I think this has some potential to allow more developers to publish a web app with at least a decent looking ui. There are a lot of good backend developers who happen to be bad at ui, this might allow more potential customers to view the product instead of being horrified as soon as they saw the ui.
New Product From 280North: Atlas
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#42Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Were currently using it: http://stylous.com/
Cool. I browsed some of the products. Is it possible to browse by sex? When I was looking at shoes, I saw stilettos, even though I'm not shopping for my weekly drag show in Las Vegas.
Sorry just women's accessories for now :-P
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#44wish sites would put a textual description below videos.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#45These guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them. The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of litt…
You've got some good points, but Interface Builder (and I imagine Atlas) departs fundamentally from VB and PowerBuilder in that the code doesn't live directly behind the GUI elements. Instead, it's connected by a series of inlets and outlets that are designed to allow for reusability and model-view-controller disconnect.
You can also define UI things in code in Cappuccino (as well as Obj-C).
IB is optional with Obj-C, and I imagine Atlas will be optional with Cappuccino.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#46A visual IDE in a browser. Very cool.
Is it fast/responsive enough to not be annoying? No demo yet.
And I wish they had a one-line pitch.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#47These guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them. The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of litt…
Stimulating points, but it's far from "failed" in commercial terms; and the best GUI designers often aren't coders, but designers. Different tasks, different values.
Challenge: how could one make a visual version of abstraction? Would you say that there is no abstraction in templates?
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#48These guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them. The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of litt…
You've got some good points, but Interface Builder (and I imagine Atlas) departs fundamentally from VB and PowerBuilder in that the code doesn't live directly behind the GUI elements. Instead, it's connected by a series of inlets and outlets that are designed to allow for reusability and model-view-controller disconnect. You can also define UI things in code in Cappuccino (as well as Obj-C). IB is optional with Obj-C…
To be precise Interface Builder doesn't actually generate ANY code at all. You are manipulating in-memory objects and setting their properties. When you save your UI it's effectively just a serialized form of the objects you were playing with.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've got some good points, but Interface Builder (and I imagine Atlas) departs fundamentally from VB and PowerBuilder in that the code doesn't live directly behind the GUI elements. Instead, it's connected by a series of inlets and outlets that are designed to allow for reusability and model-view-controller disconnect. You can also define UI things in code in Cappuccino (as well as Obj-C). IB is optional with Obj-C…
To be precise Interface Builder doesn't actually generate ANY code at all. You are manipulating in-memory objects and setting their properties. When you save your UI it's effectively just a serialized form of the objects you were playing with.
The key point that I was trying to make is that IB is fundamentally separate from the code that is running in the application. In traditional RAD tools like VB, Delphi and Powerbuilder the interface and application logic are one and the same, you literally have code behind each form and each UI element.
I didn't say anything about IB generating code.
Re: New Product From 280North: Atlas
#50These guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them. The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of litt…
Stimulating points, but it's far from "failed" in commercial terms; and the best GUI designers often aren't coders, but designers. Different tasks, different values. Challenge: how could one make a visual version of abstraction? Would you say that there is no abstraction in templates?
You're right about the designer/coder separation. I didn't think of that because I have never worked in an environment where designers created functional UIs.
Yes there is abstraction in templates. Templates typically let you indicate (visually or otherwise) what the static parts look like and where the dynamic parts go. That's it. We have done that forever. There's no progress. Templates don't describe interaction and that's what UIs are there for and it's the growing part of UI design.
Tool vendors have tried for many years to describe the interaction parts visually as well. But interaction is not inherently visual. A condition is not visual. A data transformation is not visual. Even the difference between two visual states is not visual itself.
It's a logical abstraction that manipulates visual objects. Mixing logic that manipulates visuals with the visuals themselves is not useful, and in terms of established software design principles it violates the separation of concerns.
Painting logic with a GUI builder is like entering a sine function by drawing squiggly lines on the screen.
Maybe we could create a better visual version of abstraction, but I don't feel it's the most promising direction to take in order to make abstraction more powerful.