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Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

pagedraw.io

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Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#52
post #31

We've been writing HTML for a couple of decades now. There have been dozens (hundreds?) of WYSIWYG editors and nothing has really caught on. My hypothesis is that unlike other mediums like paper or video, the elastic nature of the web makes understanding the positioning paradigms/box model/etc a necessity that no visual tool can really abstract. By the time you understand all that, it's just faster to write and maint…

We thought so too. The key idea in Pagedraw is you could design in the positon:absolute world designers think in, and we'd translate it into the Flexbox world apps need. Ultimately we didn't get all the way there, which is part of why we closed up shop

there is another way to tackle this but it takes a lot more work than a DnD editor can deliver:

Showcase:

https://youtu.be/hgFkzrqxDcs

https://youtu.be/IpX47gAe150

Demos:

https://youtu.be/u6uV2X1MGeY

https://youtu.be/s2dYVret-Ck

https://youtu.be/X6pL0St6NM4

Feel free to hit me up if you want to know more.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as someone else said, it's not always black or white. Videogames MUST deliver performance, it's not only sales. Some desktop AND web applications could benefit from some performance boost here and there, and I mean being fast enough and not some abominations I've seen/heard about (minutes to get Excel files and examples like that, just because they're "thousands" of rows from a database). You know, sales is eve…

Minecraft is generally known to be fairly poorly optimised, and the graphics weren't great. Mist was mostly a series of static images. They are two of the best selling games of all time.

> Minecraft is generally known to be fairly poorly optimised, and the graphics weren't great

Perfect example.

You're not making games, you're selling entertainment. Focus on the latter first, and optimize accordingly.

I see this time and time again - beautifully architected and performant platforms that completely bomb because noone actually wants it.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, is the desktop app on their Github the final version?

Yes, it's the final app from Pagedraw... but we encourage forks! There's some good stuff in there :)

Thank you for releasing all your hard work to the community!!

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#55

I'm actually really disappointed that I found out about them because they're shutting down. This looks perfect to me because I've been wanting to make some sites fast but I don't have the time to expand my React skills currently. Does anyone have a good recommendation for an alternative?

I'm looking forward to Modulz. https://www.modulz.app/

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#56

Interesting that they launched pagedraw exactly 1 year ago (Feb 26th, 2018) and I remember reading that launch post [0] So it took them 1 year to shut it down ? Is that a quick failure ? Wonder why they didn't go any further. Was it Funding related ? Curious. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467387

I think a year is more than enough to figure out if you have the wrong product.

Kudos to the team - they might have been able to raise money to keep plugging away, but they've seen the writing on the wall.

I know nothing about their company or their team, but I do know that product-market fit is something you have, or you don't. There's no real middle ground, so if you don't have it, you need to madly iterate/pivot until you do, or cut your losses and move onto the next project.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as someone else said, it's not always black or white. Videogames MUST deliver performance, it's not only sales. Some desktop AND web applications could benefit from some performance boost here and there, and I mean being fast enough and not some abominations I've seen/heard about (minutes to get Excel files and examples like that, just because they're "thousands" of rows from a database). You know, sales is eve…

Minecraft is generally known to be fairly poorly optimised, and the graphics weren't great. Mist was mostly a series of static images. They are two of the best selling games of all time.

Guessing Minecraft has enough performance to be playable. Wolfenstein 3D? Doom? Pretty good performance anyone? World of Warcraft being playable on low end PCs? Come on... Not everything is black or white.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#58
post #15
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you missed the gist? They are saying if you are saying "this piece needs to be more performant" you need to measure that first, before making your choice of what to make better. You are saying, "you can with an idea in mind optimize before you go and it will have better performance" but the current prevailing business logic is do not optimize until you know it's "the right thing". AKA premature optimization i…

I'm saying there are very few real black and whites, and everything in life and in software is more kind of grey. As such there are very few black and white rules you can follow and succeed. The correct approach is somewhere to the left of "premature optimization" and somewhere to the right of "don't even think about performance until you can measure it". More experienced and talented people will be more successful a…

Agree with you fully. People take these blanket generalizations and make them rules and then use them to ignorantly judge someone's decisions. I've worked on projects where performance needed to be addressed up front or else it just wasn't viable.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as someone else said, it's not always black or white. Videogames MUST deliver performance, it's not only sales. Some desktop AND web applications could benefit from some performance boost here and there, and I mean being fast enough and not some abominations I've seen/heard about (minutes to get Excel files and examples like that, just because they're "thousands" of rows from a database). You know, sales is eve…

Minecraft is generally known to be fairly poorly optimised, and the graphics weren't great. Mist was mostly a series of static images. They are two of the best selling games of all time.

People say that, but it still runs playably on pretty ancient hardware, it's certainly easier to get running that most AAA titles.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#60
post #30
post #11

One absolute rule for success in software is that there are no absolute rules. From their post mortem https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui... > Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it This just isn't true. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience is often able to look ahead - well before any code is written - and see how performance could be better if…

Only 20k LOC in 3 years is impressive. And I agree that you should watch out for premature optimization an premature abstraction. What i found most interesting was using coffeescript that compiles to js that compiles to react that compiles to js. They might have been too focused on the technical side. You should probably pick the most boring and proven tech stack and focused more on the actual problem.

Thank you! I'm one of the cofounders— keeping LoC low was one of our primary measures of code quality.

> we were too focused on the technical side

Yes. Oh boy we were.

> should probably pick the most boring stack

Agreed. I'd worked in the Coffeescript compiler so it was "boring" for me, but you should pick whatever's "boring" for you— likely not Coffeescript

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