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Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

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Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#111

Post by diatone »

Doches wrote: post #19
onion2k wrote: post #17

It reminds me of Visual Basic or early versions of Dreamweaver to an extent (which is a huge compliment). That enabled a massive number of people to make apps who wouldn't otherwise have been able to, but after using it for a long time most users abandon the visual UI builder in favor of the code editor. If you're a visually-driven person then this looks ace, but I think in the opposite way to the narrator. Rather th…

This, very much so. One of the (few) things I genuinely love about modern frontend web development is the speed of the edit loop with React and hot reloading. Look, I'm an engineer; _writing code_ is my jam, not clicking pretty widgets in a (nice!) UI. It's genuinely faster for me to turn an image in my head into a functioning component by just writing out Typescript or CSS; the abstractions are less leaky, and the e…

Playing devil’s advocate here: if this graphical interface could be manipulated without mouse clicks, you’re still interested? Alternatively: if there were some high bandwidth, low latency feedback loop between you and this app, an order of magnitude faster than how you currently iterate on working with React, you’d consider it?

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#112

Post by pavlov »

Good luck, looks great already!

I spent years of my life on the problem of generating useful multi-platform code from a GUI tool and integrating it into designer and developer workflows. Before giving up I made React Studio (https://reactstudio.com) which is owned by my co-founders now.

It's insanely difficult. Nobody's needs are exactly the same, and nobody can agree even on the basics of how a web app is structured: where does CSS go, how do you update your global data, etc.

The abstractions I had to build to handle that then increased the learning curve to such levels that it became more like a CAD tool where you'd practically need to train teams into a new way of thinking for them to become productive. Having traction with a few customers never seemed to translate into something scalable. (Maybe with an actual sales team an enterprise strategy could have worked.)

My original version of the product was a mobile-only UI tool that generated native code for iOS and Android. In retrospect that was a better product than trying to expand into full-blown web apps. In native, a button is a button and a tab bar is a tab bar (with small differences between UIKit and Android); in web anything can be anything, and it's a point of pride to reinvent the basics constantly, so a tool must somehow adapt to the shifting tides of how CSS must look this year.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#116

Post by upupandup »

solarkraft wrote: post #84

Visual editors are great! However closed source development tools tend to not do very well.

Open source doesn't make software inherently better, more reliable or secure. Without a dedicated development direction that is supported financially, you are banking on the generosity of the github author.

I have no problem with paid tools, I do have an issue with Stallmanism, gaslighting micro-ISV as evil, while telling OSS devs to suck it up and ask for donations to fund their widely used work.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#117

Post by tscepo »

danielvaughn wrote: post #58
phtrivier wrote: post #15

This isn't shown in the video, but does your editor comes with pre-set "styles" or is it something that you would import yourself ? My experience is that typing the code for components nesting inside components is not really the big hurdle when designing React views ; rather, it's getting the "layout" part of the css right. The big value in the video seems to be the simple fact that you have a "Form" parent component…

I've been wondering whether it would be possible to leverage ML/AI to "infer" a layout from a visual mockup. So like if two elements have the same X position, they're assumed to be left aligned with one another. If three elements are the same width and sit side-by-side with the same distance between them, they're assumed to be a 3-grid column. Etc etc.

We're actually in review on the Figma plugin store for exactly this. Should be out soon.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#118

Post by upupandup »

hutzlibu wrote: post #24
echopom wrote: post #20

I'm a bit fed up with those "IDE" for web attempts. Every 9 Month or so , we get a new attempt at fixing Web Dev lack of Visual Feedback and productivity issues. The typical coder behind this type of project get "Mental Fatigue/ Coder Exhaust" after 6 Months as they generally ignore the complexity behind building such product and end up abandoning the project.... There is a google graveyard , but we should also build…

Do you also have concrete criticism of this project or just generic general complaints about the topic? Yes, there are many attempts trying to fix the problem, that designing requires coding and yes, that is a very, very hard problem to do right. But just shitting on something because you feel bitter about the topic (or whatever your motivation is) probably won't lead to anything interesting.

Think he's point was that GUI products in this space is extremely difficult to get it right due to the explosion of edge cases and general complexity.

There have been other React IDEs in the past, and they've faded off into obscurity because of factors I am not familiar with but one in which parent's comment is alluding to, the hidden rise of technical debt for last mile problems and custom requirements.

Think we are dealing really with RAD vs traditional waterfall coding approaches. Both have ups and downs but the big drawdown is the stockholm syndrome effect that comes with relying on some other party for RAD.

Re: Show HN: A Visual IDE for React

#119

Post by [deleted] »

pavlov wrote: post #112

Good luck, looks great already! I spent years of my life on the problem of generating useful multi-platform code from a GUI tool and integrating it into designer and developer workflows. Before giving up I made React Studio ( https://reactstudio.com ) which is owned by my co-founders now. It's insanely difficult. Nobody's needs are exactly the same, and nobody can agree even on the basics of how a web app is structur…

[deleted]
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