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Pixate promises app UI production in pure CSS

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Re: Pixate promises app UI production in pure CSS

#24
post #9
post #2

Photoshop is awful for designing UIs

Great design has almost nothing to do with the tools used.

Seems like an irrelevant point. 89a didn't say "UIs designed in Photoshop are awful", after all. But a tool can be bad for a job, even if it is technically possible to do good work with that tool.

That said, I think that Photoshop does have a few core features that designers really like for web design, and then a ton of features that get in the way for that particular use case. So basing a web design tool on those features of PS that are good for web design seems like a reasonable strategy.

Re: Pixate promises app UI production in pure CSS

#26

This seems like it's going about solving mobile UI problems backwards. I think a better approach would be to fill in the gaps between what a graphic designer is used to (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks), and the UI tools that the different platforms offer - Interface Builder and the XML Layout editor for Android. Interface Builder is definitely visual enough for designers, but most of the "cool" effects for modern…

You have a good point. I also think that one should not completely replace IB, because its core functionality is very good: Design UI that is callable in code without naming the elements explicitly in the designer. What's missing are two features IMO:

- style templates (CSS or a subset of it) in order to increase reusability.

- access to preprocessed variables in order to define things like fonts and colors in one place that's also usable in code. (Maybe that's already possible but I'm not aware of it).

Some lightweight style plugin could solve both issues.

Re: Pixate promises app UI production in pure CSS

#27

This seems like it's going about solving mobile UI problems backwards. I think a better approach would be to fill in the gaps between what a graphic designer is used to (Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks), and the UI tools that the different platforms offer - Interface Builder and the XML Layout editor for Android. Interface Builder is definitely visual enough for designers, but most of the "cool" effects for modern…

I think good designers these days are used to HTML/CSS/JS - designing in Photoshop alone these days just doesn't cut it. This is why Pixate is so interesting.
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