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Create JavaScript, CSS Interactions With Zero Lines of Code
- aps-sids 13y agoIs this different from Google Web Designer?
- ralfn 13y ago- Google Web Designer is a desktop application and you can't run it on linux. - Google Web Designer is free to use, this costs money structurally. - This offers integrated hosting, Google Web Designer does not. So, for creative types, its easier to share a design and deploy it. (although it seems export is available) - Google Web Designer seems focused on (fixed-size) ads (for mobile), where this is focused on creating responsive animated websites.
- octatone2 13y agoInline all the styles!
- CoryG89 13y agoLack of scroll animation support for touch devices seems like a deal breaker, no?
- callmevlad 13y agoMost touch devices have terribly slow performance for scroll-based triggers, so we decided to disable them to improve user experience for now. We're working on ways to optimize performance, and will allow a way to manually enable the scroll trigger if you really want to enable it.
- Cowicide 13y agoI guess this gets to the crux of the problem with these sort of things where people make websites based on templates and WYSIWYG tools without much (or any) coding knowledge. If these codeless "devs" get hired by someone to make their website and the customer wants certain things to work, the non-coding "developer" will be at the whim of the capabilities of the WYSIWYG tool they use, not their own coding capabilities. I suppose as long as the codeless "dev" is upfront with their clients that they don't know code and are upfront that they have a limited offering, it's ethical. As long as the client knows that certain customizations may or may not be available to them and it also reflects the cost of the "development". Don't get me wrong, I think WYSIWYG apps are great in principle, but in practice I think it's pretty limited on where they should be applied.
- coderzach 13y agoNo, the limiting factor in this case is the mobile browser itself not actually not firing enough scroll/touch events. It's literally not possible to do with native scrolling. That said, I'm not sure where your premise that WYSIWYG editors are necessarily less powerful than code actually comes from.
- dgavey 13y agoNone of the scroll animations work in Firefox either. Not just touch based devices. Didn't leave a very good impression on me.
- kkilat 13y agoKyle from Webflow here. Are you on the latest version of Firefox (28.0)? The scrolling animations are working for us.
- atom-morgan 13y agoI'm also having similar issues on Firefox 28. Chrome 34 looks good though.
- talmand 13y agoI'm on Firefox 28 on OS X, I see no scrolling animations.
- Neff 13y agoSame issue here. FF 28.0 on OS X (10.8) and none of the animations are working. Works fine on Chrome and Safari
- dgavey 13y agoYes FF 28 on OSX as well.
- brokenparser 13y agoFF28 Fedora, the animations work but scrolling is choppy (like a slide show).
- jol 13y agoWorks fine on FF on Ubuntu 28.
- gavinpc 13y agoThe scroll animations don't work for me either, Firefox 28 on Windows. Works in Chrome. But frankly I like it better without them. They add no value to the page. When Bret Victor talks about "directing the user's eyes to the solution," [1] I believe he's assuming an information-dense display, which this is not. The page is designed (as many are now) so that only one thing is on the screen at a time. I already know how to look at the thing I'm scrolling to — that's why I'm scrolling. This eye candy is kind of nauseating and I'm happy to think it's a fad. This is a critique of the OP, not of Webflow, which I'm sure can be put to good use. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7598793 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7598793
- pessimizer 13y agoInstead of paying somebody once to do this stuff with skrollr, you instead rent your own website from this company for the rest of your life? Good business plan for the rentier.
- callmevlad 13y agoSorry, that's not accurate. Webflow sites can be exported at a click of a button, and you own all the code. You can host anywhere you want, make any custom changes, etc.
- skrowl 13y agoOnly the higher Webflow plans have export. The cheapest plan doesn't let you export.
- jmathai 13y ago$70 to export your site? Sounds entirely reasonable to me.
- geuis 13y agoSo what's wrong with that? These guys have built a piece of software which you personally may or may not find useful. We are all in the practice of paying for software and services we find useful. As someone who has many years of experience coding animations by hand in css and a little js, sometimes a tool would be more useful. Its too easy to get lost in the minutiae of the code and lose sight of the visual impact you're going for. For some people, a tool like this is entirely worth the cost.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- rafeed 13y agoI believe the free plan allows you to export up to 5 times.
- danso 13y agoLet me preface this by saying: I have the upmost respect for the Webflow developers and designers...they've created a highly-functional web app with the purpose of enabling creators...the process to make such a full-featured web-browser product with such a range of capability is astounding. That said, I disagree with the implication that Webflow, and similar products, solve the problems of code, e.g., the phrase "Do xyz without writing a line of code". Knowledge of code does constrain non-developers, but in the end, that is not the hard part. To use a quick example: the mechanics of baking responsiveness into a new site from scratch is significantly easier than the conceptual process of "What information and features should be prominent, or excised, in the mobile view of our website?"...and in my opinion, that latter problem is something that people can get into without knowing how to write code. So despite the technical strength of the Webflow product, I don't think that it makes things easier in the end. Instead of "code", a newbie has to learn a whole new interface, a whole new set of iconography/terms (used for buttons, subheads, etc.), and last but not least, a whole new set of quirks inherent to the Webflow program. And when they become experts at this, they have spent 50-90% of their cognitive ability mastering Webflow, and the remainder understanding the creative and technical process of web development. At some point, isn't it just better to learn some code? Not 10 years worth, but something in between that and "0 lines of code". I've used Webflow, and I'll repeat again, it is an excellent web product in execution and design...but the problem it attempts to tackle is just too big, and the abstractions it offers may ended up hindering creators in the medium-to-long run.
- callmevlad 13y agoI'm the founder and CEO of Webflow, and I can't agree enough with your statement that code is not the hard part. That's why we're trying to create tools for designers to help them focus on the hard parts (content, usability, etc). I love what Bret Victor says about this in his Magic Ink paper [1]. Replace "information software" with "web applications" as you read it: "I suggest that the design of information software should be approached initially and primarily as a graphic design project. The foremost concern should be appearance—what and how information is presented. The designer should ask: What is relevant information? What questions will the viewer ask? What situations will she want to compare? What decision is she trying to make? How can the data be presented most effectively? How can the visual vocabulary and techniques of graphic design be employed to direct the user’s eyes to the solution? The designer must start by considering what the software looks like, because the user is using it to learn, and she learns by looking at it." The act of creating a solution IS the hard part, not tweaking CSS properties or knowing how to integrate Bootstrap components just right. All those things should just get out of the way and let creatives do the important work, without bogging down in the implementation details. In case you're interested, I wrote a bit more about this on our blog a while ago: http://blog.webflow.com/designers-will-rule-the-web http://blog.webflow.com/designers-will-rule-the-web [1] http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/ http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/
- Xdes 13y agoNot interested in SaaS unless there is an offline version. I like to own my software not rent it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Edmond 13y agoyou can try HiveMind (crudzilla.com), it is something you can download and run locally or put in the cloud such as a digital ocean box...
- evo_9 13y agoMan are people that oppose to learning a little bit of coding? I guess in my mind if you are that against coding maybe you should consider just sticking with design or biz development, etc? Not being mean but seriously, stick to what you are good at, right?
- callmevlad 13y agoI don't think anyone here is "against coding" - we're just speeding up repetitive tasks that take up way too much time and manual labor to complete. People weren't "against" writing Bezier math or doing typesetting manually - it just became much more efficient to do it visually. The same thing happened with assemblers, compilers, etc, so it's nothing new - abstraction marches on.
- kkilat 13y agoTotally get your point, and we could have a fun philosophical discussion around whether or not people SHOULD want to learn how to code. However, it's pretty clear that most of the people in the world who want to create/share content on the web are NOT interested in learning how to code at all, right? I mean, that's a big part of the reason why blogging platforms, and many other user-generated content sites are so huge (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. etc.). Yeah, people could just stick with what they know if they don't want to code -- but then there would still be huge barriers between having an idea that you want to create and get out there, and actually having the ability to make it real. For example, this Webflow Interactions site was entirely created by someone who isn't a coder (I know, I work with him). How long would it have taken him to learn all of the code he would have needed to know to create it all from scratch? Or how much would he have needed to pay a developer to build it for him? And how long would that back and forth taken to get it all right? For a lot of people, those types barriers are insurmountable (they don't have the time/skill to learn themselves, or the money to pay someone else). So should their ideas just not ever have the chance to see the light of day? If everyone who ever had a great idea could code it themselves that would be awesome. I just don't think it's feasible -- and tools like Webflow can bring a lot more people a lot closer.
- evo_9 13y ago
- gbromios 13y agoDreamweaver 2.0
- evanmoran 13y agoThe most important thing to keep in mind is this is for designers not coders -- I haven't looked at this deeply enough to know if it is good yet, but my guess is if you read hacker news comments it isn't for you because, well, you probably code=). Yes, these sorts of editors often create horrible leaky abstractions. Yes, these editors often confuse product folks into thinking that coding isn't necessary or important or hard. But that isn't its goal -- the goal is to make the common stuff easy to do for people writing / designing simple site content -- fades, positional, simple triggers. There is no reason to write code for this stuff. If you don't believe me, imagine drawing something without showing the picture. Word documents without wysiwyg. Photo editing without Photoshop. In this video (http://vimeo.com/64895205 http://vimeo.com/64895205) Bret Victor brilliantly shows what a powerful interactive editor can do. For the web, no amount of manual css typing can beat what a great editor could do. Whether this is that editor remains to be seen, but the idea of editors is a good one.
- kpapke 13y agoActually I think Webflow can be a useful tool for if you're a developer who wants to learn how to design a prototype. I struggle with visualizing a new site without a mockup or style tile for reference. Webflow's UI is intuitive - everything you do has immediate visual feedback and directly translates into clean CSS/HTML. The previews of media queries affecting content is nice too. So it's very easy to reverse engineer how to make a good design, the same way you would reverse engineer some source code. But with that said, I am not a paying customer. When I need to make a site then I just sign up for a free trial and export the code to continue the project. Their individual plan doesn't really make sense for me and I think it's too expensive.
- habosa 13y agoThis is amazing, and I really intend to use it. I am a developer but I just suck at front-end (CSS, mostly) and I have a much easier time learning back-end stacks. I haven't used WebFlow yet but is it fairly easy to use it to create bits and pieces to put into my entirely separate website? Also for a person like me, it would be great if there was some sort of "explain" feature where Webflow would give me a peek at what's going on so i could slowly learn. For example: "This fade-in was achieved using the CSS3 fade animation with the following line of code: ...". I know that's a niche feature, but I think there are a lot of design-challenged coders out there who would like it.
- dangoor 13y agoNifty looking tool! The home page is missing a link to pricing. I couldn't find pricing until clicking through to the Features page.
- azurelogic 13y agoMore than half of the examples didn't even work in my browser - Chrome 34.0.1847.116, Windows 8.
- liora 13y agosame here.
- wehadfun 13y agoSo you can only make websites that are hosted in webflow. I cant send the website to my own server?
- rch 13y agoIncorrect - you can download the source from within the editor. I've been happy with the results so far.
- thehme 13y agoI tried sharing the site's link with someone who opened it on a mobile device and was unable to see it - "doesn't work on my phone". Does this mean that a site built this way would not work on mobile devices or just not on Android devices?
- buckbova 13y agoIt's a good looking product. What does this offer over something like Wix or Weebly?
- rch 13y agoI've tried Wix briefly, but so far I've only explored Webflow in depth. Comparing the two, I get an immediate sense that Webflow is a better fit for my workflow. And as long as I'm happy with the generated code, I probably won't be looking into alternatives.
- cturhan 13y agoScroll animation works well on windows phone 8. Seems like you didn't count it as `touch device` :)
- chrismorgan 13y agoVery significantly broken for me on Firefox 31 (nightly): > TypeError: F.timing is undefined
- reedlaw 13y agoThe headling should be "...without writing any code". Zero lines of code implies there is no generated code at all. That would be truly amazing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Tloewald 13y agoNone of the examples worked on my ipad (gen 4). I like the idea, but it seems to me that it needs to work or at least degrade gracefully on mobile.
- pjonesdotca 13y agoPricing missing? Why list "try free for 14 days" when there is no price listing? That makes me question if I even want to take it for a spin.
- chrisweekly 13y agoSure it demos well, but it's closed-source. Vendor lock-in sucks, full stop. And the time investment spent learning it won't pay off bc those skills won't carry over to the vast majority of other future projects that don't use it. Building a site on bootstrap (from source, ie integrating bootstrap's less files as dependencies in your webapp via grunt and bower) is defensible; becoming entirely dependent on the capabilities of something like webflow, imho, is not. I suppose if you're a designer in a hurry to build a pretty, throwaway site (eg a microsite for an event) then this might be worth your while. But if you're building something for the enterprise, anything you or your team might want to maintain and extend, I think it represents an unacceptable level of knowledge debt, to rely on site-generating tools like this. YMMV of course. My views are skewed towards the UI architecture needs of a multi-million-dollar global company. /$.02