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Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

alpha.easel.io

81–90 of 125 posts

Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

#81
post #4

Cool. 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).

Have to say this was very confusing for me too. I can't remember a thing like CTRL+SHIFT+5, besides from the fact it isn't even explained what it's supposed to do?

Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

#83
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

pagemaker?

PageMaker is for book layout, predecessor to InDesign.

Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

#86
Hi, this seems neat. Some points:

In Chrome 19.0.1084.52 on Ubuntu, I'm getting told to use Apple command key shortcuts.

There is no scrollbar. The scroll wheel works, but the site captures the middle mouse button (without using it?), so grab and drag (with the chromeTouch extension) doesn't work.

The little instruction sequences would make a lot more sense if they said what was happening. E.g. instead of "hold shift, click the text", "hold shift and click the text to frob the whatsit".

Grids and columns seem limited and too much work for aligning things. Check out what Inkscape can do.

There seem to be functions that are inaccessible if you don't know their keyboard shortcuts, or perhaps just not working for me, e.g. selecting multiple objects (not shift, control, or alt?!), making a group.

Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

#87
post #86

Hi, this seems neat. Some points: In Chrome 19.0.1084.52 on Ubuntu, I'm getting told to use Apple command key shortcuts. There is no scrollbar. The scroll wheel works, but the site captures the middle mouse button (without using it?), so grab and drag (with the chromeTouch extension) doesn't work. The little instruction sequences would make a lot more sense if they said what was happening. E.g. instead of "hold shift…

Thanks for the feedback.

The apple keys are part of the design so sadly wont change.

Shift should work for selecting multiple items, so thats a bug. We admittedly haven't done much testing on other platforms.

Grouping and making elements should definitely be in the right click menu. There are some (probably esoteric) icons on the inspector/property panel for these functions.

We'll look into the chrometouch extension and see how we can make it work with the app. I didnt know it was capturing the middle mouse button. Will fix.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

#88
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, but this is just a different sort of approximation, too. Layouts where all the elements are absolutely positioned don't work in the real world, so the markup and css will have to be 60%+ rewritten and will likely not look exactly as it's laid out here.

The intent at this point is to not generate layout html/css. Humans are much better at this right now than the editor could be. And the assumption is that the programmer will want to write the layout code himself anyway, being careful to place it in nice modules that fit with their dev environment. We could build an entire product just trying to generate semantic, reflowable markup from a design.

I agree. Let's be honest - it's kind of weird that we rely on a program that is really designed for editing photographs as our main tool for designing web sites. I'm all for exploring this further at least as a tool for doing layouts and design that CSS can handle. For everything else (e.g. designing icons), there are more appropriate tools.

Re: Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

#90
post #74
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can. But things will all be absolutely positioned. The intent is to generate pieces of html and css that fit into your dev environment. The code generation is still very much in-flux, but from what we're seeing, programmers dont want the entire thing generated.

but from what we're seeing, programmers dont want the entire thing generated Actually for developers like myself there's several use cases where having access to the complete generated source would be awesome: 1. Separate the positioning/layout styles and the color/font/design styles into separate CSS files. That way I can include all the designs created with Easel easily instead of copy/paste one at a time for each…

Aye, an export function that generates e.g. less-files much the way bootstrap has organized their imports would be killer for this app. It would make it dead simple to prototype buttons or sections of a page, and easily include them in your build process down the line. Having variables separated would also be a plus.
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