4 ms·
People often make this complaint with flash rather than with VB (although VB is also a nice example - thank you). The web platform aims to solve a _very broad_
by inglor 9y ago
People often make this complaint with flash rather than with VB (although VB is also a nice example - thank you).
The web platform aims to solve a _very broad_ problem. I don't know if you've used VB for big projects - but as someone with lots of nostalgia for VB6 (and winforms) it got very painful around the 20K LoC mark and didn't really support complex UIs in a very efficient way.
There certainly _are_ visual builders for web design (literally hundreds - google "React UI builder" or "Angular UI builder" for some examples). They just haven't received adoption. I think it's because people always get weird UI requirements and the tools break. How many UI designers worked with you when you built UIs with VB? For me that number was 0.
In general, UI is designed today in sketch/photoshop and then a tool like Zeplin is used to export the design's properties to code automatically.
- kbuchanan 9y agoYou're absolutely right: the web and its breadth of tooling solves A LOT more problems than VB or Flash could ever dream of.
- narag 9y agoI disagree. I don't know about Flash and I just assume that VB was more or less like an underpowered Delphi. The problem was not tooling at all... at least with Delphi, please see my other comment.
- goatlover 9y agoBut the web lacks a standard layout and design tooling that all these other platforms have had for a long time.
- deckard1 9y ago> people always get weird UI requirements I would say this is dancing around the issue. The fact is, you need a unique UX, or your app will lose its identity in a sea of competitors. You can't build something interesting by using a library of off-the-shelf sameness. Tools like VB and UI builders really shine with internal, corporate-only apps that put functionality way ahead of form. You can crank out requirements all day long, and the internal users really don't care much. It's just a tool to get their job done.
- marssaxman 9y agoAs a user, internal or not, I strongly wish that your app WOULD lose its identity. I don't want your app to have a separate identity; I want it to look and feel exactly like everything else I already know how to use, so I don't have to waste any additional time getting familiar with it. I don't want "something interesting", I want "a tool to get my job done", and the more you try to push a brand and make your app distinctive, the harder it is for me to plow past all that and get to what I really want to do.