Looks nice, is it or will it be open source?
We aren't currently planning on making it open source.
Props to you for that man, especially since considering how smooth this demo was working I'm pretty sure you wouldn't have problems selling it.
Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
21–30 of 125 posts
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#22To be clear- does this generate HTML, or just images that are accurate in terms of what is possible with a browser?
It generates chunks of html. Select one of the buttons, right click, 'export to html/css'. We figured this is the way people work -- they only want small pieces exported, not the whole page.
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
apple-shift-e shows an export lightbox with html.
Then I'm a little dubious about that- given that everything appears to be absolutely positioned. Reminds me of the Adobe web design tool before they bought Macromedia (anyone remember the name of it?) As a mock-up tool, it's great.
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Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#24Very cool. Is there "snap to grid" functionality?
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
apple-shift-e shows an export lightbox with html.
Then I'm a little dubious about that- given that everything appears to be absolutely positioned. Reminds me of the Adobe web design tool before they bought Macromedia (anyone remember the name of it?) As a mock-up tool, it's great.
re: absolutely positioning, definitely not ideal. We're toying around with different code generation techniques. We feel at this point, that generating layout html isn't really a good idea. So we're focusing on getting the colors, shadows, text, etc out out the tool.
We'd love to know what you might need as far as code generation.
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#26Very nice. What's next for Easel?
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#27Just a drawing tool in the browser. This doesn't do anything different than Photoshop or Omnigraffle, if the web designer is smart enough to reuse layers / components.
It could be a really useful though if it had support for more than absolute-positioned, fixed-sized elements, and used the browser's layout engine instead.
Today's biggest problem is that web designers use Photoshop for coming up with mockups and then they just expect content to fit on their fixed-sized design, when the web exactly the other around - content is king.
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you use Photoshop? It's analogous to the hotkeys there.
Is that a good idea or not, I wonder? Wouldn't people with Photoshop be using it instead of this? Seems like it might be a good idea to target it at non-PS owners.
As a web designer that primarily uses Photoshop, I'd say it's a great idea. Photoshop is horrible for web design. So horrible that I design purely in the browser now. This is going to be a nice addition to my workflow for when I want to include something shiny.
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#29Cool. One of the things that confuses me though are the hotkeys (control+shift+5 turns the div into a button? not very intuitive). Instead of hotkeys, I'd prefer to be told how to do it normally (in some intuitive way).
Do you use Photoshop? It's analogous to the hotkeys there.
Yes but Photoshop has the tools and buttons to accomplish the same thing. Generally you learn those first, and the hotkeys second. Jumping directly to the hotkeys, especially without any sort of hotkey chart, I find off-putting.
Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser
#30This strikes me as a good mix of Balsalmiq (www.balsalmiq.com) and Photoshop. One of my pet peeves is getting mockups from designers that clearly fail to take the actual abilities of browsers into account. Hopefully, this can change that, while still giving them the design freedom they want!
Then you need to get a designer that knows how the web works! It shocks me when I see fellow designers make things that's not feasible on the web.