51–60 of 148 posts
Interesting idea, but I'm not sure I see any advantage over dragging movable/resizable components from a toolbar, but there are several obvious disadvantages.
What if you could sketch your UI with a stencil, paper, and pencil. Then take a picture of it and have it translated into native components?
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This really depends on how the UI designer does layout. Nothing says you need to allow users to do absolute positioning vs rule based when someone drags stuff around. You can help this along with multiple common views at different resolutions, so users don’t try and force a pixel perfect version.
It's funny how web development still doesn't offer the ease and productivity of early 2000s RAD environments. Even this software is actually not simpler, on the contrary: It is far more complex, because you don't know how to create a given widget [assuming you already learned what widgets there are, because the software doesn't tell you]. You have to learn what the software recognizes and how you need to draw it in m…
WebFlow and OutSystems are two examples that come to my mind.
I hope that WebComponents will make it easier to adopt such tooling.
Codeless UI is so exciting! This reminds me of Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad from the early 60s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad
The thing that this demo shows in minutes could've been typed up in text in seconds. It is not a productive way to do things. There's a reason that these systems never catched on, they are unnecessary.
You may say, but "non-programmers" will use it! No, they won't. Designers will use real design tools to create (non-functional) visual designs. Programmers will bring those visual designs to functionality. That procedure works. It'll keep working. These systems are diversions, not improvements. Worthy of investigation, but not practical.
What are people's thoughts on when this will actually be usable? UI eng is just another labor intensive automatable step for creatives. Next will be to automate the design part too. Don't draw your UI, generate it from user stories.
You could automate the entire software design and development process! Could't be any worse that what we have now, amiright?
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It sounds like you don't. But many in my org come to me with an idea, and having them think through the logical pieces and build a functional wireframe would help under resourced people like me so much. Also, many people just think that business logic for sanitization and validation "just happens." The barrier to wireframing, for them, is too high so they don't. But in this idea, I could see someone submitting a wire…
> many people just think that business logic for sanitization and validation "just happens." The barrier to wireframing, for them, is too high so they don't Maybe the barrier is where it should be. Or maybe it should be even higher! People who can't understand the logic of an interface have no business creating or suggesting interfaces. An UI is meant to be used, not looked at like a pretty picture in a frame. It sho…
> Maybe the barrier is where it should be. Or maybe it should be even higher!
Across the industry people in leadership positions assume that making UI/UX is easy. Those same people are usually the owners or major stakeholders of the project. Any avenue to put more functional ownership back onto that group to empower and educate is a worth endeavor.
Maybe I am not a UI designer but I much prefer rule based approaches than drawing. Rule based means I tell use instruction like "this button must be on top on that button horizontally centered", "this label must fit that text", "this image must be between this and that", etc... and let the layout engine deal with it. UIs are usually not paintings, window sizes vary, text length changes with localization, decorations…
I find it quite pleasant once you get used to it.
For my whole life I've been "drawing" real GUIs and writing the logic code, not GUI code then. It started with VisualBasic 1.0 for DOS, then there were different versions of VisualBasic for Windows, then Borland C++ Builder and Delphi (I was using the former), then NetBeans Swing designer and WinForms designer in VisualStudio. And now building a GUI is such a problem that a huge number of almost-useless (I really pre…
There are still Visual Basic Apps from the 1990s floating around in large corporations and in government.
Users who were expert in the process but not expert developers could easily code up tools to their exact specifications.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Basic#1990s
Admittedly the deployment of web applications is much better and they can run on different devices.
Hopefully when web assembly takes off easier to use tools will reappear.
karanchahal, not sure if this can be renamed retroactively, but this may have been a good "Show HN" candidate: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html Regardless, it's a cool idea that made me laugh a bit at first (seems almost absurd at first glance) but then got me thinking about possibilities. Good job! It would be great if you could get it in a state where people could really try it out (even in an unpolished st…
Again, thanks :)