The author's assessment of the "no-code" and "hybrid tools" landscape is either lazy or a joke. Here are a few more:<p>No-code tools for apps & websites:<p><pre><code> - Webflow
- Glide
- SquareSpace
- Dreamweaver [1]
- Visly
</code></pre>
Hybrid "designer/developer connectors"<p><pre><code> - Hadron
- Modulz [2]
- Interplay [3]
- Haiku [4]
- Zeplin
- Zeroheight [5]
- InVision DSM [5]
</code></pre>
Sad to see this blog post on the front page of HN since it's such a poor representation of this landscape. Hopefully this comment helps in a small way :)<p><pre><code> --
</code></pre>
[1] yeah it still exists, and yeah it's pretty much still Webflow as a 90's-vintage desktop app.<p>[2] Modulz' product doesn't exist yet, but they've built hype. Caveat emptor.<p>[3] Just like Modulz, but from what I've seen there's more execution and less hype.<p>[4] My company: we pivoted our original "designer/developer connector" into an animation tool — we're launching our new collaboration tool soon.<p>[5] Sort-of; designer-focus
There is nothing "crazy" abut "Browsers gobble it up." Along with annotation, this was supposed to be a standard feature of the web, in fact it was built into early versions of Netscape[1]. It just takes the world a long, long, long time to catch up with the bigger background ideas, because there are so many details and so many ways to make money with the immediate.<p>1. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Composer</a>
Is there a reason (or am I wrong about it) that the most common and most liked tools for developers are mostly Open Source, while there are almost no Open Source tools aimed for designers making it big?
I find it amusing that Sketch and Figma are considered "traditional tools" now. It wasn't so long ago that neither of these existed, and everything was Photoshop.
I've never understood why web design doesn't take place in a text editor and browser (with other tools, like Photoshop or Illustrator, for secondary tasks).<p>The output of web design is, ultimately, HTML and CSS, so what reason could a professional have to work with tools that can only yield an approximation of what they are paid to do? In my view, a designer without full mastery of at least HTML and CSS doesn't really deserve his title.<p>Going a little farther: with some knowledge of JavaScript, JSON and how to transform it (map, reduce, filter, sort), a designer can ask for some sample data and come up with a functioning prototype that offers truly important insights into the problems his design is supposed to solve. Client-side frameworks like Svelte.js are making all this very easy.<p>Nothing is more maddening, and a waste of time and money, than a Photoshop mockup using rudimentary, and generally too self-complacent, content.
One of the things I rarely see discussed or even mentioned is the ability for designers to easily provide incremental design improvements to engineers.<p>Software development now has long established practices to develop and deliver incrementally. Where it is understood that you are delivering value piecemally.<p>With the disconnect present between design and development, I think design is still lacking in working out how to approach problems incrementally. All too often, you are handed down a design to deliver in one go, when you can't reasonably do that.<p>Perhaps it's my lack of familiarity with the field, but that's my perception. (To be clear, majority of software devs still struggle with it too, but core principles have been known and applied for 20 years).<p>Do any of the tools mentioned (or not) specifically focus on that aspect of coordination?
I have a #5 proposal. I believe as the future gets simpler. We’ll be on the lookout for a “Morphing UI”. One that adjusts based on the environment. We’re kind of seeing this paradigm with conversational bots - though not perfect. Perhaps entire spaces built with something like: adaptivecards.io<p>It can’t replace all of our traditional UI. However, with more A.I. requiring less inputs, there may be a future where data, not UI sets apart services.
> This is a crazy idea but hear me out. Inspect Element is amazing. It’s what Hadron is basically utilising in its app. The experience that Chrome and Firefox have created around things like animations and grids is impressive. So why can't Chrome and Firefox add a few extra features, let developers enter “Edit” mode and allows those edits to change the files you are manipulating?<p>Wasn't it possible to set up Firebug to do this, before it died and was replaced with the built-in tools? (Or am I thinking of a pre-quantum add-on to the current tools?)
> Humans love standards and standardising things so I think whatever the future is, it'll always gravitate towards 1 or 2 main tools.<p>I need 5 different chat apps on my phone in order to talk to all my friends and colleagues. And that doesn’t even include many of the ones I’ve read about online which are apparently popular elsewhere, like WhatsApp, WeChat, and Telegram. Standardization is great, but the set of tools we end up using is an accidental emergent property.
I've always wanted the ability to just save my HTML/CSS changes in Chrome Dev Tools to the source files ("Future #3"). Why has that not been done yet? Would save a ton of time.
I've been working on an IDE and one challenge is to reverse all the compilation of modern frameworks in order to get WYSIWYG editing on the compiled app.
We can systematically simulate integrated circuit systems and implement "software design/development automation" like Electronic Design Automation (EDA).
It is an innovative and revolutionary approach to develop large-scale software.<p><a href="https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow</a>