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Re:N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier by andrewflnr on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @09:36PM (#21199136)
I've seen enough of these supposedly non-programmer-friendly interfaces to judge them all guilty until proven innocent (not that many, to be honest, but I am scarred nonetheless). Looking at the video, it's not the worst I've seen. But please, I beg you (the authors here or anyone building a similar product):

- Provide first class debugging and dry-run support. Don't make people either run in prod (as the demo video effectively does) or set up full testing environments.

- Strict, comprehensible scoping rules. Non-programmers will have more, not less trouble with having named data propagated everywhere for reasons that aren't visually clear. Global state is still bad.

- Don't make users think about JSON.

- Supply auto-layout. Don't force users to manually reposition things to get a decent layout, and ideally don't let them. The demo video seems to show at least the first half in place, so that's good.

- Version control. Possibly via...

- Ideally an isomorphically editable text representation. You can switch between graphical and text representations and have changes propagate.

Maybe this project checks more of these boxes than I've seen so far. I'm pathologically optimistic, so there's a good chance I'll work with this enough to find out.

I don't really know why everyone wants to keep making these benighted flow-chart UIs instead of using the relatively proven Scratch UI model.

Re:N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier by npsomaratna on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @10:07PM (#21199319)
I'm curious - could you explain what you mean by the "Scratch UI"? I did some searching on Google, but there appear to be several products which use this term.

Is this what you meant? https://scratch.mit.edu/developers

Re:N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier by vSanjo on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @11:14PM (#21199666)
I believe they are talking about that. I've seen that methodology of UI take off lately, too.
Re:N8n.io – Workflow automation alternative to Zapier by andrewflnr on Wednesday October 09, 2019 @08:30AM (#21202502)
Exactly that, yes.