[HN Gopher] Project Helix by Adobe
___________________________________________________________________
Project Helix by Adobe
Author : thefilmore
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-07-04 09:27 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hlx.live)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hlx.live)
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| God, is there any hope Creative Cloud would go away and the
| normal Adobe would come back?
| dewey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can get unCC'd versions of Adobe tools if you know
| where to look.
| detritus wrote:
| ...please, do go on?
| sofixa wrote:
| They mean piracy.
| detritus wrote:
| Oh. Right. Duh.
| iasay wrote:
| It's really easy to uninstall their stuff from a Mac. Done
| it a few times. Just use the CC cloud app to uninstall the
| main apps then use the CC uninstaller to do it. Then reboot
| the mac. There are some things left in ~/Library you can
| clean up manually afterwards and that's it.
| jb1991 wrote:
| It's not a full uninstall -- all kind of weird stuff
| sticks around that hooks into various places. Just Google
| all the things people do just to get the Adobe CC stuff
| out of their Launchpad. Many users just create a junk
| folder and throw it all in there because there is no way
| to get rid of it on some machines.
| iasay wrote:
| That's absolutely not true.
| pier25 wrote:
| Just the other day I updated Adobe CC and it prompted me to
| install yet another daemon to check for original Adobe
| software.
| iasay wrote:
| I used to be like that but quite frankly nothing else comes
| near Photoshop and Lightroom Classic for me. The bottom end
| photo sub is cheap and you don't need to use any of the cloud
| stuff.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It's not you. Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and InDesign
| are on a class of their own. Unfortunately, nothing comes
| close. If you don't like Premiere or After Effects, that are
| great choices. Not so much for the rest of the suite.
|
| I'm rooting for Affinity, because of the buy vs rent business
| model and because Adobe need competition, but they still have
| a long ways to go
| spockz wrote:
| What do you think of the ON1 suite? Their marketing
| department is quite full of themselves. It also heavily
| features content aware deletion, filters, and options to
| replace a sky with some fancy one.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| It's an OK competitor to Lightroom, though I prefer Adobe
| Camera Raw's rendering in most cases.
|
| But Photoshop is harder to replace.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| Yeah there really isn't any replacement for After Effects
| (well I guess there is Motion, but even Apple seems to
| forget that exists).
|
| I'm not super confident that Affinity will be able to do
| it. Feature development seems to have really, really slowed
| down. The gap between Adobe and Affinity has grown, rather
| than shrank. Yeah Affinity's software has a lot of the same
| main features, but it's like MS Word where there is a long
| tail of very useful features where hardly anyone uses all
| of them, but everyone uses a few. Affinity hasn't even come
| close to integrating those kinds of features.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I'm hoping Figma leans a bit on the illustrator market,
| because their app is phenomenal. The vector editor is
| great, but is clearly biased towards UI development. If
| they could release a parallel product that is even close to
| feature parity with Illustrator, I'd be very happy.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Figma's selling point are collaboration, UI focus as you
| mentioned and being a webapp (no install needed)
|
| I think there's much to be done to compete with a general
| purpose vector tool like Illustrator.
| odessacubbage wrote:
| clip studio pretty handedly outperforms illustrator for
| vector images and publishing at this point imo.
| pantulis wrote:
| One of the procurement team members from a client said: "Adobe
| is the most unpleasant vendor we work with". I was surprised
| and then they added: "We prefer working with Oracle". Somehow
| they have managed to out-Oracle Oracle.
| Closi wrote:
| I mean I hate adobe too, but being hated by the procurement
| team (who are usually incentivised by reducing spend) doesn't
| always mean that much.
|
| Most procurement teams just love suppliers who will give them
| big quotes and then provide a 50% 'discount' so they can get
| a great big bonus for all the savings they achieved. Maybe
| i'm being too pessimistic.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| This is really a myth, I've never seen any large enterprise
| do this type of bonus on such a bogus construct and I've
| seen many.
| Closi wrote:
| I've absolutely seen it, so it's not a myth.
|
| I worked for a large company (>PS50bn revenue) that used
| to do this in the UK - I had to sign off the 'savings' my
| procurement stakeholders achieved on the projects (you
| had to 'agree' their savings and sign them off) because
| that would go into their performance reports which then
| triggered their bonus. So it happens.
|
| What else do you think procurement teams get targeted on
| if not savings/price decreases?
|
| So what do procurement teams hate? Things purchased from
| a single supplier, with no competition/accepted
| substitute, and no/little ability to negotiate the price
| or payment terms.
| pantulis wrote:
| Ah, that's for sure. I just wanted to point out that we are
| not talking about Vercel or Netlify here ;)
| thatgerhard wrote:
| Same, so over Adobe's last generation software clogging up work
| computers
| megax wrote:
| 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
|
| It'll be interesting to see how this develops...
| wolfhumble wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| tronster wrote:
| Another product called "Helix"?
| https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core
| [deleted]
| AngusH wrote:
| 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.
| Keyframe wrote:
| So, what is this even? Site doesn't tell much. From what I've
| gathered it's dreamweaver meets wix meets wordpress?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Hope none of the hundreds I pay Adobe every year went to funding
| this project.
| boboche wrote:
| 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.
| bsenftner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Perhaps the number of people who work with it is even less than
| the number of people who know what it is? ;)
| cwdegidio wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Pricing?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.l...
| cwdegidio wrote:
| Really curious how this ties into AEM. There is way too much
| marketing speak to parse out the relationship.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| "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.
| [deleted]
| vnm wrote:
| Yep https://www.hlx.live/robots.txt
| cush wrote:
| According to their FAQ https://pages.adobe.com/ redirects to some
| demo pages.
|
| "Is Helix a good solution for landing pages?
|
| https://pages.adobe.com is a great example how Adobe uses Helix
| to manage hundreds of landing pages, owned by dozens of
| independent teams."
| vnm wrote:
| 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/sidek...
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Adobe money...
| greencore wrote:
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you're tea leaf reading skills were so underdeveloped to not
| see that Flash was doomed, then that's kind of on you to get
| better. Flash was being berated everywhere about its problems,
| yet it was still being pushed because it was _the_ thing.
|
| Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of
| things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write
| once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're
| not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well
| understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the
| maker was the main vector before even running code written by
| any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.
| blooalien wrote:
| > "Write once, deploy anywhere" ... _anywhere Adobe deems
| acceptable, that is._
| xbar wrote:
| I think you are smart.
| Comevius wrote:
| Adobe Flash was killed by smartphones and HTML5, but Harman
| still offers support for it.
|
| https://services.harman.com/partners/adobe
|
| "wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse"
|
| The world keeps changing, it's on you for putting all your
| money on a horse that was obviously not going to make it.
| cush wrote:
| Is the market for flash devs really that different than similar
| software? I highly doubt those Flash devs ended up on the
| street.
|
| Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software
| that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They
| have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.
| jarjoura wrote:
| Flash was a Macromedia product that Adobe acquired. I don't
| think the team that worked on it foresaw the rapid shift to
| touchscreen mobile devices. Even so, there's no way Adobe could
| have competed with Apple and Google's push towards Javascript
| and HTML5 during those two companies early WebKit
| collaboration.
|
| I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for
| the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't
| call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift
| towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.
| enlyth wrote:
| I will never give Adobe a penny again in my life after going
| through their abysmal cancellation process littered with dark
| patterns and manipulation for one of their subscriptions, on
| top of being charged a fee to cancel.
| finfinfin wrote:
| I contested the cancellation fee in PayPal and Adobe didn't
| bother to respond, so the case was auto-resolved in my favor.
|
| Since then I switched to PixelmatorPro and it works for all
| my needs.
| willio58 wrote:
| 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?
| badsectoracula wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| > 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."
| frognumber wrote:
| The major reason I don't use Adobe is lack of trust in
| Adobe. I want my files to work next year, and in 10
| years. That's also why I don't use anything B2B from
| Google, and avoid Oracle (who doesn't break products the
| same way as Adobe and Google, but tends to milk cash cows
| in unpleasant ways).
|
| The payback on open-sourcing something like Flash is
| maintaining trust. I trust open-source. I trust a few
| commercial companies who invest like crazy in maintaining
| trust (e.g. Microsoft or AWS). That leads to business on
| unrelated product lines down-the-line.
| None4U wrote:
| Amazon managed to do it with CryEngine
| blooalien wrote:
| And yet there exist open source Flash renderers [0] to
| this day which can render much of that old Flash content
| with little to no issues. Kinda sad that multiple _other_
| folks could each independently accomplish what Adobe
| themselves could not.
|
| [0]: https://alternativeto.net/software/flash-
| player/?license=ope...
| [deleted]
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| 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 ;)
| nfreising wrote:
| So I spent a while on their page,
| 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| They probably weren't expecting the scrutiny of HN. Most pages
| we discuss here are now redirecting to the home page. The one
| you linked to included.
| pornel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Markdown though looks like a _really_ constraining medium.
| michaelmrose wrote:
| Why would you want there to be a separate upload and file
| sync step instead of simply editing in the browser?
| mbreese wrote:
| Versioning? Publishing workflow?
|
| People might like to pass around a draft before publishing
| an article. Maybe to an editor for feedback. That's easiest
| done with a Word document.
|
| Then, when you're ready to publish, just save the file to
| the right location. It's easier than opening an CMS and
| copying/pasting (marginally).
| yetanother12345 wrote:
| > So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word
| document and dynamically renders that to HTML.
|
| Ages ago (probably more than 15 years or so) I generated HTML,
| even multi-page web sites from within Word itself, using VBA.
| It required some proficiency in VBA but Word already had a
| structure that you could translate with different classes of
| headings, font modifications, etc. - so it wasn't exactly
| "rocket science" either. I did the same in Excel, but here more
| focused on autogenerating pseudo "db-driven" sites than on
| prose.
|
| Typically these would be "intranet" apps, but I believe some
| may have been exposed to the www. Being static sites, security
| was like any other pure HTML site.
|
| > I still don't see who would use this for their site.
|
| My customers were in marketing. They already used these Office
| tools and they found it a real advantage that they could just
| continue to use these tools.
|
| This was before WP got to the dominant position (and level of
| user-friendlyness) it has today. It's still possible though.
| skilled wrote:
| 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.
| Paul_S wrote:
| I just get a blank page on firefox.
| interestica wrote:
| 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."
| AndrianV wrote:
| 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, https://siter.io,
| and 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.
| jjbinx007 wrote:
| I wish pages like this were written by techies for techies
| rather than by a Marketing dept
| duxup wrote:
| I wish there was always a mirrored nuts and bolts page for
| every marketing page.
| krisoft wrote:
| But it has one!
|
| In the top menu click "Getting Started / Build your first
| site". And that tells you how exactly it works.
|
| Do you want even more details? Click "Documentation /
| Architecture"
|
| Are you seeing the same page I'm seeing? I'm confused by
| all these complaints.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| It definitely feels like this was written for someone on an
| executive team, rather than the person who would actually use
| the product.
| blooalien wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I think that's pretty much the point - this is kind of a SSG
| generator that is usable by non-techies...
| keyle wrote:
| It's adobe. By the time we understand it, it will be cancelled.
| appleflaxen wrote:
| > Faster. Better. Period.
|
| Is it a menstrual tracker?
| smelbe wrote:
| website with Microsoft word is like websites with notion...
| anodari wrote:
| Is an Wix alternative?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| 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.
| daviddever23box wrote:
| Does anyone else find it interesting that the architectural
| diagram (https://github.com/adobe/helix-
| home/blob/main/docs/Helix%20A...) is in an OmniGraffle file
| format?
| ksec wrote:
| 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
| bonaldi wrote:
| 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.
| andybak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| #helix-chat is that the keyword for the chatbot?
|
| I dont get it VIP??? Really?? AEM Sites? Whats that?
|
| Are you from marketing?
| ImprobableTruth wrote:
| I'm 99% sure they just copypasted from the 'Get Demo' page:
|
| https://www.hlx.live/business/demo
| [deleted]
| andybak wrote:
| I don't understand it either. I was just pasting it to try
| and be helpful.
| nix23 wrote:
| Ah ok, was thinking your the head of adobe marketing ;)
| TimSchumann wrote:
| 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.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Nothing on the page linked even describes what 'Helix' is,
| much less why I would want it.
|
| I think this is unfair criticism. Right at the top it says:
|
| "Helix is the fastest way to launch new sites and deliver the
| fastest pages on the web, as a bonus it is also the most
| intuitive and fastest way to create and publish content."
|
| That is what it is and that is why you would want to use it.
| It is a way to create new websites fast. And it promises that
| those websites will be fast, and you will be able to update
| them fast.
|
| These are small and simple words.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 1. Small and simple words *for a technical audience*, not
| C-suite know-nothings. An example might be something like
| "Generates HTML statically from Markdown documents in a Git
| repository with a built-in caching server with load
| balancing to edge servers for an additional fee" --
| whatever it actually does. Nowhere that I can easily find
| does it describe how it does what it claims.
|
| 2. Claiming to be "fastest" is usually a good way to get
| your ass handed to you.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _What is Helix? (if you like tech jargon) Helix let's [sic]
| business users ingest and publish markdown documents and
| spreadsheets from Microsoft Office or Google Docs and Sheets
| into a scalable, distributed content repository and
| dynamically renders HTML (and JSON, webp, etc.) to produce
| fast websites and actively manages cache consistency with
| your existing CDN infrastructure.
|
| Helix let's [sic] frontend devs develop and deploy the design
| and functionality of their website with CSS and JavaScript
| directly in their GitHub repos._
|
| - cut and pasted from near the bottom of the page
| winkelwagen wrote:
| 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.
| status200 wrote:
| 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)
| hansword wrote:
| 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?
| ecmascript wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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]
| icemelt8 wrote:
| site builder from microsoft word
| albertopv wrote:
| "What is Helix?" is the 4th question in FAQ page:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
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