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The description of Eve seems pretty vague, which I'm sure is intentional, but it'd be nice to get a bit of clarification. It sounds like Eve will essentially b

The description of Eve seems pretty vague, which I'm sure is intentional, but it'd be nice to get a bit of clarification. It sounds like Eve will essentially be a visual programming language, similar to the many others that have come across Hacker News. Chris - is Eve a visual programming language? If so, what makes it better than all the others that have tried and failed?

sdegutis 12y ago
This is the best comment I've seen on this thread so far. And yet it's already near the bottom. I didn't want to believe it, but it looks like HN is highly biased toward anything that has some VC behind it, flocking to it like it's suddenly going to change the world.
- jeffreyrogers 12y ago
  I've noticed this too lately and it's a bit depressing.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > I didn't want to believe it, but it looks like HN is highly biased toward anything that has some VC behind it, flocking to it like it's suddenly going to change the world. Considering who sponsors HN, the biases of the community it draws aren't that surprising.
gagege 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6iUm_Cqx2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6iUm_Cqx2s Here's a demo they did a while ago. I think it kind of explains what he intends to do with Eve, at least as a concept. On an older blog post he said that it has changed a lot since this demo.
sanderjd 12y ago
There is a podcast from a while back[0] that does a great job of describing their goals and strategy in depth. [0]: http://podcasts.thoughtbot.com/giantrobots/111 http://podcasts.thoughtbot.com/giantrobots/111
ibdknox 12y ago
It depends on how you use the term "visual programming language", which unfortunately has a lot of baggage around it. It is not sticking lego blocks together like Scratch or LEGO Mindstorms, nor is it the boxes with arrows pointing at eachother like Max MSP/Lab View/Blueprint/noflo, but it's also not strictly textual. The closest analog really is Excel or Access, but with the ability to describe how you translate one sheet/table to another one. Your main interface is a grid of data and a list of output tables. On top of that sits a set of domain editors though, to make drawing UI, for example, not an exercise in writing a bunch of rows out into a table. Instead you use a photoshop-like tool to just draw your UI. Same with doing math or string operations or flying drones or working with music and so on. We of course can't cover every domain, but what's interesting is that the editor is itself kind of like an editor of editors and it'll make it fairly trivial for you to build your own manipulable representations.
- mwcampbell 12y ago
  Trying to reduce UI design to something like Photoshop seems quite problematic to me. It encourages the designer to think that what you see is all there is. What about the things that aren't immediately evident in a WYSIWYG environment, like accessibility for users with disabilities (I'm thinking especially of blind users)? And if the WYSIWYG environment uses absolute positioning, as Photoshop does, then how will the UI adjust itself to different screen sizes? An advantage of representing a UI in a human-editable format like HTML, XAML, or Android's XML layout system is that all the properties of the UI elements are equally visible and editable, not just the things that are visible in the on-screen rendering. Also, I think that reading and editing the UI definition in a textual format forces the designer to think of the UI at a more abstract level than just dragging and dropping elements onto the screen and tweaking the things that are visible in that environment. And for the UI definition to actually be human editable, one is forced to leave absolute layout to the computer, making it more flexible.
  - ibdknox 12y ago
    We're doing some clever stuff between constraint layout and relative layout that will make a lot of that concern disappear. We also intend to present this as almost a statemachine, or a storyboard where you see the various states of your UI laid out, which gives us an opportunity to surface a lot of the "unseen" aspects of UI.

sdegutis 12y ago

This is the best comment I've seen on this thread so far. And yet it's already near the bottom. I didn't want to believe it, but it looks like HN is highly biased toward anything that has some VC behind it, flocking to it like it's suddenly going to change the world.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago
I've noticed this too lately and it's a bit depressing.
dragonwriter 12y ago
> I didn't want to believe it, but it looks like HN is highly biased toward anything that has some VC behind it, flocking to it like it's suddenly going to change the world. Considering who sponsors HN, the biases of the community it draws aren't that surprising.

gagege 12y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6iUm_Cqx2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6iUm_Cqx2s Here's a demo they did a while ago. I think it kind of explains what he intends to do with Eve, at least as a concept. On an older blog post he said that it has changed a lot since this demo.

sanderjd 12y ago

There is a podcast from a while back[0] that does a great job of describing their goals and strategy in depth. [0]: http://podcasts.thoughtbot.com/giantrobots/111 http://podcasts.thoughtbot.com/giantrobots/111

ibdknox 12y ago

It depends on how you use the term "visual programming language", which unfortunately has a lot of baggage around it. It is not sticking lego blocks together like Scratch or LEGO Mindstorms, nor is it the boxes with arrows pointing at eachother like Max MSP/Lab View/Blueprint/noflo, but it's also not strictly textual. The closest analog really is Excel or Access, but with the ability to describe how you translate one sheet/table to another one. Your main interface is a grid of data and a list of output tables. On top of that sits a set of domain editors though, to make drawing UI, for example, not an exercise in writing a bunch of rows out into a table. Instead you use a photoshop-like tool to just draw your UI. Same with doing math or string operations or flying drones or working with music and so on. We of course can't cover every domain, but what's interesting is that the editor is itself kind of like an editor of editors and it'll make it fairly trivial for you to build your own manipulable representations.

mwcampbell 12y ago
Trying to reduce UI design to something like Photoshop seems quite problematic to me. It encourages the designer to think that what you see is all there is. What about the things that aren't immediately evident in a WYSIWYG environment, like accessibility for users with disabilities (I'm thinking especially of blind users)? And if the WYSIWYG environment uses absolute positioning, as Photoshop does, then how will the UI adjust itself to different screen sizes? An advantage of representing a UI in a human-editable format like HTML, XAML, or Android's XML layout system is that all the properties of the UI elements are equally visible and editable, not just the things that are visible in the on-screen rendering. Also, I think that reading and editing the UI definition in a textual format forces the designer to think of the UI at a more abstract level than just dragging and dropping elements onto the screen and tweaking the things that are visible in that environment. And for the UI definition to actually be human editable, one is forced to leave absolute layout to the computer, making it more flexible.
- ibdknox 12y ago
  We're doing some clever stuff between constraint layout and relative layout that will make a lot of that concern disappear. We also intend to present this as almost a statemachine, or a storyboard where you see the various states of your UI laid out, which gives us an opportunity to surface a lot of the "unseen" aspects of UI.