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Show HN: UI builder for web developers

tandemcode.com

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Re: Show HN: UI builder for web developers

#3

Post by techdragon »

I noticed that you show the logos of PHP and Ruby in your graphics, while not actually supporting either.

It certainly left a very unappealing first impression on me after my initial enthusiasm at seeing those logos was bludgeoned by your actual supported language list further down the page.

Re: Show HN: UI builder for web developers

#4

Post by crcn »

redindian75 wrote: post #2

Is this something like a opensource version of WebFlow?

Yep, I made Tandem open source here: https://github.com/tandemcode/tandem

It is a bit like WebFlow, but focused more-so on the coding aspect. Tandem integrates with your text editor, encourages you to write code instead of using the design tools to all of your UI work -- they're mostly there for UI adjustments, and to create features that are hard to code by hand.

Re: Show HN: UI builder for web developers

#5

Post by crcn »

techdragon wrote: post #3

I noticed that you show the logos of PHP and Ruby in your graphics, while not actually supporting either. It certainly left a very unappealing first impression on me after my initial enthusiasm at seeing those logos was bludgeoned by your actual supported language list further down the page.

Sorry for the confusion there, I went ahead and clarified the descriptions.

Tandem runs any application, but needs the appropriate extensions in order to write code. It has the capabilities of writing PHP, but that isn't implemented yet.

The code writing aspect of Tandem is really just a small feature of the whole application - The focus of Tandem is really to provide a preview (or many previews) of your application with tooling that makes it easier to fix visual bugs.

Re: Show HN: UI builder for web developers

#6

Post by terragon »

From your page, I don't see any way I can evaluate it. Either some video with an example, or a quick way to install a beta version would have been good.

I like it in concept, but there's been an explosion of UI design tools recently and if you want to keep our attention, we need more of a demo. Perhaps the show HN would have been better postponed a bit.

Re: Show HN: UI builder for web developers

#7

Post by crcn »

terragon wrote: post #6

From your page, I don't see any way I can evaluate it. Either some video with an example, or a quick way to install a beta version would have been good. I like it in concept, but there's been an explosion of UI design tools recently and if you want to keep our attention, we need more of a demo. Perhaps the show HN would have been better postponed a bit.

Thanks for the feedback! I figured that short videos throughout the website would be enough to describe visually what Tandem is, but a short video at the top would probably be better.

And yeah, there are a ton of UI design tools out there on the web, it's been my #1 concern when building this thing out because they all promise similar tooling. Though, I'm trying to position this app as more of an Atom, or VSCode-like since it's geared to be another kind of extensible development environment. I figured that open sourcing it would be a first good step for that since developers would probably need to understand the internals before writing plugins for new UI tools, code writers, etc.

I went ahead and added a "Fork me on GitHub" badge to make it more clear that this is open source.

Re: Show HN: UI builder for web developers

#10

Post by crcn »

taqwasd1 wrote: post #9

Why use this over writing basic html/css/js?

Ideally you'd use Tandem along-side your text editor. It's not meant to replace writing code - I think in most cases it's easier to write code by hand than use a visual tools. Though, I think there are cases where it's easier to use visual tools against a live application preview for making small adjustments - that's where Tandem fits in.

Here's a better video demo to help demonstrate this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/pc50x5m991j71ot/html-css-js-demo.m...

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