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Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

dev.aspect.app

131–140 of 148 posts

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#131

Bravo. Soon, developing point-and-click, drag-and-drop apps will be almost as easy as it was in 1998 with Visual Basic 6. I (mostly) jest, but yeah, this is marvelous. I'm developing a small React app this weekend, I'll use this and make sure to report any bugs or issues along the way. Thanks a lot for making something that makes other people (me!) excited!

or winforms and C#!

tbf, building a ui with an absolutely-positioned, pixel-bound presentation engine was AWFUL without a designer. anyone work with Win32 APIs back in the day? 60 lines of code just to open a window without even drawing anything on it!

building a ui in code is a lot easier with flow layout and a good component library

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#133

First, congrats to your new project! Secondly, although it's not for react, but that's exactly the same reason why I have developed http://liveditor.com some years ago! The idea was that the css inspector/tweaker and the code editor should be combined together and working together seamlessly. PS, I know the software might have some little issues but I'm going to update it soon ;)

This feels like home to me, as I was once a Dreamweaver.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#134
post #38

This isn't shown in the video, but does your editor comes with pre-set "styles" or is it something that you would import yourself ? My experience is that typing the code for components nesting inside components is not really the big hurdle when designing React views ; rather, it's getting the "layout" part of the css right. The big value in the video seems to be the simple fact that you have a "Form" parent component…

I set up super minimal preset styling, and yeah I think basic css import makes sense as a next feature. Hoping to avoid overly complex style inheritance. I 100% agree, getting layout css right is the most annoying part of styling. I’m inspired by Apple’s stack views and Figma’s auto layout which make it a lot more intuitive so I think those can be the first “Aspect components” that will come out on next release. Than…

Tailwind support would be awesome. I often use Tailwind Play (https://play.tailwindcss.com/) when I'm "sketching out" the look of a new component since it's so quick to iterate and get immediate visual feedback, as you well know.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#135
post #122
post #112

Good luck, looks great already! I spent years of my life on the problem of generating useful multi-platform code from a GUI tool and integrating it into designer and developer workflows. Before giving up I made React Studio ( https://reactstudio.com ) which is owned by my co-founders now. It's insanely difficult. Nobody's needs are exactly the same, and nobody can agree even on the basics of how a web app is structur…

Yeah I can learn a lot from React Studio—I think a lot about keeping the learning curve down for growth, so I'm glad you pointed that out. I'm focusing on enterprise sales next and actively looking for people to help with that, so again I think you're right. Thanks for the feedback!

> enterprise sales

+1. Most devs would keep building but really sales is the right move. Product looks great! GL finding your customer and early revenue.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#136
Just a tip for the demo video - check out Descript.com for an easy way to edit out the “ums” in videos and screen recordings. I use it regularly to tighten up a recording quickly. I likely wouldn’t edit or make videos in the first place if I didn’t have Descript. No relationship to disclose, just a happy customer.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#138

I don't believe we need an IDE for React, it will end up dead like Dreamweaver or FrontPage. BUT, a Vscode plugin that visualizes self-contained components with all its styles intact would be nice: like I open MyComponent.tsx and in the right pane I see it visually, without running the actual webpage or server.

Dreamweaver has existed for 25 years and it’s still around.

Well MS-DOS is still around.

But nobody uses it because the industry moved to more efficient software after seeing there are better ways to solve the problem.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#139
post #14

Great idea. I think UI/UX designers would love a tool like this. Especially if they could import React components made by the development department.

It is not a unique concept, but there's absolutely room for another implementation/offering. Some of the more popular existing ones Framer-X (funny landing page copy claiming it is entirely unique) and Modulz: https://designcode.io/framer-x https://www.modulz.app/

Here are some other exciting products in the space: https://www.plasmic.app/ https://www.builder.io/ https://clutch.io/ https://builderx.io/ https://dynaboard.com/ Each one has a slightly different take on the problem, and some of these are turning out to be quite useful for teams. I'm very curious to see how things will shape up. I find Aspect to be particularly beautiful, a nice clean UI great work!

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#140
Hi many years ago I built something similar for a game framework called libgdx. https://github.com/pyrossh/gdx-studio Looks cool. But to get it completely working it takes a lot of time and effort. See overlap2d as well.

These days I just prefer writing plain code as I feel the generated code is not what I want.

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