Comment by Animats
4 years ago
How did we manage to lose GUI editing of HTML, as in Dreamweaver, and GUI editing of user interfaces, as in Visual Basic?
4 years ago
How did we manage to lose GUI editing of HTML, as in Dreamweaver, and GUI editing of user interfaces, as in Visual Basic?
We also lost GUI editing of interactive vector animation, as in Flash.
I know. It used to be common to build the 2D UIs of games in Flash. The Adobe design tools were OK, and there are third-party libraries for running Flash. There's even a Flash runtime in Rust.
Yes. I was one such designer. You could do a UI in Flash and then export all its animations to cryengine. The actual design tools in Flash were mediocre, but some animators really loved them. For designers, it played well with Illustrator... if an illustrator vector file updated you could re-import it and reuse the animation. You'd just draw your UI gizmos / HUD / whatever, assign anything to be a sprite and hook it from code. Any complex vector animations could be created visually and then triggered. It even had full 3D capabilities, worked really well on mobile chipsets and could leverage a GPU, although in the UI-as-export for games context it would run on the CPU.
It's tricky to do GUI editing when your design is expected to be responsive to different aspect ratios, input methods, and screen sizes. :(
The myth of "omg only html has different screen sizes" is so pervasive, it's mind boggling.
Desktop apps have had "different screen sizes" forever. This is called "resize your window in any way you want".
I have a rant/thread on this: https://twitter.com/dmitriid/status/1424052193951354881?s=20...
Sure, but I don't recall many programs / games / thick clients that would reorganize the layout of the application (adding or removing elements, reorganizing rows as communs, etc...) At least not 90s era windows programs, and certainly not dos.
Résolution was taken into account in games, to compute a scaling factor, maybe add some screen bars, and that was nearly all - fundamentally, because hardly any program was going to be used in a small, top to bottom screen at all.
So html was just the first one to have to do it pervasively because of desktop + mobile web browsing of the same source - but it could have happened before.
13 replies →
No.
NeXTStep had resizable windows.
NeXTStep had Interface Builder.
Worked like a charm.
It's still there in MacOS's XCode
2 replies →
I think "it's tricky" and "it exists" are compatible sentiments.
Ok, how about "scrollable page" as the underlying mental model?
2 replies →
Not tricky if you spend the time. I'm always speechless when people claim that lack of responsive screen adjustment was the death knell of Flash/AS3. Any language or stack is going to suck on some screens unless you test it on those screens and write code accordingly. Nothing had better performance in this than Flash, up until Google decided to stop letting Chrome fire off new window boundaries on resize until the click/drag was let up. I wrote practically a whole operating system with window managers and apps in a resizable browser window in 2008 using that tool in under 300k. And large portions of the graphical elements were done through the GUI. Do you realize how much more boring and time consuming it is to write every media size CSS subclass and have to test it compared with just drawing multiple sizes of things and changing their positions and filters?
>and write code accordingly
That is exactly the point — now you have to write code, not use a graphical editor.
1 reply →
Have you seen Retool (https://retool.com)? It feels familiar to HyperCard / Visual Basic, but now in the cloud. I’ve used it and like it.
Relying on a SaaS today is not too bright.
LiveCode is also a SaaS, locked behind a subscription iirc.
1 reply →
We didn't, of either.
If you have a WordPress blog, you would be surprised how much you can edit in GUIs. .NET/Delphi/etc. are still around. Heck, you can GUI edit a Swing app right now if you want.
The trouble is that GUI editing is super limited, so it is worth learning to write the code yourself. And frankly, HTML with CSS3 is not that hard to make by hand; organize div and spans and other tags around what you need, then open the page in Chromes dev tools and adjust margins etc., until it looks like what you want, then save the CSS file it generates.
This is much better than fighting with a GUI tool.
It’s better than fighting with a gui tool if you care about gui. I just need something to work and then give it to someone. I still haven’t found anything productive outside something like retool (cannot use cloud for the work I do) that works for me. Most wysiwyg tools now use drag and drop to containers that are responsive etc which I find impossible and tedious to use. I want to throw stuff on a canvas and hook it up to the backend I made, test it and then throw the code to a frontend colleague. Found nothing usable like Delphi (used it for 10 years in the 90s/00s) but for html for that yet; it’s all tedious, slow and usually incredibly buggy.
I am a senior (30 years+) software engineer and html/css really doesn’t work for me. I can do it but I find it boring and annoying.
If you just want to slap something together, why not use a GUI to edit a Swing frontend?
Or do you specifically mean an interactive HTML front-end, something I don't think you could make in DreamWaver either?
Livecode offers exactly what you're describing: GUI editing of a live user interface, with code able to be built-in to every object. https://livecode.com
It's based on HyperCard, so the language isn't to everyone's taste. But it's updated to include color, unicode, more advanced coding techniques, database access, multi-platform and more. But the basic concept -- I want a button here, and a field there, and a slider there -- is still 100% there.
Google Web Designer which is closed source has Dreamweaver features including templates. see https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com/
Professionals in every domain like to maintain a certain level of difficulty to keep amateurs out. The tools of a trade can never be too easy, the tax code can never be simplified, legal writing and procedure has to be opaque etc. as professionals subconsciously reject job security threating ideas.
This sabotage is subtle: A wide variety of technical decisions can be made at any time, with complex trade-offs, bounded by what the majority of developers is willing and able to handle. As we move our servers to the cloud to make our lives easier and get admins fired, the exact right level of complexity shows up in AWS and Azure to enable stable and well-paid cloud expert jobs. For that difficulty-goldilocks-zone, Visual Basic was too easy, and things like functional programming are too hard.
This is nonsense. The tax code is complex to close loopholes that smart money-motivated people find in it. Similarly, programs are complex because they solve complex problems. Of course you can write very simple programs, but they simply don't solve the complex problems. None of this is about gatekeeping anyone, all of this is about what value we actually provide.
There are some complex problems out there, but the vast majority of requirements are rather trivial, no? Heavy websites that don't do much, but with enough javascript to harm usability seem to be an issue HN readers agree on. Opening a car glove box is another simple problem that now has complex solutions (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRB0gbYO3fE). Isn't it weird how those things come about? It can't possibly be incompetence, nor would it be outright evil.
I suspect it's a subconscious process where we like to build a framework that appeals to us, where we get to be 'senior' and shape the world the way it is convenient for us. The antidote is a clear commitment to simplicity, to meditate over Picasso's Bull and apply that to our work.
The tax code is complex to create loopholes for the wealthy to exploit.
1 reply →
> Professionals in every domain like to maintain a certain level of difficulty to keep amateurs out.
Not all of us. I fervently wish that implementing the various platform-specific accessibility APIs, and the corresponding tricks for canvas-based GUIs in web applications, was easier, so more GUIs would be accessible. I wish I wasn't one of maybe a few hundred people in the world who had substantial experience with the UI Automation API on Windows, for instance. I'm working on an open-source project to try to package up that specialized knowledge in a reusable implementation. But it takes work to make inherently complicated things easier.