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Would a member of the Pagedraw team share a postmortem? Seems like this is a huge need and will be the future state of web / mobile design - what stopped you guys?
So what does this mean? Does it mean it is the right product when it is open source, or is the code being made open source just for the purposes of archiving?
Or now that it is open source is it seen that it might become a more useful tool?
Pagedraw looks very polished. I can take some wild guesses why it didn't succeed but glad to have it live on as open source. My best guess would be that it either did too much or not enough. Getting an extra developer's worth of productivity from a tool is great but there could be other ways to make gains as noted in the shutdown page. Visual editing is a different way of programming and can be more or less productiv…
For example, we (Anima - YC S18) are doing it (https://www.animaapp.com)
"Sorry, our editor is optimized for Chrome" Please don't fall for the monopoly. Spend a little time and make it work everywhere, for the sake of the open web
Pagedraw looks very polished. I can take some wild guesses why it didn't succeed but glad to have it live on as open source. My best guess would be that it either did too much or not enough. Getting an extra developer's worth of productivity from a tool is great but there could be other ways to make gains as noted in the shutdown page. Visual editing is a different way of programming and can be more or less productiv…
I worked on a thing like that for a long time. I wasn't trying to "draw" HTML and CSS, but rather I wanted a way of building rich and structured content in a natural and visual interface without sacrificing control of the markup. I ended up bogged down because little by little it tried to be a design tool, and I ended up with a complex project that doesn't do any one thing very well.
It's on the back-burner for now, and it may end up open source. Link below:
It’s a pity they’ve shut down, though hopefully it can live on somehow as open source. There’s a lot of activity in the Sketch/Figma/whatever to React space at the moment, including Hadron [0], Alva [1] and Lona [2]. There’s a real gap in the workflow between design - basically a drawing - and working code. Handoff tools like Zeplin help, but it seems redundant to build everything twice, first in a design and prototy…
Wanted to add Modulz [3] to this list [3] https://www.modulz.app/
Would a member of the Pagedraw team share a postmortem? Seems like this is a huge need and will be the future state of web / mobile design - what stopped you guys?
Probably the same as every other attempt at this since the mid 90s. People who can code front-ends don't need such a tool. People who cannot code front-ends hire people who can, and still don't need such a tool.
making stuff is never going to go mainstream when you can just pay someone to do it for you
This is an extremely ambitious problem to solve because it requires building an entire Wix or Webflow that also speaks and outputs some sort of web component (in our case React). It needs to allow designers to work in a completely visual way without worrying about tools like Git while developers can at the same time add logic and state to the otherwise static design. You have to remove all hard handoffs that fork the source of truth and keeps ideas from flowing from the canvas through the development pipeline. InVision and other tools are "glue" that attempt to solve this, and they definitely make things easier, but the handoffs are still there.
Many of the tools I'm seeing get close, but they don't go all the way because it would be insanely expensive to replace all the tools in the pipeline (InVision included) and make a single environment that everyone works in to produce a full UI from blank canvas to prototype to production. Gamers have Unity, that's what we need in the web/native app development arena.
We've been working on it here: http://www.shift.studio. While I'm sad to see Pagedraw go (and I've reached out about getting lessons learned from the founder who responded and was extremely helpful/nice), I still believe this is a good idea and we are going to push forward and get it done. I also really love seeing that others here agree that something like this needs to be built.
I would love to hear from HN, what do y'all believe is the fundamental list of features required to tackle this? (no matter how bold/crazy the request)
"Sorry, our editor is optimized for Chrome" Please don't fall for the monopoly. Spend a little time and make it work everywhere, for the sake of the open web