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Show HN: Easel, web design in the browser

alpha.easel.io

121–125 of 125 posts

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

#121

Congratulations! Glad to see more people attempting this type of thing. The demo content design is pretty nice. Some good things in Easel, but I have lots of problems with all the tiny little controls. Also it's an interesting decision to use a canvas element instead of the DOM. Without solving the overall page layout issue, this is a nice drawing tool like others have mentioned, and kudos to the technical and design…

I've always thought about this idea. After dissecting my own process, I think Easel.io's "picture only" approach is good.

It's very common that I iterate by doing very messy things, like say, breaking menus apart into two just to see how it will work. A DOM-based tool will probably have a nightmare with this, and even if it manages to account for this elegantly, I know from experience that having too many iterations that actually mess up the code can only be a bad thing.

I like Easel's approach. I want to paint a "picture," then build it with hand-made CSS. I don't want some tool being smart about my workflow. Easel exports just the right building blocks so I can implement by picture into a webpage the way I want to.

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

#123
post #97
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is not an easy problem (and I think nailing the parts you're focusing on first is a good decision) but if you guys could get the code generation part of the overall page layout problem solved, you'd really have something unique. I think by far the most time consuming (and frustrating) part of "easy" web design, at least for me, is getting the floats, clears, block vs inline, etc. stuff working perfectly without…

floats, block vs inline and adaptive layouts.. for sure it is not easy but we are working to solve that in http://www.froont.com.

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

#124
It's a interesting problem you guys are tackling and your progress is very impressive! I like the UI! And for sure it's good that more people are working to make web design more enjoyable. For some time I was wondering why there are so many new frameworks for coding emerging and way less 'visual frameworks' designers can use. That's why we are building one – focusing on freedom and responsive websites rather than code, something Photoshop can not handle for sure. More at http://www.froont.com. Anyhow we are living in very interesting times! Looking forward to see how Easel.io will evolve!

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

#125
post #92

Cool :) Two notes: - I'm not on a mac so don't give me mac shortcuts - Control+Shift+E is already bound in firefox (and it's a very handy shortcut)

Ditto for me as non-Mac user as well. One neat feature might be to detect which operating system you use and display the appropriate shortcuts.
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