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I tried using PageDraw for LetsBet when we ported our ClojureScript + React codebase to desktop with Electron. All of our designs are done in Figma, by our desi
by Jeaye 8y ago
I tried using PageDraw for LetsBet when we ported our ClojureScript + React codebase to desktop with Electron. All of our designs are done in Figma, by our designer, so we were trying to rely on the Figma project importer. Unfortunately, the importer was very unreliable, bringing in something that looked like a Vangough-like representation of what had been designed. Basically, our designer would have to use Pagedraw's editor to build the UI, but it simply lacked the feature set compared to PageDraw.
Integrating with ClojureScript ended up working, but it was a real pain. That's less on them than us though, so I won't fault them for not supporting every language which compiles to JS.
However, PageDraw never worked in Firefox. Perhaps now that it's going open source, this can be prioritized, but it was a serious issue for me, since don't use anything else. Just for PageDraw, I installed Chromium; they had a desktop app, but it was much less stable than the site, in my experience.
PageDraw had some annoying bugs, as well. Invisible components in Figma would be imported as visible, but I could work around that. However, there were codegen issues with multi-states which required me to go into the code and make tweaks. I had reached out to Gabriel several times with reproduction cases and debug info, but never heard back.
Aside from that, a slew of UX issues (copied right from my notes):
* Add a "Select children" button when only one item is selected; it shows up when multiple are selected, but not one
* Add a "Delete branch" button which deletes the selected and all children
* Allow searching for component within project
* Allow viewing of an image's source, if it's imported from Figma
* Allow inter-project component references, so I can not have every screen in the same project
* Allow importing of path-based icons with overlaps from Figma; currently, they're all broken
* Allow selecting multiple items with overlapping properties and setting them all at once
I love the idea of PageDraw and I wanted so badly for it to help us with our app development and converting Figma designs to React code which we can use from ClojureScript. Alas, the experience was viable for neither me nor my designer.
Thanks for trying, PageDraw devs, and thanks even more for open sourcing your work as part of this shut down. Best of luck in your future endeavors.