It’s what got me working on Retool (https://tryretool.com). The idea is that visual programming has a bad rap, primarily because it’s being used in the wrong places. Most people try to apply visual programming to end-user software (Twitter, Airbnb, etc.). But because visual programming is really good for getting to an 80% solution in 20% of the time, and because 80% of Twitter really isn’t good enough (imagine Twitter with no autocomplete for tagging other users), building customer-facing software is precisely visual programming’s worst use case!
Retool’s focused specifically on building internal software. The idea is that, for internal software, 80% literally is 80%. And so visual programming is particularly suited for building internal stuff. Here’s a 4 minute demo video: https://vimeo.com/303811211. (People have described it as Delphi or Visual Basic in the cloud. In this case, the cloud is actually helpful, since it lets you distribute the created apps easily with authentication, authorization, and audit logs.)
If anybody has any feedback, or otherwise wants to hypothesize on why we’re still programming in text editors, please let me know! I’m david@.
Programmers might dislike visual programming because you give up a lot of control, but artists have a far easier time using them than writing "const int x = foo", etc since they have to basically learn a whole new language/subject matter.
On that note, I think anything that isn't particularly algorithm heavy and visual could enable a different class of people (like designers and artists) to access the utility of programming logic without having to learn a whole new language and paradigm of thinking. Who knows, maybe in the future, front-end ui work might be done by designers using a "photoshop-for-interfaces" software rather than programmers writing react components.
We had HyperCard > Flash > Visual Basic > Delphi. None of those got any traction in the field because Computer technology popularity are dependent on Companies using them.
Computer Programming languages, or in fact most of the Technology Tools are Top to Bottom design. Google, IBM, Apple, Microsoft design tools that fits them, and people start using it. Do you really need k8s? I bet 80% of uses cases could do without it. Instead of bottom up design that is like Excel, everybody uses it all the way up to investment banks. It serves the need for 80%, or arguably 90%+ of number crushing uses cases.
But for me k8s solves lot of problems, make deployment reliable, faster, infrastructure in code and these things. Other than k8s, haven't seen faster way of deployment on scale. IMO canary deployment style in istio is just the way deployment should be done. I find k8s great piece of software, still lots of apis need to be in GA, but still I found and see k8s a great piece of future.
Here's a short demo: https://youtu.be/Yi0BjSM3v4w
It eliminates weeks and months of tedious design to code conversion and you can build sophisticated SaaS applications, content-rich pages, and e-commerce portals much faster.
It might help designers who're interested in understanding how their design translates into code because they can instantly see the underlying code for each design, play around with it, and see how it changes.
In your tool an anti pattern that I found was that it seems to use inline styles and css class names of sort 'font-normal' 'text-gray1', etc. That's unmaintainable for large code base.
On the other hand having `copy CSS attributes` contextual menu item in Sketch is super productive. I can choose my own class name and whatsoever and still have the exact styles as the designer wanted them to be.
Actually lots of companies use micro classes. I first learned about it using Tachyons and built a full compliance platform. It’s good because you don’t need to worry about unintended visual changes and bad because you can’t make large style changes without lots of effort.
`text-gray1` means what? Which library am I supposed to use in order to make this stylesheets work? Does it match tachyons or tailwind - no. So I have to add X lines of CSS to my project coming from a tool that I am not able to use once I change a simple class name? Not a good start.
The software also can generate BEM like you wish for in the future. One of our earlier iterations did do that, but the default stack today is Tailwind which I've found to be the second best way to approach CSS (the first is CSS-in-JS, but with explicit design scales).
BTW I took a look at your CodeGen project, and I'm impressed.
Is it really odd, though? UI design is inherently a visual activity - it makes sense to me to have a graphical tool like Sketch to use.
Whilst I sometimes use class hierarchy or control flow graphs to help me visualise a codebase, I feel that the medium of text is more efficient to write in (if you've ever seen one of those block-based coding tools often used in education, you'll know how painful it is to make something non-trivial by dragging and dropping blocks).
And it's not like we haven't seen innovation in the developer tooling space - nobody is using notepad to write serious code. JetBrains in particular have made a whole suite of tools which actually understand the code you're writing and suggest improvements, allow you to easily perform refactorings etc - it's far, far more than just a text editor. Today, I won't use a programming language without a JetBrains IDE/plugin.
- wire-framing
and
- demoing prototypes with transitions on my phone (specially this)
?
I am about to jump the wagon of design (product owner & ceo doing stuff on power point copy paste or balsamiq) and i do not have time to have multiple tools, i want just one.
Figma on browser + collaboration seems nice to test.
Amongst other things designers also use our generated code to learn how designs can be viewed in browsers as HTML/CSS.
When Sketch introduced Symbols, they started making designers think like developers, in the sense of reusable self-contained components. This makes our and companies like us live easier. And for that we thank them :)
An as for whether they are scalable, the new ones might be. I remember reading about a company, from somewhere in the middle East, using them to build hospital IT systems, which are usually very complex.
Link: https://www.outsystems.com/blog/introducing-sapphire-hospita...
A few years later Sketch came along and it was so easy and intuitive to use that I was able to pick it up immediately. I've been able to get pretty good at UX design now because the barrier to entry on the tools side got so much lower.
I wonder if there's a way to lower the barrier to entry for coding in the same way. I mean, when you think about it, we're still using text editors to build software. Seems odd.
Anyway, Sketch is awesome and the first of this new wave of design tools. I use Figma now. It has most of the benefits of sketch and it supports Mac, Windows and in browser. I fear this funding may have come too late.