An Open Source UI Builder for React
github.com
An Open Source UI Builder for React
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#2Would a member of the Pagedraw team share a postmortem? Seems like this is a huge need and will be the future state of web / mobile design - what stopped you guys?
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#3Tried to open the demo and got an "Only Works in Chrome" error page. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the tool, as my audience for my UI should be larger than just one browser, and I know that I have to test in multiple browsers.
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#4Pagedraw looks very polished. I can take some wild guesses why it didn't succeed but glad to have it live on as open source.
My best guess would be that it either did too much or not enough. Getting an extra developer's worth of productivity from a tool is great but there could be other ways to make gains as noted in the shutdown page. Visual editing is a different way of programming and can be more or less productive depending on specifics. I recall doing some IBM DirectTalk voice/telephony app dev using a visual flow editor--it was the worst. There are of course success stories like the original Visual Basic 1.0. Xcode and autolayout is less productive but more expressive.
On the doing less side, are there tools for parsing/editing/outputting HTML+CSS rather than a full React integration? I've worked with designers that used Figma or Zeplin but we only tended to export the graphics and copy/paste the styles.
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#5Tried to open the demo and got an "Only Works in Chrome" error page. That doesn't give me a lot of confidence in the tool, as my audience for my UI should be larger than just one browser, and I know that I have to test in multiple browsers.
I don't think the output from this tool is necessarily non-compliant with other browsers. This tool/app itself might be - and I think it's OK given it's audience (web developers) who anyways overwhelmingly gravitate towards chrome for it's superior debug tooling
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#6I don't understand why they shut this down before they even attempted to start charging money for it.
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#7> Ultimately, we think Pagedraw is the wrong product. We think you can get 90% of the benefits of Pagedraw by just using JSX better. Our findings on this will be controversial, as they go entirely against the current “best practices,” so we’ll save them for a later blog post.
There is certainly a grey area for tools that are too limiting for developers and require too much setup for designers to use out of the box.
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#8Hmm I was desperately looking for something like this and only ever found was Framer X. Strange I never came across this but definitely excited to give it a go!
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#9"Sorry, our editor is optimized for Chrome"
Please don't fall for the monopoly. Spend a little time and make it work everywhere, for the sake of the open web
Re: An Open Source UI Builder for React
#10Would a member of the Pagedraw team share a postmortem? Seems like this is a huge need and will be the future state of web / mobile design - what stopped you guys?
I think the reality is, no matter how awesome and impressive these tools are, they just don't seem to have a fit in the market.
Prefacing this with the fact I don't know all that much about the product, only a quick glance
For a big team of developers, building a big website with complicated interactions or requirements, a tool like this isn't going to meet all the requirements the developers have
If you're building something simpler, then you're probably better served by something like Webflow or Squarespace.