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Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

pagedraw.io

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Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#41

Post by jpochtar »

pier25 wrote: post #31

We've been writing HTML for a couple of decades now. There have been dozens (hundreds?) of WYSIWYG editors and nothing has really caught on. My hypothesis is that unlike other mediums like paper or video, the elastic nature of the web makes understanding the positioning paradigms/box model/etc a necessity that no visual tool can really abstract. By the time you understand all that, it's just faster to write and maint…

We thought so too. The key idea in Pagedraw is you could design in the positon:absolute world designers think in, and we'd translate it into the Flexbox world apps need.

Ultimately we didn't get all the way there, which is part of why we closed up shop

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#42

Post by jpochtar »

syntaxing wrote: post #25
jitl wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use the open-source desktop app they released.

Interesting, is the desktop app on their Github the final version?

Yes, it's the final app from Pagedraw... but we encourage forks! There's some good stuff in there :)

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#43

Post by jpochtar »

moreira wrote: post #6
thedangler wrote: post #5

very interested in the vuejs implementation. How soon is soon, now that its moving to open source?

Odds are, never. If some volunteer open-source developer decides to pick it up, it might happen, but as the company's shutting down, any "soon" promised by them in the past is obviously now a "never". Note: That page is clearly just their old homepage + the shutdown message; whatever it says was written pre-shutdown.

This is correct. We wanted to preserve the pre-shutdown homepage, but there is no future development planned.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#44

Post by YorickPeterse »

pier25 wrote: post #31

We've been writing HTML for a couple of decades now. There have been dozens (hundreds?) of WYSIWYG editors and nothing has really caught on. My hypothesis is that unlike other mediums like paper or video, the elastic nature of the web makes understanding the positioning paradigms/box model/etc a necessity that no visual tool can really abstract. By the time you understand all that, it's just faster to write and maint…

I think there are also two other problems with WYSIWYG editors that haven't really been solved:

1. They tend to produce output that is not ideal to work with using another program (e.g. your editor of choice).

2. When you make changes to the output, the WYSIWYG editor might not understand it. This very much depends on what is changed, how, etc, but it could be a problem.

Both essentially force you to use the same software, and I think that scares people away (rightfully so I'd say).

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#45

Post by jpochtar »

nathan_f77 wrote: post #8

Sorry to hear about the shutdown, and it looks like it was a pretty useful tool. Great that they open sourced it. The source code looks very interesting (and a bit unusual for a React app.) [1] Looks like Coffeescript + "Coffeescript JSX", which I hadn't heard of before. I didn't look too closely, but I didn't see how they're doing state management in the editor. No Redux in the package.json [2]. I was hoping that I…

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html is how we felt about Coffeescript + JSX

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#46

Post by jameslk »

> Ultimately, we think Pagedraw is the wrong product. We think you can get 90% of the benefits of Pagedraw by just using JSX better. Our findings on this will be controversial, as they go entirely against the current “best practices,” so we’ll save them for a later blog post.

I'd like to hear more about this. I'm not sure if it was ever turned into a blog post? I don't understand how using JSX differently can eliminate the need for a visual editor for components.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#47

Post by juangacovas »

aspencer8111 wrote: post #34
beachy wrote: post #11

One absolute rule for success in software is that there are no absolute rules. From their post mortem https://medium.com/@gabriel_20625/technical-lessons-from-bui... > Performance is never a justification for anything if you haven’t measured it This just isn't true. Anyone with a reasonable amount of experience is often able to look ahead - well before any code is written - and see how performance could be better if…

Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile. I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about…

Well, as someone else said, it's not always black or white. Videogames MUST deliver performance, it's not only sales. Some desktop AND web applications could benefit from some performance boost here and there, and I mean being fast enough and not some abominations I've seen/heard about (minutes to get Excel files and examples like that, just because they're "thousands" of rows from a database).

You know, sales is everything and I agree that "there are two types of software: software that people complain about and software that nobody talks about", but some of us take some pride on doing stuff with enough performance and not pure crap...

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#48

Post by codegeek »

Interesting that they launched pagedraw exactly 1 year ago (Feb 26th, 2018) and I remember reading that launch post [0]

So it took them 1 year to shut it down ? Is that a quick failure ? Wonder why they didn't go any further. Was it Funding related ? Curious.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16467387

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#49

Post by CJefferson »

juangacovas wrote: post #47
aspencer8111 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its comments like this that make people hate HN. I agree with their writeup fully. They focused wayyyy too much on performance and not enough on an MVP, pivoting, marketing, growth, and staying agile. I would love to get all these "Performance First! Its so easy" engineers in a room for a week. Hell, give em three weeks and they still wouldn't have a single line of code written. But they would still be arguing about…

Well, as someone else said, it's not always black or white. Videogames MUST deliver performance, it's not only sales. Some desktop AND web applications could benefit from some performance boost here and there, and I mean being fast enough and not some abominations I've seen/heard about (minutes to get Excel files and examples like that, just because they're "thousands" of rows from a database). You know, sales is eve…

Minecraft is generally known to be fairly poorly optimised, and the graphics weren't great. Mist was mostly a series of static images. They are two of the best selling games of all time.

Re: Pagedraw is shutting down and going open source

#50

Post by aspencer8111 »

CJefferson wrote: post #49
juangacovas wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, as someone else said, it's not always black or white. Videogames MUST deliver performance, it's not only sales. Some desktop AND web applications could benefit from some performance boost here and there, and I mean being fast enough and not some abominations I've seen/heard about (minutes to get Excel files and examples like that, just because they're "thousands" of rows from a database). You know, sales is eve…

Minecraft is generally known to be fairly poorly optimised, and the graphics weren't great. Mist was mostly a series of static images. They are two of the best selling games of all time.

Yep...100x this! What is that they say about pride and what it cometh before???

Take as much pride as you want. Just remember to, you know, ship something from time to time.

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