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Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

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Re: Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

#21

Doesn't work on Firefox

Also doesn't work on Safari. The "error" message tells you to use Chrome instead (or ask for an app download).

Safari doesn't support fancy pants features like telling which mouse button is held down (event.buttons on MouseMove, works everywhere else since IE9), which makes it a total pain in the behind for any kind of drawing app.

If I could drop support for it completely I would open up a bottle of champagne. It truly is the new IE of the web.

Re: Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

#22

Doesn't work on Firefox

This was tough for us, because we're big believers in the standards-based web. We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

Unfortunately, while most of the editor works in all browsers, getting full support is really hard. We're doing a lot of things that get pretty deep in the browser, so we wanted to lock things down as much as possible.

We almost were electron-only to ensure consistency, and can still give you the electron app today. We felt it was better to launch with Chrome + Electron than just Electron for an optional installation-free experience, which is why we only support Chrome.

I'm personally really sorry as an engineer that we don't support Firefox, Safari, and other browsers yet. It's on our roadmap :)

Re: Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

#25

Have you fully consider the Designer's side of this? I feel that to be successful and bridge the gaps between those two mental models you also need to onboard the designers so they can help with generating the right type of mockup (or at least the kind that will help a developer using Pagedraw get the closest to a 1 to 1 code export). The reason why I ask is that I tried importing several semi-complex but not uncommo…

Pagedraw doesn't impose any organizational requirements on your Sketch files! You're right that requiring certain structures is bad UX; we agree and care deeply about following that principle. The incorrect file formatting error means we don't recognize your upload as a Sketch file at all.

Probably a bug on our side. Could you try emailing the Sketch file to team@pagedraw.io and we'll see if we can debug it?

Re: Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

#26

Doesn't work on Firefox

This was tough for us, because we're big believers in the standards-based web. We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers. Unfortunately, while most of the editor works in all browsers, getting full support is really hard. We're doing a lot of things that get pretty deep in the browser, so we wanted to lock things down as much as possible. We almost were electron-only to ensure consistenc…

As a basically-everything-except-Chrome user, I'm increasingly skeptical of excuses this. There's almost certainly some feature(s) that you've spent a lot of time on that provide less value than having the app working in Firefox and Safari.

As soon as I saw it was Chrome only, I closed out.

Re: Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

#28
post #14
post #8

I created a text field, deleted it, and added another ending up with a slightly mis-defined UI element. The name in the UI is Text 4, the prop is text3 and the css class is text_4. That said, I’m totally in love. Can I just ask for Typescript generation, please? (UPDATE: My god it’s already there in the full version - Thank you!)

I’ve installed the pagedraw-cli app but am getting crashes because my project is on the D:/ drive and it’s inheriting the drive specifier and looking for my C:/users folder under D:/users. Super excited to go deeper with this.

Thanks to PageDraw crew for helping with this... looks like it’s a bug in the upstream netrc package used for persisting user credentials locally. Workaround for now is to copy your project to the C:/ when playing with the command-line version of pagedraw.

Re: Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

#30

Have you fully consider the Designer's side of this? I feel that to be successful and bridge the gaps between those two mental models you also need to onboard the designers so they can help with generating the right type of mockup (or at least the kind that will help a developer using Pagedraw get the closest to a 1 to 1 code export). The reason why I ask is that I tried importing several semi-complex but not uncommo…

Pagedraw doesn't impose any organizational requirements on your Sketch files! You're right that requiring certain structures is bad UX; we agree and care deeply about following that principle. The incorrect file formatting error means we don't recognize your upload as a Sketch file at all. Probably a bug on our side. Could you try emailing the Sketch file to team@pagedraw.io and we'll see if we can debug it?

Cool. I can't really send it because I'll be violating the infosec policy of my company (I was already violating it trying to upload it, lol)...

I feel that eventually, you will need to set a certain standard. Not because is required on your side, but because this is how every designer/developer relationship should work. People just don't know how to do it because there's no standard or methodology. Think how horrible would be if developers didn't have Git to collaborate... Well, that's basically the state of developer-designer collaboration. I think with this product you guys are in a good position to help solve this problem.

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