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Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

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Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#81

Post by leowoo91 »

karanchahal wrote: post #61
leowoo91 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just fixed it for 15 minutes but it is still far from running, I would rather wait until project instructions are added.

Hello, thank you for your interest ! I have fixed the repo structure and added instructions on how to build and run. Hopefully that is fine, if not please tell me about it and I shall update it as soon as possible.

Thank you for fixing, I think it's close. Now, flask says "index.html" is missing :-) also step 2 should have "pip3 install -r" instead of "python3 -r".

Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#82

Post by beachy »

zeroname wrote: post #53
jakelazaroff wrote: post #6

Codeless UI is so exciting! This reminds me of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad from the early 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

Don't get excited. The thing that this demo shows in minutes could've been typed up in text in seconds . It is not a productive way to do things. There's a reason that these systems never catched on, they are unnecessary. You may say, but "non-programmers" will use it! No, they won't. Designers will use real design tools to create (non-functional) visual designs. Programmers will bring those visual designs to functio…

I worked on state of the art CASE software decades ago that would allegedly let users graphically model then generate their own systems without writing any code.

Yet looking around I see plenty of people still building systems by writing code.

Maybe one day the surf will come in for these ideas.

Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#83

Post by madeofpalk »

Animats wrote: post #65
sien wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is disappointing how modern web GUI environments are harder to use than what was around 20+ years ago. There are still Visual Basic Apps from the 1990s floating around in large corporations and in government. Users who were expert in the process but not expert developers could easily code up tools to their exact specifications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic#1990s Admittedly the deployment of we…

It really is disappointing how modern web GUI environments are harder to use than what was around 20+ years ago. Yes. We had drag and drop UIs decades ago. Now you can't even get a decent GUI program for laying out a web page. CSS/Javascript got so messy that even Dreamweaver became useless. Part of the problem is that ad code requires a messy environment, so that ad blockers and click generators have a hard time. Go…

> Yes. We had drag and drop UIs decades ago.

We had _simple_ drag and drop UIs decades ago.

Computers operated within a lot more limited constructs back then. UI windows didn't resize, or it was reasonable to expect that they're fixed. How did those drag and drop tools back then handle creating a UI for screens ranging from 400pt wide to 2560pt wide?

Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#84

Post by madeofpalk »

sien wrote: post #74
andyidsinga wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just curious - why would web assembly make it easier for those tools to reappear? I used to use hose 90s GUI tools - VB's, VC's, Symantec's and Borland's java gui tools. Although they did work well for fixed UIs (absolute positioning) -- they were rather hard to get non-fixed uis working. IMHO Bootstrap's grid system was a real leap in this regard and (to me) still a pleasure to work with.

Perhaps because I live in hope... The main reason WASM and whatnot might make it easier is that instead of depending on thousands of Javascript libraries the way that so many modern web apps do perhaps a more controlled environment might include a better set of standard libraries and controls. Also Javascript has evolved at a lightning pace which is remarkable but also makes any complex tooling for it tricky. 10 year…

I'm confused as to how having a common target to have _any_ language, including C, running on the web makes tooling easier rather than harder.

Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#85

Post by aaaaaaaaaab »

KaoruAoiShiho wrote: post #2

What are people's thoughts on when this will actually be usable? UI eng is just another labor intensive automatable step for creatives. Next will be to automate the design part too. Don't draw your UI, generate it from user stories.

Ah, the recurring pipe dream of business people: software without coding!

A few billion dollars must have been flushed down this toilet bowl already; I wonder how much is yet to come...

Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#87

Post by mattigames »

meredydd wrote: post #73
sien wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is disappointing how modern web GUI environments are harder to use than what was around 20+ years ago. There are still Visual Basic Apps from the 1990s floating around in large corporations and in government. Users who were expert in the process but not expert developers could easily code up tools to their exact specifications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic#1990s Admittedly the deployment of we…

We've built an explicitly Visual Basic-like development environment for the web, which I think fits your bill: https://anvil.works . It's got a drag'n'drop UI creator, you use Python to build the front-end and the back-end (with proper autocomplete, VB-style), and it even has a built-in database if you need one.

"Drop a title here" wtf what does the app doesn't create one for me when I double click (maybe ask me for confirmation if you think user intent is not clear)

Don't create your own icons, use already known icons, Ab and Ab-but-with-underline doesn't clearly mean "Text" and "Link" but the word "Text" and the famous anchor icon do.

Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#88

Post by saagarjha »

GuB-42 wrote: post #36

Maybe I am not a UI designer but I much prefer rule based approaches than drawing. Rule based means I tell use instruction like "this button must be on top on that button horizontally centered", "this label must fit that text", "this image must be between this and that", etc... and let the layout engine deal with it. UIs are usually not paintings, window sizes vary, text length changes with localization, decorations…

What you're looking for is constraint-based layout such as AutoLayout on iOS and ConstraintLayout on Android.

Re: Show HN: Don't code your UI, draw it

#89

Post by qwerty456127 »

meredydd wrote: post #73
sien wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is disappointing how modern web GUI environments are harder to use than what was around 20+ years ago. There are still Visual Basic Apps from the 1990s floating around in large corporations and in government. Users who were expert in the process but not expert developers could easily code up tools to their exact specifications. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic#1990s Admittedly the deployment of we…

We've built an explicitly Visual Basic-like development environment for the web, which I think fits your bill: https://anvil.works . It's got a drag'n'drop UI creator, you use Python to build the front-end and the back-end (with proper autocomplete, VB-style), and it even has a built-in database if you need one.

Seems really cool but the selection of controls looks too humble (no TreeView? I'm choosing a trchnology to build an app on right now and I need a tree) - IMHO this is a severe limitation for the platform usefulness, I really hope more controls are going to be introduced.

Also as far as I can understand it won't let you export apps the way one could run them on their own outside of your servers - this limits the usage too.

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