10 ms·

To be honest UI dev tools just plain suck, making everything move more slowly that it needs to. If I'm on the web it's the HTML + CSS clusterfuck, If I'm in C#

To be honest UI dev tools just plain suck, making everything move more slowly that it needs to. If I'm on the web it's the HTML + CSS clusterfuck, If I'm in C# I'm writing color converters for WPF, if it's Java I have to use the outdated looking Swing, if it's C++ it's QT which I need to doll out cash for. Additionally every smart phone OS has it's own groundbreaking GUI layout concepts and ideas too. Then you get the layers on top, Xamarin or Eto.Forms or X, that convert down to the native widgets or just create their own entirely. These usually come with a healthy dose of missing functionality, such as mouse drag detection. And then there are the languages with no UI libraries at all. As if this is even acceptable in 2017. All in all, whoever decided GUI frameworks were a good idea got it very very wrong indeed. This stuff should have been standardized long ago, stored in some universal data format, and then every programming language could add support for it. They would want to add support for it. Closest to this is HTML of course... but, well, I think everyone would hope for something more elegant.

pavlov 10y ago
Sun NeWS should have been that GUI standard, thirty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS There was a simplicity and purity in its approach to front-end interactivity and rendering that completely eludes the HTML+CSS+JS stack we're now stuck with. As the Wikipedia article states... "NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming; used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering; used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation." PostScript is basically a graphics-oriented Forth, so it's kind of a weird language to write directly... But it would have been great as a target for all sorts of interesting compilers and GUI tools.
- TuringTest 10y ago
  If you have compilers and GUI tools, how does it matter than the underlying layer is HTML+CSS+JSON? The designer shouldn't see it anyway. Now that we have a web-aware platform (which NeWS was not), nothing stops us to create good UI tools on top - yet it is happening very slowly.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    You mean by piling up <div>, <span>, CSS and JavaScript?
    - TuringTest 10y ago
      Yes, why not? That's no different than piling objects in a GUI widget library to build a tree structure for the layout of a window; except that it has a human-readable string representation.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Sure there is, on a GUI toolkit I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn, while on a browser I need to hope it does the right thing. Also there is big performance impact, where piling up divs with CCS requires the right incantations, some browser version specific, for hardware acceleration to kick in. And in any case, it is impossible to fully replicate the UX of the host platform.
        TuringTest 10y ago
        > I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn How well does that work when your GUI must be shown in arbitrary devices, with arbitrary screen sizes and arbitrary resolutions? And how well does it reflow when the user changes the viewport size? In any case, the original post to which I replied was comparing HTML5 to the NeWS platform, which provided a unified UI stack itself, so you wouldn't be able to match the native behavior following that approach either.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        That is what layout managers and logical pixels are for. You are missing the fact that NeWS offered this kind of control. "The NeWS Book" - https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863
- samkellett 10y ago
  you either die a hero or...
- lj3 10y ago
  Didn't NeWS have its own issues? It lost to X11 for a reason... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix2000/invitedtalks/gettys_html/img16.htm https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix2000/invitedtalks/...
seanmcdirmid 10y ago
What do UI dev tools have to do with UX design?
- pavlov 10y ago
  Designs have to be implemented in something. Currently UX designers are often like chefs who work by drawing pictures of food and writing down conceptual recipes. When they've created a beautiful menu this way, they're surprised to find out that their recipes can't actually be made using the cooking equipment available, and some of the ingredients don't even exist. You're not going to run a Michelin-rated restaurant like that. The industry desperately needs better UI development tools. To continue my (already strained) food analogy... Right now we are still in a "hunter-gatherer" stage where everyone does their own thing, teams are foraging and hunting, and occasionally they stumble on something great. Consistent UX will require an "agricultural revolution", a systematic production innovation that makes the essential pieces more understandable and repeatable in isolation.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    You really underestimate the amount of time it takes to practice and do adequate UX design; unless you spend 10,000 hours doing design, you are going to suck at it, and most of the jack of all trades designers devs I met have really been mediocre at both. "Designers should code" is as fallacious as "accountants should be lawyers". Specialization has been the direction of human civilization ever since the neolithic revolution allowed us to have enough food surplus to move into cities. Designers should definitely work with devs, if they are surprised their designs can't be implemented in the end, then that organization is REALLY dysfunctional. We definitely need better UI development tools, but this is orthogonal to UX design, much of which doesn't even involve the aesthetics of the UI anyways.
    - dpark 10y ago
      Designers must understand the media they work in. Design involves tradeoffs and accommodations for practical limits. A designer who doesn't understand the capabilities of the systems they design for is destined to produce bad designs. You can't understand the limits of CSS unless you can work with it. Imagine if Apple hardware designers depended on their manufacturers to tell them what's achievable with aluminum and glass. Instead Apple has a small manufacturing facility in their design studio so the designers can iterate rapidly and actually understand what is possible.
kuschku 10y ago
> if it's Java I have to use the outdated looking Swing Java has JavaFX now
- kpil 10y ago
  Swing is themeable, as has always been. With some minimal effort, it's possible to do a nice looking GUI with fonts that not look like vomit, etc. If Sun and Oracle had spent more than 5 minutes on packaging applications - why not in jxe-files for executable jars, as a simple start to avoid torturing your users - and using nice fonts - and why not a discrete and non-whiny non-bundlig autoupdating jre - they could actually have won on the desktop, when it still was relevant.
  - flukus 10y ago
    The biggest problem was always that everyone hated the native win32 theme, Even MS didn't use it in big products like office.
  - hasbot 10y ago
    I was a Swing developer (and loved it). Distributing Swing applications was never a major issue. The issue was that once the web hit, all my co-workers wanted to do web applications and convinced management web was where it was at.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      I have been both side of the fence, and when I have the freedom to choose which projects I apply for, projects with native UIs always win my heart. Personally I think it was a good move to go back into native UIs, right about the time people were starting to adopt Angular.
    - kpil 10y ago
      I specifically mean such a simple thing that they have used the .jar file extension both for executable jars and plain archives of files. If they had defined and promoted using .jxe as the file name extension for executable jars, there had been so much less confusion for the end users. (Just like they have done with ear, war, rar, etc) Also, the security considerations for java web start applications where rather strange, with ugly icons warning that you were running a java application etc, and much higher requirements for certificates and signed executable compared to just about everything else that you run on a computer. If they had re-imaged the framework to use a "installation" and providing automatic updates, just like normal applications, they could have lowered the bar a little.
smokeyj 10y ago
I think the react-native style architecture is the way forward. Mainly, thinking of the UI as a state-machine, and managing that state from a cross-platform runtime. The reality is every platform offers it's own encouraged design patterns and to create the best UX you need to maintain builds for each platform. In the next 5 years I don't see JS being replaced as that cross-platform runtime, but maybe a transpiled strongly typed language could become defacto.
thomastjeffery 10y ago
> if it's C++ it's QT which I need to doll out cash for. What? *EDIT: TIL, Qt is GPL, but offers a lesser licence for a price. For some reason, I didn't know that.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  Yeah, either you make your whole project GPL, or you buy a license so you can make your code proprietary/non-GPL.
  - thope 10y ago
    I thought LGPL meant if you link to (Qt) shared libraries, your project does not have to be LGPL ?
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Not all platforms allow for dynamic linking.
      - fnord123 10y ago
        Out of interest, which platforms that Qt targets, cannot have dynamic linking?
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Embedded devices, car infotainment systems, iOS (only dynamic frameworks from Apple are allowed).
        zanny 10y ago
        If you are targeting ios you are already paying Apple for a developer account, so paying Qt basically just doubles the license cost. Everything else is fairly exclusively corporate, where Qt licenses are a non-issue.
hullsean 10y ago
UI <> UX
- mack73 10y ago
  UX = UI + ? UX % UI = ? Is it a feeling or a thing perhaps?
  - sweetdreamerit 10y ago
    UX is about needs and goals of users. Is about research with the users, documentation, and then UI, and usability. UI is a part of UX. The most visible, not the most important.
    - amelius 10y ago
      So UX is really about product design?
      - bbcbasic 10y ago
        It is about the experience that the user has when using your product.
        martin-adams 10y ago
        and service
radley 10y ago
buzzzzzzzz No. Standardization exists. In two ways. Either your brand has a standardization or your platform does. Both work. It's like saying "we only need one coding language" when the reality is quite different. The disconnect is when brand isn't as complete as platform. Granted, platform has really only fallen into place in the last few years for iOS and Android. But does brand really need standardization initially? No. Because new paradigms need to stand out, either for UX or for impression. Otherwise AOL would be Snapchat, and it ain't. I respect that coders don't grok product design fully or in parts. But please understand, a great deal of the fun, the joy of tech, is in UI/UX evolution.
- hacker_9 10y ago
  I think we're arguing different things here. I fully agree that from a design perspective, things need to look distinctive (MacOS vs Windows vs Android etc). But implementation wise, the only actual difference is the images used and the colour of the gradient brushes. The only shake-up UI-wise in the last 10 years was the introduction of smart phones, which meant the need to design for smaller screens, as well as work with gesture commands. Instead of adding to what we had, we spawned Bootstrap on the Web, Android has it's own custom widgets, as does IOS and so does Windows Mobile. This is the divided state of technology we live in. A smaller screen somehow communicated to people we need four new GUI frameworks. This result stifles design, because if I design for IOS, I have to re-make everything again for android (including any custom controls, themes and so on). This has a cost, I can't support android UI controls if there doesn't exist the same on IOS, or other platforms. So people might choose to layer Xamarin on top, essentially throwing another framework into the mix. Why do we need so much abstraction? Recently I've switched my desktop project from WPF to Eto.Forms, so it can also target Mac and Linux. But the result is I now have no mouse drag functionality, because that isn't implemented yet. These are real limitations I face everyday. What exactly is the problem I wonder? We are literally talking about squares with text/images on here. It is mind boggling.
zer0tonin 10y ago
>if it's Java I have to use the outdated looking Swing Swing has been deprecated in favor of javaFx for a while now.
- on_and_off 10y ago
  and neither are used on Android
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Thanks Google.
  - fspacef 10y ago
    I get the /s but does anyone know why this is the case? Would make life a lot easier IMO.
    - on_and_off 10y ago
      oh, I did not mean to be sarcastic, just to point out that the state of these frameworks don't matter that much when they are not used on the main platform where people write UI in java. As for the lack of Swing/JavaFx on Android, I don't know if there is an official reason. It could be that Google only wanted to take the language and replicate everything else in order to avoid lawsuits. Another option (and they are not exclusive) is that you take a lot of cruft with you when you integrate something like Swing. Also, widgets like RecyclerView are really complex and do some deep optimizations like pre-binding views when the ui thread is idle. Having ownership of this part of the stack in order to make it evolve might have been considered worth the development cost.
beaconstudios 10y ago
I'm working on something much more elegant that takes designers above the focus of "HTML+CSS code" to an abstraction that makes sense. Similar to webflow, but allows you to continue to build out your app without having to drop down into text editing. A solution may be closer than you think ;)
- laktek 10y ago
  Interested hear more about your approach. I'm also trying to solve it with Pragma - https://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/ https://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/ Here's a little sneak peak: https://twitter.com/laktek/status/845815533450682370 https://twitter.com/laktek/status/845815533450682370
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    we should definitely have a chat - could you drop me an email? my address is in my profile. Thanks!
- TuringTest 10y ago
  Also interested. Do you have anything online to explain your base ideas?
  - beaconstudios 10y ago
    hey! I actually don't, but was planning to write up a blog post to explain the core concept behind Basis (the working project title). If you'd like, I can send you some info if you drop me an email :)
on_and_off 10y ago
Weird, I feel that UI tools are evolving very fast on Android. ConstraintLayout is pretty much AutoLayout without the bad parts, Databinding makes declarative style UI easy to write. It is not perfect by any means, but it is definitely improving quite steadily.
- taude 10y ago
  But these ideas of declarative frameworks supporting databinding are old, and have been implemented many times in many heterogeneous frameworks and platforms over the past two decades (probably longer, but I don't have context).
  - on_and_off 10y ago
    I don't have the context either, but according to the people behind databinding on Android, the previous databinding frameworks are usually pretty slow. They focused on making it run fast by making it compile to bytecode and make the same minimal calls you would make in java . It is true that it is not a new idea at all though
sprafa 10y ago
As a designer I can tell you right now = solve this problem and make lots of money as an engineer. If you need help, PM me, I will list you all the clusterfucks Adobe has made trying to solve this problem.
- lj3 10y ago
  Could you sent that list to me? :) You have no email in your profile, so maybe you could send it to me at the email in my profile?

pavlov 10y ago

Sun NeWS should have been that GUI standard, thirty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS There was a simplicity and purity in its approach to front-end interactivity and rendering that completely eludes the HTML+CSS+JS stack we're now stuck with. As the Wikipedia article states... "NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming; used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering; used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation." PostScript is basically a graphics-oriented Forth, so it's kind of a weird language to write directly... But it would have been great as a target for all sorts of interesting compilers and GUI tools.

TuringTest 10y ago
If you have compilers and GUI tools, how does it matter than the underlying layer is HTML+CSS+JSON? The designer shouldn't see it anyway. Now that we have a web-aware platform (which NeWS was not), nothing stops us to create good UI tools on top - yet it is happening very slowly.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  You mean by piling up <div>, <span>, CSS and JavaScript?
  - TuringTest 10y ago
    Yes, why not? That's no different than piling objects in a GUI widget library to build a tree structure for the layout of a window; except that it has a human-readable string representation.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      Sure there is, on a GUI toolkit I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn, while on a browser I need to hope it does the right thing. Also there is big performance impact, where piling up divs with CCS requires the right incantations, some browser version specific, for hardware acceleration to kick in. And in any case, it is impossible to fully replicate the UX of the host platform.
      - TuringTest 10y ago
        > I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn How well does that work when your GUI must be shown in arbitrary devices, with arbitrary screen sizes and arbitrary resolutions? And how well does it reflow when the user changes the viewport size? In any case, the original post to which I replied was comparing HTML5 to the NeWS platform, which provided a unified UI stack itself, so you wouldn't be able to match the native behavior following that approach either.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        That is what layout managers and logical pixels are for. You are missing the fact that NeWS offered this kind of control. "The NeWS Book" - https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863
samkellett 10y ago
you either die a hero or...
lj3 10y ago
Didn't NeWS have its own issues? It lost to X11 for a reason... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix2000/invitedtalks/gettys_html/img16.htm https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix2000/invitedtalks/...

seanmcdirmid 10y ago

What do UI dev tools have to do with UX design?

pavlov 10y ago
Designs have to be implemented in something. Currently UX designers are often like chefs who work by drawing pictures of food and writing down conceptual recipes. When they've created a beautiful menu this way, they're surprised to find out that their recipes can't actually be made using the cooking equipment available, and some of the ingredients don't even exist. You're not going to run a Michelin-rated restaurant like that. The industry desperately needs better UI development tools. To continue my (already strained) food analogy... Right now we are still in a "hunter-gatherer" stage where everyone does their own thing, teams are foraging and hunting, and occasionally they stumble on something great. Consistent UX will require an "agricultural revolution", a systematic production innovation that makes the essential pieces more understandable and repeatable in isolation.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  You really underestimate the amount of time it takes to practice and do adequate UX design; unless you spend 10,000 hours doing design, you are going to suck at it, and most of the jack of all trades designers devs I met have really been mediocre at both. "Designers should code" is as fallacious as "accountants should be lawyers". Specialization has been the direction of human civilization ever since the neolithic revolution allowed us to have enough food surplus to move into cities. Designers should definitely work with devs, if they are surprised their designs can't be implemented in the end, then that organization is REALLY dysfunctional. We definitely need better UI development tools, but this is orthogonal to UX design, much of which doesn't even involve the aesthetics of the UI anyways.
  - dpark 10y ago
    Designers must understand the media they work in. Design involves tradeoffs and accommodations for practical limits. A designer who doesn't understand the capabilities of the systems they design for is destined to produce bad designs. You can't understand the limits of CSS unless you can work with it. Imagine if Apple hardware designers depended on their manufacturers to tell them what's achievable with aluminum and glass. Instead Apple has a small manufacturing facility in their design studio so the designers can iterate rapidly and actually understand what is possible.

kuschku 10y ago

> if it's Java I have to use the outdated looking Swing Java has JavaFX now

kpil 10y ago
Swing is themeable, as has always been. With some minimal effort, it's possible to do a nice looking GUI with fonts that not look like vomit, etc. If Sun and Oracle had spent more than 5 minutes on packaging applications - why not in jxe-files for executable jars, as a simple start to avoid torturing your users - and using nice fonts - and why not a discrete and non-whiny non-bundlig autoupdating jre - they could actually have won on the desktop, when it still was relevant.
- flukus 10y ago
  The biggest problem was always that everyone hated the native win32 theme, Even MS didn't use it in big products like office.
- hasbot 10y ago
  I was a Swing developer (and loved it). Distributing Swing applications was never a major issue. The issue was that once the web hit, all my co-workers wanted to do web applications and convinced management web was where it was at.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    I have been both side of the fence, and when I have the freedom to choose which projects I apply for, projects with native UIs always win my heart. Personally I think it was a good move to go back into native UIs, right about the time people were starting to adopt Angular.
  - kpil 10y ago
    I specifically mean such a simple thing that they have used the .jar file extension both for executable jars and plain archives of files. If they had defined and promoted using .jxe as the file name extension for executable jars, there had been so much less confusion for the end users. (Just like they have done with ear, war, rar, etc) Also, the security considerations for java web start applications where rather strange, with ugly icons warning that you were running a java application etc, and much higher requirements for certificates and signed executable compared to just about everything else that you run on a computer. If they had re-imaged the framework to use a "installation" and providing automatic updates, just like normal applications, they could have lowered the bar a little.

smokeyj 10y ago

I think the react-native style architecture is the way forward. Mainly, thinking of the UI as a state-machine, and managing that state from a cross-platform runtime. The reality is every platform offers it's own encouraged design patterns and to create the best UX you need to maintain builds for each platform. In the next 5 years I don't see JS being replaced as that cross-platform runtime, but maybe a transpiled strongly typed language could become defacto.

thomastjeffery 10y ago

> if it's C++ it's QT which I need to doll out cash for. What? *EDIT: TIL, Qt is GPL, but offers a lesser licence for a price. For some reason, I didn't know that.

Arizhel 10y ago
Yeah, either you make your whole project GPL, or you buy a license so you can make your code proprietary/non-GPL.
- thope 10y ago
  I thought LGPL meant if you link to (Qt) shared libraries, your project does not have to be LGPL ?
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    Not all platforms allow for dynamic linking.
    - fnord123 10y ago
      Out of interest, which platforms that Qt targets, cannot have dynamic linking?
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Embedded devices, car infotainment systems, iOS (only dynamic frameworks from Apple are allowed).
        zanny 10y ago
        If you are targeting ios you are already paying Apple for a developer account, so paying Qt basically just doubles the license cost. Everything else is fairly exclusively corporate, where Qt licenses are a non-issue.

hullsean 10y ago

UI <> UX

mack73 10y ago
UX = UI + ? UX % UI = ? Is it a feeling or a thing perhaps?
- sweetdreamerit 10y ago
  UX is about needs and goals of users. Is about research with the users, documentation, and then UI, and usability. UI is a part of UX. The most visible, not the most important.
  - amelius 10y ago
    So UX is really about product design?
    - bbcbasic 10y ago
      It is about the experience that the user has when using your product.
      - martin-adams 10y ago
        and service

radley 10y ago

buzzzzzzzz No. Standardization exists. In two ways. Either your brand has a standardization or your platform does. Both work. It's like saying "we only need one coding language" when the reality is quite different. The disconnect is when brand isn't as complete as platform. Granted, platform has really only fallen into place in the last few years for iOS and Android. But does brand really need standardization initially? No. Because new paradigms need to stand out, either for UX or for impression. Otherwise AOL would be Snapchat, and it ain't. I respect that coders don't grok product design fully or in parts. But please understand, a great deal of the fun, the joy of tech, is in UI/UX evolution.

hacker_9 10y ago
I think we're arguing different things here. I fully agree that from a design perspective, things need to look distinctive (MacOS vs Windows vs Android etc). But implementation wise, the only actual difference is the images used and the colour of the gradient brushes. The only shake-up UI-wise in the last 10 years was the introduction of smart phones, which meant the need to design for smaller screens, as well as work with gesture commands. Instead of adding to what we had, we spawned Bootstrap on the Web, Android has it's own custom widgets, as does IOS and so does Windows Mobile. This is the divided state of technology we live in. A smaller screen somehow communicated to people we need four new GUI frameworks. This result stifles design, because if I design for IOS, I have to re-make everything again for android (including any custom controls, themes and so on). This has a cost, I can't support android UI controls if there doesn't exist the same on IOS, or other platforms. So people might choose to layer Xamarin on top, essentially throwing another framework into the mix. Why do we need so much abstraction? Recently I've switched my desktop project from WPF to Eto.Forms, so it can also target Mac and Linux. But the result is I now have no mouse drag functionality, because that isn't implemented yet. These are real limitations I face everyday. What exactly is the problem I wonder? We are literally talking about squares with text/images on here. It is mind boggling.

zer0tonin 10y ago

>if it's Java I have to use the outdated looking Swing Swing has been deprecated in favor of javaFx for a while now.

on_and_off 10y ago
and neither are used on Android
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Thanks Google.
- fspacef 10y ago
  I get the /s but does anyone know why this is the case? Would make life a lot easier IMO.
  - on_and_off 10y ago
    oh, I did not mean to be sarcastic, just to point out that the state of these frameworks don't matter that much when they are not used on the main platform where people write UI in java. As for the lack of Swing/JavaFx on Android, I don't know if there is an official reason. It could be that Google only wanted to take the language and replicate everything else in order to avoid lawsuits. Another option (and they are not exclusive) is that you take a lot of cruft with you when you integrate something like Swing. Also, widgets like RecyclerView are really complex and do some deep optimizations like pre-binding views when the ui thread is idle. Having ownership of this part of the stack in order to make it evolve might have been considered worth the development cost.

beaconstudios 10y ago

I'm working on something much more elegant that takes designers above the focus of "HTML+CSS code" to an abstraction that makes sense. Similar to webflow, but allows you to continue to build out your app without having to drop down into text editing. A solution may be closer than you think ;)

laktek 10y ago
Interested hear more about your approach. I'm also trying to solve it with Pragma - https://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/ https://www.laktek.com/2016/11/29/introducing-pragma/ Here's a little sneak peak: https://twitter.com/laktek/status/845815533450682370 https://twitter.com/laktek/status/845815533450682370
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  we should definitely have a chat - could you drop me an email? my address is in my profile. Thanks!
TuringTest 10y ago
Also interested. Do you have anything online to explain your base ideas?
- beaconstudios 10y ago
  hey! I actually don't, but was planning to write up a blog post to explain the core concept behind Basis (the working project title). If you'd like, I can send you some info if you drop me an email :)

on_and_off 10y ago

Weird, I feel that UI tools are evolving very fast on Android. ConstraintLayout is pretty much AutoLayout without the bad parts, Databinding makes declarative style UI easy to write. It is not perfect by any means, but it is definitely improving quite steadily.

taude 10y ago
But these ideas of declarative frameworks supporting databinding are old, and have been implemented many times in many heterogeneous frameworks and platforms over the past two decades (probably longer, but I don't have context).
- on_and_off 10y ago
  I don't have the context either, but according to the people behind databinding on Android, the previous databinding frameworks are usually pretty slow. They focused on making it run fast by making it compile to bytecode and make the same minimal calls you would make in java . It is true that it is not a new idea at all though

sprafa 10y ago

As a designer I can tell you right now = solve this problem and make lots of money as an engineer. If you need help, PM me, I will list you all the clusterfucks Adobe has made trying to solve this problem.

lj3 10y ago
Could you sent that list to me? :) You have no email in your profile, so maybe you could send it to me at the email in my profile?