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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

#91

Post by sien »

madeofpalk wrote: post #84
sien wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The idea would be that WASM will facilitate a particular language with a good standard library would be used to create an easy to use GUI drawing and then coding setup.

But yes, it wouldn't support every language that could compile to WASM and you're right that would be even harder than creating a good tool for Javascript.

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

#92

Post by yen223 »

treve wrote: post #10

7 comments in, and it's all ragging on this. Good job everyone

Half the comments here bring to mind the infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Reinforces my personal rule-of-thumb that any comment HN has about UX can be safely ignored.

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

#93

Post by mhb »

pjmlp wrote: post #52
blattimwind wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how web development still doesn't offer the ease and productivity of early 2000s RAD environments. Even this software is actually not simpler, on the contrary: It is far more complex, because you don't know how to create a given widget [assuming you already learned what widgets there are, because the software doesn't tell you]. You have to learn what the software recognizes and how you need to draw it in m…

Actually there are a couple of companies doing it, but they have commited the capital crime of asking for money, as such they remain a niche product. WebFlow and OutSystems are two examples that come to my mind. I hope that WebComponents will make it easier to adopt such tooling.

Would be nicer if those could be tried without signing up. A misdemeanor.

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

#94

Post by qwerty456127 »

AnaniasAnanas wrote: post #70
qwerty456127 wrote: post #58

For my whole life I've been "drawing" real GUIs and writing the logic code, not GUI code then. It started with VisualBasic 1.0 for DOS, then there were different versions of VisualBasic for Windows, then Borland C++ Builder and Delphi (I was using the former), then NetBeans Swing designer and WinForms designer in VisualStudio. And now building a GUI is such a problem that a huge number of almost-useless (I really pre…

If you are a C++ user you might want to check out QtCreator. It makes it as easy to create GUIs as Visual Basic did back in the day, and it's free (both as in price and freedom).

Thanks. I used to be a C++ user when there were no better languages for rapid GUI application development around (C++Builder/Delphi were the best). I've switched to C# with WinForms many years ago. Now I'm going to try Qt5 with Python (just because there is no WinForms designer for Linux, nevertheless Qt Creator doesn't feel as intuitive as C++Builder, VisualBasic and WinForms designer did though I believe it can do the job) but I'm certainly interested in the web GUI world as writing a single app that is going to run on every computer (smartphones included) seamlessly via a web browser feels extremely appealing.

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

#95

Post by jakelazaroff »

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…

Journey back in time with me to 1963, when that Sketchpad software to which I linked was unveiled. The same criticisms apply:

"The things this demo shows could have been typed up in text in seconds. Designers will use real design tools to create (rough) visual designs. Engineers will bring those visual designs to blueprints."

And yet half a century later, CAD is firmly in the domain of visual designers, where it seems so obvious that you would have to be crazy to think people would be designing in code. But hindsight is 20/20!

The way forward to visual programming might not be super clear, but we'll get there. If you don't think text-based REPL-style programming is limiting, I encourage you to check out Bret Victor's explorations of abstraction and direct manipulation. http://worrydream.com/

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

#96

Post by fphhotchips »

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…

You may say, "but 'non-typesetters' will use it!" No, they won't. Authors will use real writing tools to create (non-legible) articles. Type-setters will bring those articles to print. That procedure works. It'll keep working. These systems are diversions, not improvements. Worthy of investigation, but not practical.

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

#97

Post by stevenicr »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #89
meredydd wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usag…

quick glance, looks interesting.. but without "won't let you export apps " - I would never buy in.. if you can export, then it suffers from the same lack of easy to understand that webflow has suffered from it's initial launch.

I liked the tree view that netobjects fusion had years ago, it makes bigger sites easier to work with.

Still trying to carve out time to try pinegrow to see if it's got enough drag and drop and resize to make me no longer miss netobjest fusion.

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

#98

Post by marbletiles »

madeofpalk wrote: post #83
Animats wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Interface Builder has been building complicated and resizable UIs for literally decades.

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

#99

Post by vthriller »

madeofpalk wrote: post #83
Animats wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> How did those drag and drop tools back then handle creating a UI for screens ranging from 400pt wide to 2560pt wide?

For simpler forms you'd just set anchoring properties of the widgets in question (akRight/akBottom in Borland's VCL or whatever its counterpart is called in WinForms or what was its predecessor). Nowadays it's even easier with things like, say, GTK's HBox/VBox.

> Computers operated within a lot more limited constructs back then.

Resource limits didn't stop web browsers of the era from rendering complicated tables in a variety of sizes.

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

#100

Post by zeroname »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #95
zeroname wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Journey back in time with me to 1963, when that Sketchpad software to which I linked was unveiled. The same criticisms apply: "The things this demo shows could have been typed up in text in seconds . Designers will use real design tools to create (rough) visual designs. Engineers will bring those visual designs to blueprints." And yet half a century later, CAD is firmly in the domain of visual designers, where it see…

What a poor comparison. Have you actually used any CAD software? None of it works like Sketchpad. Design software in general doesn't use shape recognition, that's a pointless gimmick.

> The way forward to visual programming might not be super clear, but we'll get there.

This isn't even visual programming, nor is it a step in the right direction. My text editor has all kinds of visual tools. The data I edit however is textual, which has a lot of benefits.

> If you don't think text-based REPL-style programming is limiting...

I don't think REPLs are very useful for programming either.

> ...I encourage you to check out Bret Victor's explorations of abstraction and direct manipulation.

I'm aware of this stuff, it looks nice, but I don't think you need an entire visual programming language to get that benefit. If I need visualization, there are lots of tools to use.

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