22 ms·

Project Helix by Adobe

81 points by thefilmore 4y ago

cwdegidio 4y ago
Really curious how this ties into AEM. There is way too much marketing speak to parse out the relationship.
ecmascript 4y ago
In typical launch fashion, I read the site but still couldn't figure out what it was. Closed it pretty fast after that. I don't understand why people insist in not explaining what it is they're selling in a clear, simple manner.
- geraltofrivia 4y ago
  Some sell technology, some sell vision. The latter involves trusting them/submitting to their vision which would put off a lot of developers, I feel, but still create intrigue in managerial circles for them to get traction. I can’t remember which but there was a post about this, in the context of cloud service providers, a few weeks ago, on Hackernews Top. Will add if I can find it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- icemelt8 4y ago
  site builder from microsoft word
- albertopv 4y ago
  "What is Helix?" is the 4th question in FAQ page: https://www.hlx.live/docs/faq https://www.hlx.live/docs/faq There's really something wrong if you have to put a question to FAQ list to tell what your product is and that question is not the first one in the list.
  - TimSchumann 4y ago
    And even then… it really doesn’t answer what exactly ‘Helix’ is. A subscription service? An API? How do I interact with it? What’s the value add? What’s the use case? Why would I even want this thing?
Keyframe 4y ago
So, what is this even? Site doesn't tell much. From what I've gathered it's dreamweaver meets wix meets wordpress?
boboche 4y ago
Thanks Adobe, 3 minutes of my life wasted to figure out that you have converted the bounce rate, after 2 second page load hesitation, to epic ragequit after 3 minutes of having to go through developper documentation to figure out whats the actual, tangible and practical experience you are trying to sell.
AndrianV 4y ago
I've taken some time to try to comprehend what this tool is doing, but I still don't get it. Could someone kindly clarify? Similar websites include http://webflow.com http://webflow.com, https://siter.io https://siter.io, and http://www.squarespace.com http://www.squarespace.com. ? What exactly is this? I understand: Speed - ok, the same can do other platforms Migration - ok same can do othe rplatforms Create content in Microsoft Word or Google Docs - realy Adobe? Stop wasting developer time on framework churn - start wasting time on Helix.
- smelbe 4y ago
  website with Microsoft word is like websites with notion...
- jjbinx007 4y ago
  I wish pages like this were written by techies for techies rather than by a Marketing dept
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    It definitely feels like this was written for someone on an executive team, rather than the person who would actually use the product.
    - blooalien 4y ago
      That's because when you're Adobe, you sell to that person on the executive team who then mandates that everyone use it, whether they like it or not, because of how much money the company just paid Adobe for it.
  - 9dev 4y ago
    I think that’s pretty much the point - this is kind of a SSG generator that is usable by non-techies…
  - duxup 4y ago
    I wish there was always a mirrored nuts and bolts page for every marketing page.
andybak 4y ago
Helix is currently made available to select AEM Sites customers in the Helix VIP program. If you are interested in learning more about Helix, getting a personalized demo, and want to understand how Helix can make your site better, reach out to your Adobe account manager and mention the keyword #helix-chat. If you are impatient, a developer, or both, take a look at the Helix Developer Tutorial in the meantime.
- nix23 4y ago
  #helix-chat is that the keyword for the chatbot? I dont get it VIP??? Really?? AEM Sites? Whats that? Are you from marketing?
  - ImprobableTruth 4y ago
    I'm 99% sure they just copypasted from the 'Get Demo' page: https://www.hlx.live/business/demo https://www.hlx.live/business/demo
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - andybak 4y ago
    I don't understand it either. I was just pasting it to try and be helpful.
    - nix23 4y ago
      Ah ok, was thinking your the head of adobe marketing ;)
- TimSchumann 4y ago
  Nothing on the page linked even describes what ‘Helix’ is, much less why I would want it. That whole site seems like excessive marketing fluff written by someone who’s been living and breathing whatever this project is for years. Assume I have no idea what it does or why I’d want it. Use small words and no acronyms. Also, less words. Then, as simply as possible, tell me what it is and what it does for me from a technical standpoint. I’ll decide for myself if it’s useful.
AngusH 4y ago
So I've read through this, but the docs seem to assume you already know what it does. (Which I'm still not sure that I do) It seems to be a way of generating a website from a shared google drive or MS sharepoint setup. The google drive documents act as content which is mixed with templates to generate a website. But it doesn't seem to be static site generator, more like wordpress with google drive (or sharepoint) as the content database? But then it also talks about the helix team doing work for you? So it's maybe more of a service to create websites than a technology stack? It seems like there are some interesting ideas, but it also feels like there should be more explanation.
bsenftner 4y ago
Friend of mine tells me a headhunter perked up when he mentioned he used this for his last project, and told him crazy salaries if he wanted a job as the Helix specialist at several corporations. Says he's investigating.
- gertrunde 4y ago
  Perhaps the number of people who work with it is even less than the number of people who know what it is? ;)
- cwdegidio 4y ago
  Sounds like people with Adobe Experience Manager experience as well. I think AEM salaries are high because there is no way to learn it on your own (from my experience). You can only learn it on the job because there is no “developer version” that I know of.
  - kinglion75 4y ago
    I understand your point, but I don't think is 100% accurate. There are tons of tutorials on adobe.com and you can at least study some open source projects (such as Adobe core component) to understand how it works. If you mean there is no downloadable free version of AEM you are definitely right, but still some of the most important stuff can be learned by using the open source stack on which AEM is built, like Apache Felix, Apache OAK and Apache Sling. And I guess even in the current market if you have java skills and you know something about Felix, OAK and Sling it could be pretty easy to get a good job contract (maybe not at the same salary, but just with one year experience you can get a substantial increase).
madspindel 4y ago
Pricing?
monkey_monkey 4y ago
I'm trying to understand the thought process that would lead someone to decide that this wierd and entirely proprietary solution is the best way to build a website for their organisation.
- skonteam 4y ago
  Adobe money...
winkelwagen 4y ago
Great, Google docs and share point, does that mean we have an extra dependency on Microsoft and Google not to break any of their apis? Managing formatting straight from a document sounds like a recipe for disaster if you don’t own the whole stack. I really wonder how a company like adobe is managed.I’m sure they have some great selling products with great margins. But the creative industry is beginning to hate their products more and more. Yes they might have a a good unmatched creative suite as a whole, but if professionals can’t do their work anymore because of serious deteriorating of quality between versions. Was following a Twitter rant from Ashe thorp a while ago, he isn’t one to whine about anything quickly, but that guy is so well connected and in think his network pretty much operates is anything cutting edge design wise, avatar, Microsoft film etc. At this point I chose for an alternative to adobe products they might be a better deal, but I wouldn’t trust your paying my mortgage on anything in adobe creative suite. I’d rather invest upfront in something that I know will get better over time instead of worse.
hansword 4y ago
Is this the most current Adobe Dreamweaver? As an online service? I think it's hilarious there are 20 comments here, and all are voicing confusion at what the product is and does?
dewey 4y ago
It seems to be a no-code website builder for people who are already in the Adobe ecosystem. For one-off landing pages or websites an agency might build for projects this is probably a good fit if they are already all-in on Adobe. The hate here in the comments seem to be around developers thinking they are the target group of this product when they are clearly not.
- nfreising 4y ago
  I agree that is clearly for non-developers that are in the Adobe ecosystem, however to me it's still unclear why they decided on this system. I thought about simple landing pages as well, but they state this in the faqs: "You can use Helix for small sites because it is very easy to get started, but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic." Which confuses me a bit about which kind of pages they intended to be created in Helix. They also talk about Stripe integration for e-commerce shops.
  - dewey 4y ago
    > but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic. I could see it being used for short-lived high traffic sites like festivals, concerts, movie landing pages and other typical agency-created sites. These might have multiple authors to public posts, FAQ items and some small e-commerce components.
mikl 4y ago
When you see the words “by Adobe” and loose all interest instantly. Let me guess, whatever it is requires a Creative Cloud subscription? I do remember when I was excited about Adobe stuff. 20 years ago. Since then, their virus-like “install a million things just to run Photoshop” and awful licensing practises have put them next to Oracle in the “avoid at all cost” category.
- jb1991 4y ago
  Agreed, I have a machine for which it is impossible to uninstall CC completely. I'd have to bust out a full drive wipe and OS reinstall just to get rid of an application. It's silly that tools for artists would need to hook so deeply into the OS and have no reasonable way to get rid of them.
  - alexalx666 4y ago
    well that's rich, that's exactly what I noticed on my GF MacBook Pro, always was putting off until later, good to know that it does not makes sense to spend time on this. Would love to find responsible and install My programs
    - fbanon 4y ago
      You can get unCC'd versions of Adobe tools if you know where to look.
      - detritus 4y ago
        ...please, do go on?
        sofixa 4y ago
        They mean piracy.
        detritus 4y ago
fxtentacle 4y ago
"https://www.hlx.live/business/experience-effectiveness https://www.hlx.live/business/experience-effectiveness" looks to me like they didn't intend to publish this yet. I mean the formatting is off and they have 3 feature boxes without icons.. looks really unfinished to me.
- vnm 4y ago
  Yep https://www.hlx.live/robots.txt https://www.hlx.live/robots.txt
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
vnm 4y ago
How is it ok for a serious company to claim that their solution is the "fastest on the web", as if nobody else can hit the same performance marks? And what's with the code? Why not use TypeScript, at least? https://github.com/adobe/helix-website/blob/main/tools/sidekick/module.js https://github.com/adobe/helix-website/blob/main/tools/sidek...
nfreising 4y ago
So I spent a while on their page, https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan seems to have the best explanation how Adobe thinks you should use their product. However I still don't really see the use case: > Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say. So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?). However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.
- pornel 4y ago
  This is the Dropbox for your rsync. The hard part in maintaining a website by a team of non-geeks is not a Markdown renderer, but the fact that people have their own preferred tools and workflows, and aren't keen on learning yet another one. All the extra export/import/sync steps are a pain for them, and cause chaos when collaborating. You update the Markdown version, someone else changes the Word version instead, a third person hates Word, and someone else puts notes on GitHub, and now you need to train half a dozen people how to clone a repo and how to fix a detached head.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    Markdown though looks like a really constraining medium.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    Why would you want there to be a separate upload and file sync step instead of simply editing in the browser?
anodari 4y ago
Is an Wix alternative?
- whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  Judging from the domain, I feel that's what they're hoping. I imagine someone on the team felt very strongly Wix might still have the advantage if they can't secure a 3 letter domain name.
wellthisisgreat 4y ago
God, is there any hope Creative Cloud would go away and the normal Adobe would come back?
megax 4y ago
This is an interesting move by Adobe, which appears like the first step towards reasserting themselves in a hot WYSISWG CMS authoring market that’s currently dominated by folks like Webflow. What makes it even more interesting is that their enterprise CMS offering AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) will certainly get a leg up as it relates to ease/flexibility, further separating them from the market competition. For the folks who are unaware, AEM is a tier 1 CMS powering many top-shelf enterprise websites[1], competing with products Contentful, Contentstack, Salesforce, etc. I’m personally not a huge fan of their solution but they tick many of the boxes clients typically ask for. [1] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Adobe-Experience-Manager https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Adobe-Experience-Manager It’ll be interesting to see how this develops…
- wolfhumble 4y ago
  I remember I heard about Adobe moving into the CMS business in 1998 or 1999. I'm glad they finally got around doing it . . . ;-)
  - kinglion75 4y ago
    Adobe entered the CMS business long time ago, currently it's for sure the leader in this category, leveraging the acquisition of Day Software in 2010.
    - finfinfin 4y ago
      Which category? Adobe is not even close to being the leader in the CMS category. WP, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla!, Shopify… how does Adobe fit here?
      - kinglion75 4y ago
        You can look at the Forrester and Gartner of this world, but for a less subjective and more objective metric you can look at the statistics related to the CMS used by high traffic website [0]. I won't even say Wix, Squarespace, Joomla (is this still a thing?) or Shopify are in the same category of AEM, they missed a lot of the qualification criteria to be considered an enterprise level CMS. [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-adobeexperiencemanager https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-adobeexperiencem...
daviddever23box 4y ago
Does anyone else find it interesting that the architectural diagram (https://github.com/adobe/helix-home/blob/main/docs/Helix%20Architecture.graffle https://github.com/adobe/helix-home/blob/main/docs/Helix%20A...) is in an OmniGraffle file format?
tambourine_man 4y ago
https://www.hlx.live/business/developer-productivity https://www.hlx.live/business/developer-productivity “Helix has reinvigorated my passion for coding. The simplicity of building something great and seeing it used by our visitors the next day is a joy like no other. Kenny” Who's Kenny? Has no one reviewed this page? I hope that's not a signal of how important this project really is to Adobe.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  This link now redirects to the home page. Good for them. It's on Wayback Machine, but the indexing breaks the page. One must inspect the source code. https://web.archive.org/web/20220704092727/https://www.hlx.live/business/developer-productivity https://web.archive.org/web/20220704092727/https://www.hlx.l...
ksec 4y ago
For a moment I thought Adobe brought Real Media [1]. Which despite the hatred against it, is a surprisingly good video codec. [1] https://realnetworks.com/products-services/helix https://realnetworks.com/products-services/helix
greencore 4y ago
I will never trust Adobe on their development platforms after they were lying to developers about bright Flash future while silently killing it and wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse.
- willio58 4y ago
  To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept. Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    > To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful. This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      > Open source the Flash Player code This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch). All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so. That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marbletiles 4y ago
Easy is hard. That is, to make something easy for users, you have to work hard to build great tools for them. Helix appears to be punting on that. Examples: > Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown is a lossy format. Sometimes that's good (it'll strip unwanted Word formatting), but there are vital things that get lost too. (The easiest to grasp are the internationalisation issues, like mixing right-to-left and left-to-right scripts in the same paragraph, or multiple language spans.) > To add metadata to your page, create a table like this at the end of the document And how is this better than an actual tool, with actual field validation, helpful UX, etc? It's not: it's undiscoverable magic boxes with inexplicable (to the user) side-effects that oblige users to remember secret incantations (or sticky them to their screens) and hope everything works out all right. This is the opposite of "intuitive and fast". Which anybody familiar with AEM won't be surprised by.
cush 4y ago
According to their FAQ https://pages.adobe.com/ https://pages.adobe.com/ redirects to some demo pages. "Is Helix a good solution for landing pages? https://pages.adobe.com https://pages.adobe.com is a great example how Adobe uses Helix to manage hundreds of landing pages, owned by dozens of independent teams."
skilled 4y ago
It's very rare I get frustrated with landing pages, but holy guacamole... is it so hard to link to demo websites? Is it so hard to provide a quick demo of a landing page? What are those lousy screenshots on the "Built with Helix" section? The only one I could make out was blog.adobe.com - and by the looks of it that was no small feat to make such a conversion happen. Very unhappy, even more so seeing Adobe trying to get away with a barebones product explanation. EDIT: Ok, after going through the comments in this thread - it looks like Adobe doesn't even intend to have this site published yet. That's my impression of it also.
interestica 4y ago
Brackets was actually my favourite code editor on Mac and it was discontinued by Adobe. It left a bad taste in my mouth. It seems that they are trying to replace it with "Phoenix" which is entirely web-based and kinda seems to defeat the purpose. It looks like brackets may have some others keeping it alive. The project helix page comes off quite hilarious on mobile for me. "these aren't the droids you're looking for" followed closely by an uncaptioned screenshot and then a long scroll of a blank orange canvas only to be greeted at the bottom with "You can go about your business."
Paul_S 4y ago
I just get a blank page on firefox.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Hope none of the hundreds I pay Adobe every year went to funding this project.
tronster 4y ago
Another product called "Helix"? https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core
status200 4y ago
Sure, i'll use this tool and then in a few months Adobe will want a monthly subscription fee or they break all my links or something. Such a low effort site as well, ugly design and i found at least a couple dead links that redirect back to the homepage (e.g. https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan)
fleddr 4y ago
Somebody else already mentioned it, but I want to highlight Adobe's other CMS product: Adobe Experience Manager. It is a bizarre product in the sense that the typical web developer has never heard of it, whilst it's one of the most powerful (and complex) CMS systems out there. Given its license costs, you'll only find it in large companies. It's a stunningly powerful but also complicated platform. Still, it's a CMS on steroids with some truly eye-opening ideas.
- user_named 4y ago
  I believe Helix is launched for companies using AEM as their CMS, to speed up launch of simpler pages. It takes months to build a page in a big Corp using AEM.

81 points by thefilmore 4y ago

Really curious how this ties into AEM. There is way too much marketing speak to parse out the relationship.

In typical launch fashion, I read the site but still couldn't figure out what it was. Closed it pretty fast after that. I don't understand why people insist in not explaining what it is they're selling in a clear, simple manner.

geraltofrivia 4y ago
Some sell technology, some sell vision. The latter involves trusting them/submitting to their vision which would put off a lot of developers, I feel, but still create intrigue in managerial circles for them to get traction. I can’t remember which but there was a post about this, in the context of cloud service providers, a few weeks ago, on Hackernews Top. Will add if I can find it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
icemelt8 4y ago
site builder from microsoft word
albertopv 4y ago
"What is Helix?" is the 4th question in FAQ page: https://www.hlx.live/docs/faq https://www.hlx.live/docs/faq There's really something wrong if you have to put a question to FAQ list to tell what your product is and that question is not the first one in the list.
- TimSchumann 4y ago
  And even then… it really doesn’t answer what exactly ‘Helix’ is. A subscription service? An API? How do I interact with it? What’s the value add? What’s the use case? Why would I even want this thing?

Keyframe 4y ago

So, what is this even? Site doesn't tell much. From what I've gathered it's dreamweaver meets wix meets wordpress?

boboche 4y ago

Thanks Adobe, 3 minutes of my life wasted to figure out that you have converted the bounce rate, after 2 second page load hesitation, to epic ragequit after 3 minutes of having to go through developper documentation to figure out whats the actual, tangible and practical experience you are trying to sell.

AndrianV 4y ago

I've taken some time to try to comprehend what this tool is doing, but I still don't get it. Could someone kindly clarify? Similar websites include http://webflow.com http://webflow.com, https://siter.io https://siter.io, and http://www.squarespace.com http://www.squarespace.com. ? What exactly is this? I understand: Speed - ok, the same can do other platforms Migration - ok same can do othe rplatforms Create content in Microsoft Word or Google Docs - realy Adobe? Stop wasting developer time on framework churn - start wasting time on Helix.

smelbe 4y ago
website with Microsoft word is like websites with notion...
jjbinx007 4y ago
I wish pages like this were written by techies for techies rather than by a Marketing dept
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  It definitely feels like this was written for someone on an executive team, rather than the person who would actually use the product.
  - blooalien 4y ago
    That's because when you're Adobe, you sell to that person on the executive team who then mandates that everyone use it, whether they like it or not, because of how much money the company just paid Adobe for it.
- 9dev 4y ago
  I think that’s pretty much the point - this is kind of a SSG generator that is usable by non-techies…
- duxup 4y ago
  I wish there was always a mirrored nuts and bolts page for every marketing page.

andybak 4y ago

Helix is currently made available to select AEM Sites customers in the Helix VIP program. If you are interested in learning more about Helix, getting a personalized demo, and want to understand how Helix can make your site better, reach out to your Adobe account manager and mention the keyword #helix-chat. If you are impatient, a developer, or both, take a look at the Helix Developer Tutorial in the meantime.

nix23 4y ago
#helix-chat is that the keyword for the chatbot? I dont get it VIP??? Really?? AEM Sites? Whats that? Are you from marketing?
- ImprobableTruth 4y ago
  I'm 99% sure they just copypasted from the 'Get Demo' page: https://www.hlx.live/business/demo https://www.hlx.live/business/demo
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- andybak 4y ago
  I don't understand it either. I was just pasting it to try and be helpful.
  - nix23 4y ago
    Ah ok, was thinking your the head of adobe marketing ;)
TimSchumann 4y ago
Nothing on the page linked even describes what ‘Helix’ is, much less why I would want it. That whole site seems like excessive marketing fluff written by someone who’s been living and breathing whatever this project is for years. Assume I have no idea what it does or why I’d want it. Use small words and no acronyms. Also, less words. Then, as simply as possible, tell me what it is and what it does for me from a technical standpoint. I’ll decide for myself if it’s useful.

AngusH 4y ago

So I've read through this, but the docs seem to assume you already know what it does. (Which I'm still not sure that I do) It seems to be a way of generating a website from a shared google drive or MS sharepoint setup. The google drive documents act as content which is mixed with templates to generate a website. But it doesn't seem to be static site generator, more like wordpress with google drive (or sharepoint) as the content database? But then it also talks about the helix team doing work for you? So it's maybe more of a service to create websites than a technology stack? It seems like there are some interesting ideas, but it also feels like there should be more explanation.

bsenftner 4y ago

Friend of mine tells me a headhunter perked up when he mentioned he used this for his last project, and told him crazy salaries if he wanted a job as the Helix specialist at several corporations. Says he's investigating.

gertrunde 4y ago
Perhaps the number of people who work with it is even less than the number of people who know what it is? ;)
cwdegidio 4y ago
Sounds like people with Adobe Experience Manager experience as well. I think AEM salaries are high because there is no way to learn it on your own (from my experience). You can only learn it on the job because there is no “developer version” that I know of.
- kinglion75 4y ago
  I understand your point, but I don't think is 100% accurate. There are tons of tutorials on adobe.com and you can at least study some open source projects (such as Adobe core component) to understand how it works. If you mean there is no downloadable free version of AEM you are definitely right, but still some of the most important stuff can be learned by using the open source stack on which AEM is built, like Apache Felix, Apache OAK and Apache Sling. And I guess even in the current market if you have java skills and you know something about Felix, OAK and Sling it could be pretty easy to get a good job contract (maybe not at the same salary, but just with one year experience you can get a substantial increase).

madspindel 4y ago

Pricing?

monkey_monkey 4y ago

I'm trying to understand the thought process that would lead someone to decide that this wierd and entirely proprietary solution is the best way to build a website for their organisation.

skonteam 4y ago
Adobe money...

winkelwagen 4y ago

Great, Google docs and share point, does that mean we have an extra dependency on Microsoft and Google not to break any of their apis? Managing formatting straight from a document sounds like a recipe for disaster if you don’t own the whole stack. I really wonder how a company like adobe is managed.I’m sure they have some great selling products with great margins. But the creative industry is beginning to hate their products more and more. Yes they might have a a good unmatched creative suite as a whole, but if professionals can’t do their work anymore because of serious deteriorating of quality between versions. Was following a Twitter rant from Ashe thorp a while ago, he isn’t one to whine about anything quickly, but that guy is so well connected and in think his network pretty much operates is anything cutting edge design wise, avatar, Microsoft film etc. At this point I chose for an alternative to adobe products they might be a better deal, but I wouldn’t trust your paying my mortgage on anything in adobe creative suite. I’d rather invest upfront in something that I know will get better over time instead of worse.

hansword 4y ago

Is this the most current Adobe Dreamweaver? As an online service? I think it's hilarious there are 20 comments here, and all are voicing confusion at what the product is and does?

dewey 4y ago

It seems to be a no-code website builder for people who are already in the Adobe ecosystem. For one-off landing pages or websites an agency might build for projects this is probably a good fit if they are already all-in on Adobe. The hate here in the comments seem to be around developers thinking they are the target group of this product when they are clearly not.

nfreising 4y ago
I agree that is clearly for non-developers that are in the Adobe ecosystem, however to me it's still unclear why they decided on this system. I thought about simple landing pages as well, but they state this in the faqs: "You can use Helix for small sites because it is very easy to get started, but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic." Which confuses me a bit about which kind of pages they intended to be created in Helix. They also talk about Stripe integration for e-commerce shops.
- dewey 4y ago
  > but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic. I could see it being used for short-lived high traffic sites like festivals, concerts, movie landing pages and other typical agency-created sites. These might have multiple authors to public posts, FAQ items and some small e-commerce components.

mikl 4y ago

When you see the words “by Adobe” and loose all interest instantly. Let me guess, whatever it is requires a Creative Cloud subscription? I do remember when I was excited about Adobe stuff. 20 years ago. Since then, their virus-like “install a million things just to run Photoshop” and awful licensing practises have put them next to Oracle in the “avoid at all cost” category.

jb1991 4y ago
Agreed, I have a machine for which it is impossible to uninstall CC completely. I'd have to bust out a full drive wipe and OS reinstall just to get rid of an application. It's silly that tools for artists would need to hook so deeply into the OS and have no reasonable way to get rid of them.
- alexalx666 4y ago
  well that's rich, that's exactly what I noticed on my GF MacBook Pro, always was putting off until later, good to know that it does not makes sense to spend time on this. Would love to find responsible and install My programs
  - fbanon 4y ago
    You can get unCC'd versions of Adobe tools if you know where to look.
    - detritus 4y ago
      ...please, do go on?
      - sofixa 4y ago
        They mean piracy.
        detritus 4y ago

fxtentacle 4y ago

"https://www.hlx.live/business/experience-effectiveness https://www.hlx.live/business/experience-effectiveness" looks to me like they didn't intend to publish this yet. I mean the formatting is off and they have 3 feature boxes without icons.. looks really unfinished to me.

vnm 4y ago
Yep https://www.hlx.live/robots.txt https://www.hlx.live/robots.txt
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

vnm 4y ago

How is it ok for a serious company to claim that their solution is the "fastest on the web", as if nobody else can hit the same performance marks? And what's with the code? Why not use TypeScript, at least? https://github.com/adobe/helix-website/blob/main/tools/sidekick/module.js https://github.com/adobe/helix-website/blob/main/tools/sidek...

nfreising 4y ago

So I spent a while on their page, https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan seems to have the best explanation how Adobe thinks you should use their product. However I still don't really see the use case: > Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say. So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?). However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.

pornel 4y ago
This is the Dropbox for your rsync. The hard part in maintaining a website by a team of non-geeks is not a Markdown renderer, but the fact that people have their own preferred tools and workflows, and aren't keen on learning yet another one. All the extra export/import/sync steps are a pain for them, and cause chaos when collaborating. You update the Markdown version, someone else changes the Word version instead, a third person hates Word, and someone else puts notes on GitHub, and now you need to train half a dozen people how to clone a repo and how to fix a detached head.
- nine_k 4y ago
  Markdown though looks like a really constraining medium.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  Why would you want there to be a separate upload and file sync step instead of simply editing in the browser?

anodari 4y ago

Is an Wix alternative?

whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Judging from the domain, I feel that's what they're hoping. I imagine someone on the team felt very strongly Wix might still have the advantage if they can't secure a 3 letter domain name.

wellthisisgreat 4y ago

God, is there any hope Creative Cloud would go away and the normal Adobe would come back?

megax 4y ago

This is an interesting move by Adobe, which appears like the first step towards reasserting themselves in a hot WYSISWG CMS authoring market that’s currently dominated by folks like Webflow. What makes it even more interesting is that their enterprise CMS offering AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) will certainly get a leg up as it relates to ease/flexibility, further separating them from the market competition. For the folks who are unaware, AEM is a tier 1 CMS powering many top-shelf enterprise websites[1], competing with products Contentful, Contentstack, Salesforce, etc. I’m personally not a huge fan of their solution but they tick many of the boxes clients typically ask for. [1] https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Adobe-Experience-Manager https://trends.builtwith.com/cms/Adobe-Experience-Manager It’ll be interesting to see how this develops…

wolfhumble 4y ago
I remember I heard about Adobe moving into the CMS business in 1998 or 1999. I'm glad they finally got around doing it . . . ;-)
- kinglion75 4y ago
  Adobe entered the CMS business long time ago, currently it's for sure the leader in this category, leveraging the acquisition of Day Software in 2010.
  - finfinfin 4y ago
    Which category? Adobe is not even close to being the leader in the CMS category. WP, Wix, Squarespace, Joomla!, Shopify… how does Adobe fit here?
    - kinglion75 4y ago
      You can look at the Forrester and Gartner of this world, but for a less subjective and more objective metric you can look at the statistics related to the CMS used by high traffic website [0]. I won't even say Wix, Squarespace, Joomla (is this still a thing?) or Shopify are in the same category of AEM, they missed a lot of the qualification criteria to be considered an enterprise level CMS. [0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-adobeexperiencemanager https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/cm-adobeexperiencem...

daviddever23box 4y ago

Does anyone else find it interesting that the architectural diagram (https://github.com/adobe/helix-home/blob/main/docs/Helix%20Architecture.graffle https://github.com/adobe/helix-home/blob/main/docs/Helix%20A...) is in an OmniGraffle file format?

tambourine_man 4y ago

https://www.hlx.live/business/developer-productivity https://www.hlx.live/business/developer-productivity “Helix has reinvigorated my passion for coding. The simplicity of building something great and seeing it used by our visitors the next day is a joy like no other. Kenny” Who's Kenny? Has no one reviewed this page? I hope that's not a signal of how important this project really is to Adobe.

tambourine_man 4y ago
This link now redirects to the home page. Good for them. It's on Wayback Machine, but the indexing breaks the page. One must inspect the source code. https://web.archive.org/web/20220704092727/https://www.hlx.live/business/developer-productivity https://web.archive.org/web/20220704092727/https://www.hlx.l...

ksec 4y ago

For a moment I thought Adobe brought Real Media [1]. Which despite the hatred against it, is a surprisingly good video codec. [1] https://realnetworks.com/products-services/helix https://realnetworks.com/products-services/helix

greencore 4y ago

I will never trust Adobe on their development platforms after they were lying to developers about bright Flash future while silently killing it and wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse.

willio58 4y ago
To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept. Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  > To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful. This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    > Open source the Flash Player code This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch). All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so. That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marbletiles 4y ago

Easy is hard. That is, to make something easy for users, you have to work hard to build great tools for them. Helix appears to be punting on that. Examples: > Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown is a lossy format. Sometimes that's good (it'll strip unwanted Word formatting), but there are vital things that get lost too. (The easiest to grasp are the internationalisation issues, like mixing right-to-left and left-to-right scripts in the same paragraph, or multiple language spans.) > To add metadata to your page, create a table like this at the end of the document And how is this better than an actual tool, with actual field validation, helpful UX, etc? It's not: it's undiscoverable magic boxes with inexplicable (to the user) side-effects that oblige users to remember secret incantations (or sticky them to their screens) and hope everything works out all right. This is the opposite of "intuitive and fast". Which anybody familiar with AEM won't be surprised by.

cush 4y ago

According to their FAQ https://pages.adobe.com/ https://pages.adobe.com/ redirects to some demo pages. "Is Helix a good solution for landing pages? https://pages.adobe.com https://pages.adobe.com is a great example how Adobe uses Helix to manage hundreds of landing pages, owned by dozens of independent teams."

skilled 4y ago

It's very rare I get frustrated with landing pages, but holy guacamole... is it so hard to link to demo websites? Is it so hard to provide a quick demo of a landing page? What are those lousy screenshots on the "Built with Helix" section? The only one I could make out was blog.adobe.com - and by the looks of it that was no small feat to make such a conversion happen. Very unhappy, even more so seeing Adobe trying to get away with a barebones product explanation. EDIT: Ok, after going through the comments in this thread - it looks like Adobe doesn't even intend to have this site published yet. That's my impression of it also.

interestica 4y ago

Brackets was actually my favourite code editor on Mac and it was discontinued by Adobe. It left a bad taste in my mouth. It seems that they are trying to replace it with "Phoenix" which is entirely web-based and kinda seems to defeat the purpose. It looks like brackets may have some others keeping it alive. The project helix page comes off quite hilarious on mobile for me. "these aren't the droids you're looking for" followed closely by an uncaptioned screenshot and then a long scroll of a blank orange canvas only to be greeted at the bottom with "You can go about your business."

Paul_S 4y ago

I just get a blank page on firefox.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

Hope none of the hundreds I pay Adobe every year went to funding this project.

tronster 4y ago

Another product called "Helix"? https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core

status200 4y ago

Sure, i'll use this tool and then in a few months Adobe will want a monthly subscription fee or they break all my links or something. Such a low effort site as well, ugly design and i found at least a couple dead links that redirect back to the homepage (e.g. https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan)

fleddr 4y ago

Somebody else already mentioned it, but I want to highlight Adobe's other CMS product: Adobe Experience Manager. It is a bizarre product in the sense that the typical web developer has never heard of it, whilst it's one of the most powerful (and complex) CMS systems out there. Given its license costs, you'll only find it in large companies. It's a stunningly powerful but also complicated platform. Still, it's a CMS on steroids with some truly eye-opening ideas.

user_named 4y ago
I believe Helix is launched for companies using AEM as their CMS, to speed up launch of simpler pages. It takes months to build a page in a big Corp using AEM.