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Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

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Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#91

Post by towawy »

shireboy wrote: post #35
aosaigh wrote: post #29

The killer feature here would be hooking this up to Netlify/Vercel etc. and having a 2-way-write. Every time you update something in the CSSPro editor, your codebase is actually updated and the site is rebuilt in the background. This would let you essentially design in the browser and avoid the tedious copy/paste, rebuild, reload cycle.

This is what I’ve wanted for ages from browser dev tools. It’s now fairly standard to have hot refresh where the dev server uses websockets to control injecting changes and refreshing the browser when changes are made in the code files. I want to go the other way. If I tweak css in browser, have a way to write those changes back to the project. The real challenge would be traversing a change in browser css back to sc…

Chrome Dev Tools has had that feature (for css specifically, not transpiled languages) for years. https://developer.chrome.com/docs/devtools/workspaces/

We used to have full WYSIWYG editors in browsers as far back as the 90s (including deployment via FTP). Specialized editors just seem to have always been the preference for developers.

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#92

Post by spyke112 »

jroseattle wrote: post #87

Just a suggestion on pricing: drop the lifetime option. I've had a bunch of perpetual licenses I've acquired over a lifetime, and nearly every one of them have said "we have no record of you" after 5+ years. I know, I know...save the receipts and all that. But it's just frustrating. Don't put yourself and your customer in a potentially problematic position of he-said-she-said. When you have recurring revenue with a m…

I’ll be the one suggesting to keep the option. I haven’t tried the product yet, but I would in general expect a perpetual life time license to be some sort of license key, that can be entered into the application and verified. So that I can keep it safe, and forever proof that I own a license, thus eliminating the problem mentioned here.

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#93

Post by lolinder »

SlowAndCalm wrote: post #31
samwillis wrote: post #17

I think the comments criticising the pricing are wrong, you can't compare one generalist tool to another highly specialised tool. But on top of that comparing to Figma, Framer or other VC backed products is a mistake, these products are priced to capture market share and grow rabidly. They are clearly underpriced. I may be wrong but CSS Pro looks like a small bootstrapped product, pricing for market growth doesn't ne…

On the subscription side, I think it's an issue as it moves the control away from the consumer when doing those upgrades. With the older, one-time purchase upgrade model, which has since fallen out of favour; I could evaluate once a year whether the updated product was worth the additional cost. With a subscription model, there's a chance I could end up funding the development of features that I neither want nor need…

The old model was tightly coupled to the CD as distribution vector—you got what came on the disk, nothing more. It was easy to understand for everyone involved, and the path of least resistance for the developers

The internet changed that, because people began to expect you to fix bugs in a released product indefinitely. Declaring that you are all done fixing bugs is now not just an obvious necessity given the infeasibility of distributing small updates on CDs, it's now a conscious decision that has to be explained to the customer in sufficiently clear terms that they don't come complaining to you later. Failing that, you just have to plan on supporting a purchase indefinitely, and the easiest way to organize that is as a subscription for a single main release channel.

JetBrains has what could be a good model for products that lend themselves to a regular release cadence—it's a subscription, but you keep the license for the version that was current on the day of your last payment. But not every product lends itself to that kind of regular, predictable release cadence.

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#94

Post by globalise83 »

rcconf wrote: post #69

Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap. Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money a…

Maybe this should have a slightly different audience than developers, namely UX designers, technical product managers (semi-technical folks who know about html and css), etc. so that they can play around with their products, produce prototypes based on the actual product, share design specifications more easily etc.

For example, I am a semi-technical product manager, meaning I know enough about coding to be able to make whatever simple UI changes I want, but leave actual development of the products to the professionals. I would use this tool and maybe recommend to my business paying for it if it genuinely saves some time over making the same changes in dev tools.

For example, the ability to prototype a new UI feature "inside" my existing products, and then share the prototype with someone would be extremely valuable to me. Currently I use the "edit as html" tool in dev tools and then apply some styling to the new elements. Of course, if I hit refresh by mistake, I would lose my changes. Has happened before!

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#95

Post by ggoo »

aceazzameen wrote: post #90
rcconf wrote: post #69

Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap. Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money a…

No. Monthly subscriptions suck. Every company wants to "tax" me monthly for something that's feature complete. The ones I already pay, I do so very begrudgingly. There's simply too many SaaS products out there. Let's go back to perpetual licenses. And I'll gladly pay for upgraded versions, or not if the upgrade isn't worthwhile. When it's not SaaS, I also get to control what version I'm using. The product doesn't own…

This is the most developer response I could've imagined. I love it.

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#96

Post by mrieck »

This tool is for front-end devs who love tweaking front-end designs faster.

My tool is for back-end devs who don’t want anything to do with front-end, but want to build UI faster. https://www.snipcss.com

I’ve always wondered how CSSPro works at extracting/scoping CSS because that’s supposed to be a feature. But I’ve never been willing to pay $30/mon just to see how well a competitor works. Anyone who pays - do you think it recreates a carbon copy of any section of a website well?

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#97

Post by no_wizard »

onion2k wrote: post #59
o1y32 wrote: post #53

Looks like this is meant for professional web developers to make their life easier. So it is not here to replace wix. So, 1. I am struggling to understand the value proposition of this. Demo is cool but most developers working in an organization will not use most of the features shown here. No, no rotation or fancy fonts or colors. The only thing they will do is to use the standard font or color. And most elements do…

What if someone makes a similar, open-source tool that achieves 50% of this... Would you need to mount it locally with curlftpfs if you're on Linux?

To anyone who doesn't understand the reference, its about the now somewhat infamous Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#98

Post by tailspin2019 »

rcconf wrote: post #69

Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap. Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money a…

It’s not just about the price. It’s also about how it’s pitched and what the on ramp looks like.

In this case, without a free trial, there is a much bigger gap to traverse to go from “not a customer” to “paying monthly”.

It’s also harder if you are not the one paying the bills and need to pitch/sell such a tool internally.

Re: Show HN: I made CSS Pro, a re-imagined Devtools for web design

#99

Post by lolinder »

tmikaeld wrote: post #76
rcconf wrote: post #69

Honestly the comments are a good example on how difficult it is to sell to developers and why startup ideas that target developers are dangerous to bootstrap. Developers have high incomes, but are quite frankly, extremely cheap. And I actually mean cheap and not frugal. They will spend 40 hours/week for months to save $5/mo. There's basically no logic apart from that developers have a poor concept of time and money a…

I don't think developers in general are cheap, it's that they are employed somewhere and therefore it doesn't benefit THEM to save time, it benefits their employer. It may even be detrimental to the developer as it put higher expectations on the developer to produce more if the suddenly perform better at a specific task..

Most tools like this are priced with the understanding that they'll be billed to the employer in the end, not paid out of pocket by the developer.

They probably need to add org licenses soon in order to better accommodate that.

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