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Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

utopia.app

21–30 of 175 posts

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#21
post #9

To me this editor gets it right in the sense that we don’t need to get rid of code as the “nocode” movement is trying. Instead we need to make coding more enjoyable and figure out ways to make it more interactive. One specific thing Utopia addresses to me is the need for the code and the actual thing to be treated more as one single interactable component and not two separate things. Instead we're treating the thing…

Thank you! This is pretty much exactly the ethos behind Utopia - that there is ultimately some underlying thing that you want to make changes to, but you often want to be able to make those changes from different viewpoints (or in different contexts) depending on the types of changes you want to make. The React paradigm, especially with functional components, is absolutely right for this kind of a tool.

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#27
post #23

25 years later, and we're back to FrontPage. "Time is a flat circle."

> 25 years later, and we're back to FrontPage.

And... about bloody time IMHO. There's a reason tools like FrontPage and Flash were so popular - those tools made the internet available to millions of people who aren't into tedious coding.

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#29

I am very interested in this. I am a low-coder you could say. I have to start coding a front-end in React soon (and I have yet to learn React) so with all the overhead of learning React as well as fiddling with html, css etc, it feels like a really big task. I saw some visual builders for React , downloaded/tried a couple but they had pretty big learning curves of their own so I didn't bother taking it any further. Y…

Thank you! I'm one of the developers working on Utopia.

> I saw some visual builders for React , downloaded/tried a couple but they had pretty big learning curves of their own so I didn't bother taking it any further.

This was our experience with existing low code or code generating design tools as well – you actually have to put a lot of time into learning how to use them, time you could spend on learning actual React.

One of our guiding principles was that people who use Utopia should not need to learn anything that is proprietary to our platform.

Re: Utopia, a visual design tool for React, with code as the source of truth

#30
post #23

25 years later, and we're back to FrontPage. "Time is a flat circle."

> 25 years later, and we're back to FrontPage. And... about bloody time IMHO. There's a reason tools like FrontPage and Flash were so popular - those tools made the internet available to millions of people who aren't into tedious coding.

I totally agree. I'm not sure why they fell out of popularity. I would've never learned HTML/CSS/JS had it not been for my 9-year-old self messing with FrontPage.
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