81–90 of 140 posts
Meanwhile designers using WYSIWYG tend to build applications that work just fine in their environment and nowhere else.
The best current real-world example to look at would be Apple's Interface Builder for iOS. Why doesn't everyone use IB? The biggest reasons in my experience are: * Limited logic. A builder is fine for a simple static layout. How should that layout change depending on the data to be displayed? How should it adapt to different screen dimensions and orientations? Pretty soon you want to write code to control the view. *…
Back when I did Mac OS 9 development, we used Metrowerks' PowerPlant framework. Constructor, their GUI editor, made laying out user interfaces a joy. It just worked. When I came back to try iOS development, and saw the sad state of IB, I wondered how things had fallen so far. Then I tried Android development. Hand rolled XML layout of UI? NOPE. I too am surprised that no one has developed tools to just do this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...centering an object horizontally and vertically consistently is still a surprisingly difficult endeavor..." This is so true - even today. Oh wait, someone might state, "but there are frameworks you can simply integrate and they handle that kind of stuff for you, or at least make it easier"...To which I reply, do i really have to include ~500K - 1MB of some framework for this!?! Just silly that centering is an ann…
If you can afford not to support IE9 [1], you don't need a 500K - 1MB framework to center vertically and horizontally by using flexbox (align-items: center; justify-content: center) on the parent container. [1] http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
I'm a designer, and consider HTML/CSS/JS to be as good a design tool as any, perhaps even better than any CAD app. I use Sketch, Illustrator and Photoshop as needed for icons, illustrations and photos. Also, code is a really handy tool for design (generation/automation). I believe in using the right tool for whatever "material" I'm working with. For (responsive) web apps, that tool is HTML/CSS/JS. Most designer's hav…
There's a huge separation between who designs the frontend and who implements the frontend. To date, none of the frontend editors are good enough to completely replace the need for a programmer to wire up actions. Even back in the Flash days, you needed an ActionScript programmer to make your webapp do anything meaningful. Since you need a programmer anyway, you might as well use a freeform design tool (Photoshop) to…
In terms of easily cranking out a CRUD app, the current state of the art in web front-end development is a long ways behind Visual Basic 4 which was released in 1995.
this is what's shocking to me - I will confess, I partly started this thread to investigate whether there was an opportunity to start a company around making web front-end development suck less. The fact that we hand-write the most fine-grained basic stuff in 2017 is odd for such a technical industry. Shoot me an email (my address is in my profile) if you'd like to check it out when it's ready!
I've tried to use some of these mentioned GUIs. For me, the learning curve is fairly steep. Beyond creating something very simple I always find myself spinning my wheels very soon. I know what I need, so it's much easier to jump into the IDE and just do it. Also. At some point even your HTML is going to be made live. Either through turning it into the template or inline code or etc. it just doesn't really blend with…
There's so much flexibility that allows for creativity when you just understand the code. In fact, I've been doing what I consider to be "designing in the browser" for years. Which is using Photoshop to get started, pick colors, etc, then utilizing developer tools for much of the refinement during the implementation phase. This is the closest thing I've ever found to a good "GUI editor".
Simple, job security. It would put lot of FrontEnd Coders out of work - not all, but many of them. So it is in everyone's best interest to keep coders coding, designers designing and have as little overlap as possible. Silos keeps the wheels turning. So there has been a collective badmouthing about how WYSIWYG tools create a codular mess, and then they proceed to create similar codular mess by hand (pull this library…
There are great answers in these comments that provide good insight. This comment is not one of them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
this is what's shocking to me - I will confess, I partly started this thread to investigate whether there was an opportunity to start a company around making web front-end development suck less. The fact that we hand-write the most fine-grained basic stuff in 2017 is odd for such a technical industry. Shoot me an email (my address is in my profile) if you'd like to check it out when it's ready!
Check out Rails. You could make a static header and footer template for all pages in Dreamweaver or whatever, then for the dynamic parts, the code is very simple. GUI editors can't do this because they don't have a good way to specify what you want to be templated and what you want to be dynamic, and how/when to display those dynamic parts.
The best current real-world example to look at would be Apple's Interface Builder for iOS. Why doesn't everyone use IB? The biggest reasons in my experience are: * Limited logic. A builder is fine for a simple static layout. How should that layout change depending on the data to be displayed? How should it adapt to different screen dimensions and orientations? Pretty soon you want to write code to control the view. *…
This is a bit more specific to Apple imho. Android layouts are also XML but much smaller and much more manageable in source control. The underlying xml of storyboard files are hundreds of lines long and often change just from opening the file, even if you don't change anything.