Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to React Code

Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by jpochtar on Monday February 26, 2018 @02:39PM (#16468276)

This was tough for us, because we're big believers in the standards-based web. We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

Unfortunately, while most of the editor works in all browsers, getting full support is really hard. We're doing a lot of things that get pretty deep in the browser, so we wanted to lock things down as much as possible.

We almost were electron-only to ensure consistency, and can still give you the electron app today. We felt it was better to launch with Chrome + Electron than just Electron for an optional installation-free experience, which is why we only support Chrome.

I'm personally really sorry as an engineer that we don't support Firefox, Safari, and other browsers yet. It's on our roadmap :)

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Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by stefano on Monday February 26, 2018 @03:26PM (#16468674)

> We 100% promise that all the code we generate works across all browsers.

By supporting only Chrome, you're showing that you consider Firefox/Safari/Edge as second class citizens, making it harder to trust that you will keep supporting non-Chrome browsers in your generated code.

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Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by btown on Monday February 26, 2018 @03:06PM (#16468497)

As someone who also made this difficult decision to launch a product with only Chrome support: don’t feel bad, and don’t feel responsible for haters. Supporting other browsers, even those that are standards compliant, is a nefarious class of technical debt: from verifying scrollbar sizing to performance degradations, you add a tremendous amount of overhead to ongoing QA - especially important when you have a small team without dedicated QA resources or processes, and a clientele with an eye towards aesthetic detail. We owe it to our respective missions to focus on what matters.

For my part, I look forward to trying the product!

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Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by marpstar on Monday February 26, 2018 @02:45PM (#16468321)

As a basically-everything-except-Chrome user, I'm increasingly skeptical of excuses this. There's almost certainly some feature(s) that you've spent a lot of time on that provide less value than having the app working in Firefox and Safari.

As soon as I saw it was Chrome only, I closed out.

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Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by miketery on Monday February 26, 2018 @03:53PM (#16468864)

On the other hand think of it from their perspective if you want your odds of success to be higher you have to focus on the biggest user base, simple 80/20. I doubt that an additional feature vs friefox support is a fair comparison.

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Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by yodon on Monday February 26, 2018 @03:16PM (#16468593)

For anyone else looking for the electron app mentioned above it’s at https://documentation.pagedraw.io/electron/ BUT only in Mac and Linux versions

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Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by gablg1 on Monday February 26, 2018 @04:33PM (#16469169)

Windows versions are also up now! Please let us know if you run into any issues.

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Re:Launch HN: Pagedraw (YC W18) – Compile UI Mockups to Reac... by mohamedmansour on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @05:15AM (#16472313)

Doesn't work on Edge, Firefox, or even Safari. I am sorry, your first sentence "big believers in standards" is just a lie. It is just developer laziness for supporting non standard stuff and doing User Agent sniffing.

Rule #1 is do feature detection not user agent detection. What are you doing that is "pretty deep in the browser"? NaCL? Experimental Chrome features?

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