[HN Gopher] Show HN: Easier, Free Webflow
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Show HN: Easier, Free Webflow
Author : tshepom
Score : 61 points
Date : 2021-05-04 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aspect.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (aspect.app)
| mlejva wrote:
| I'm not much of a fan of Webflow precisely because of its
| complexity. Seeing Aspect a few months ago was exactly what I
| wished for from Webflow. I love how Aspect gives you the same
| freedom as Figma, for example.
|
| Great work, Tshepo!
| tshepom wrote:
| Thanks, Vasek!
| aparsons wrote:
| I find tech like this so impressive, because back when I used to
| code for a living, web browsers were slow, clunky and woefully
| underpowered.
|
| Is the core app just using a canvas/svg? Did you have to build
| your own UI toolkit on top of it? Any open source libraries /
| similar projects I can read to learn more?
|
| Thanks
| tshepom wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah it's exactly that - pure js and canvas element for
| custom drawing. No UI frameworks. It's all custom so there's no
| open source reference, but I plan to release some open source
| stuff.
| aparsons wrote:
| Thanks for the overview. I'm looking forward to it, and best
| of luck with your project!
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| Does it come with templates?
| tshepom wrote:
| Yep, you can find them at https://aspect.app/layouts. You can
| also add components while you're editing a project.
| haxiomic wrote:
| This is really impressive and I can't wait to start using it!
|
| I love that it's currently free and I'm curious what the pricing
| model is - or what the future plan might be - are you thinking
| about freemium and charging for specific features?
| tshepom wrote:
| Thanks! Pricing will be freemium, resembling Figma where we
| charge teams per seat or for usage past a certain threshold.
| But it's important to me to keep it virtually free for the
| casual individual.
| singhkays wrote:
| > it's important to me to keep it virtually free for the
| casual individual.
|
| I love this!
|
| As a casual user, I can see myself using this to put together
| quick landing pages
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| I know it's just simple shapes, but the name + logo combo makes
| me think of the Abstract[1] brand.
|
| [1] https://www.abstract.com
| tobr wrote:
| For what it's worth, that was my first impression too.
| legutierr wrote:
| Looks very cool. I'm having trouble making edits, though. I've
| opened a template, and while I am able to change the font of
| text, I cannot edit the text. Am I missing something? Do I need
| to log in?
| tshepom wrote:
| Thanks! If double-clicking or pressing the enter key while the
| text element is selected doesn't work, it's likely a bug. Are
| you using Firefox by any chance? I just tested on chrome and
| safari.
| prezjordan wrote:
| Pretty cool! I don't see any pricing, are you eventually going to
| sell templates? Hosting?
| tshepom wrote:
| Thanks! Pricing info here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27041676
| Elof wrote:
| I'm about to start a project to move off of webflow. Here are my
| complaints, do with them what you will :)
|
| Something got pushed to production a while back that should very
| much not have been on the production website because of a broken
| workflow I had with a contractor. I didn't realize it did and it
| ended up blowing up in my face badly. I want to remove his
| ability to push to his work out or have me be a final approver,
| bu that's not possible. In fact, there are no levels of
| permission and anyone will always publish all changes not matter
| what. I want to be able to colab in real-time, publish per
| change, and manage users permissions to do things on the
| platform.
|
| Another thing, that would actually solve the first thing, is
| integration to Github. If I could have my designer push a PR to
| GH I would be able to see the changes he was making and accept or
| reject them, right now I have no idea what changes are being
| made. He could point me to one thing and have changed a bunch of
| others. I also don't love the webflow hosting, it's not that
| performant. I'd much rather have a colab tool and manage my own
| infra. I know there is a code download feature, but downloading a
| zip, adding it to git every time is a heavy lift. I like being
| able to make little changes here and there.
|
| I'd like to be able to write more custom code and add JS libs
| (looks like you have this one already, so cheers). I saw someone
| suggesting you host your own JS on a CDN and then call it in the
| header, but I don't like introducing outside dependencies unless
| I absolutely have to, I would rather host all of my JS with my
| other static content.
|
| One last thing. I want markdown support for the blog. Our blog is
| technical and I've had to do some very hacky things to get code
| blocks in there.
| tshepom wrote:
| This all makes sense, and I've definitely been feeling the
| integration pain when I want to export code elsewhere - GitHub
| support coming soon!
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Did you build your homepage using Aspect? If so you should
| definitely promote that. One of the screenshots shows what looks
| like an Apple.com page - you probably want to find an alternative
| to show, you should have plenty of examples.
| tshepom wrote:
| Yeah it was, and got it will update now. Thanks!
| sevencolors wrote:
| Looks great! Love that I can kick the tires without having to
| signup. Will try it out soon for a project
| robertlf wrote:
| Is this a layer on top of Webflow or did you copy its
| functionality and add a simpler UI on top?
| tshepom wrote:
| It's built entirely from the ground up - no ui libraries. It's
| focused on simple, PowerPoint-like usability instead of
| Webflow's complex, Photoshop-like approach.
| tobr wrote:
| How does it scale to real-world projects? One of the problems
| I've felt with Webflow is that you're missing all the tools
| you would normally have when making a website, like version
| control, being able to search and replace across all project
| files, having a decent deploy process, or being able to
| automate or refactor things without hundreds of manual
| actions. You also still kinda need to know HTML and CSS to
| not make a mess (I've been tasked with cleaning up a mess
| like that, and it's not much fun, especially when the toolkit
| described above is not available). These are flaws that are
| hard to anticipate until you're halfway through a project.
|
| Considering you're describing Aspect as easier, what are your
| solutions to these problems?
| tshepom wrote:
| Great questions! I've got upcoming features for version
| control - it'll still involve conflict resolution in git,
| but much easier than current code export methods. So far
| I've focused on good code export readability to address
| integration into existing codebases.
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