[HN Gopher] Magic UI: UI Library for Design Engineers
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       Magic UI: UI Library for Design Engineers
        
       Author : achristmascarl
       Score  : 181 points
       Date   : 2024-05-23 03:23 UTC (19 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (magicui.design)
 (TXT) w3m dump (magicui.design)
        
       | antigirl wrote:
       | Love this. I tried my hand at reverse engineering some of these
       | components on linear and similar websites but did not get good
       | results. I love the fact these are configurable and free.
       | Something I definitely would have paid for.
       | 
       | The rise of bento box designs [at least for now] is very visually
       | appealing. Glad to be moving away from illustrations. Some of the
       | designs animated with Rive are mind blowing:
       | https://x.com/alex_barashkov/status/1790748157141213237
        
       | yu3zhou4 wrote:
       | Looks great. The website is sluggish on Firefox tho
        
         | jerriep wrote:
         | Yeah, I found it unusable on Firefox. It would not respond to
         | clicks on any of the links in the sidebar navigation. Works
         | without an issue on Chrome
        
         | noname120 wrote:
         | Sluggish and laggy on Chrome here as well: macOS Sonoma 14.5,
         | Apple M2 Max, 32 GB of RAM.
        
       | gregolo wrote:
       | Nice, but your site is buggish
        
       | ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
       | So so sluggish
        
       | 4gotunameagain wrote:
       | So, front end devs are also engineers now ?
       | 
       | Like, my friend who took a 3 month js / react bootcamp and is
       | working as a front end dev for our local pizza place, she's an
       | engineer now ?
       | 
       | Cool.
        
         | pavlov wrote:
         | 1997 called, they want their prejudice back.
         | 
         | "Web designers are not even programmers"
        
           | 4gotunameagain wrote:
           | haha. Semantics are important. Words carry meaning, we use
           | them to convey information.
        
             | geraldwhen wrote:
             | Anyone can build a bridge much like anyone can make an HTML
             | page render.
             | 
             | Building a half mile suspension bridge supporting millions
             | of cars per day will require a different depth of
             | understanding.
        
         | art0rz wrote:
         | What is the definition of an engineer in your eyes? In some
         | countries there is a legal definition, so developers are not
         | allowed to call themselves engineers unless they have an
         | engineering degree (and not the software kind).
        
           | 4gotunameagain wrote:
           | It is not about my personal definition, there are even laws
           | as you said.
           | 
           | I just find it silly to use a definition that you typically
           | need 4-6 years of maths heavy formal education for front end
           | javascript that you can learn on youtube in a month.
        
             | onion2k wrote:
             | _there are even laws as you said_
             | 
             | Not in my country..
        
             | whstl wrote:
             | I'm one of those "real engineers" that studied 4-6 years of
             | maths, and this gatekeeping feels very silly to me.
             | 
             | Some frontend developers are doing more _actual_
             | engineering than I did when I was working as an actual
             | electrical engineer, and I was working on buildings and
             | shit.
             | 
             | Not all frontend devs, though, and certainly not the ones
             | straight out of a bootcamp, but a lot are.
             | 
             | But the people building foundations for others to work on
             | (like the target audience for this library) definitely are
             | doing some sort of engineering.
        
             | Alifatisk wrote:
             | In some regions, the title engineer is not a protected
             | title, so you could call yourself a css engineer or
             | whatever and it's perfectly fine.
        
         | agos wrote:
         | I expect better from the HN than gatekeeping against front end
         | developers
        
       | titipoco wrote:
       | Looks sleek, but resource-hungry to the point of absurdity.
        
       | drbig wrote:
       | I wish that were this MUI: http://www.sasg.com/mui/
       | 
       | Oh, the nostalgia: http://www.sasg.com/mui/preview.gif
        
         | blurb4969 wrote:
         | THIS is beauty.
        
         | blooalien wrote:
         | "Oh, the nostalgia" indeed! One of the best things I ever
         | installed on my Commodore Amiga.
        
         | Alifatisk wrote:
         | I almost forgot how it feels like when a website loads
         | instantly
        
       | karpovv-boris wrote:
       | lagging af
        
       | croes wrote:
       | Sorry but to me most of them are useless animations that create
       | distractions from the content.
       | 
       | Like the blink or marquee tag of Internet Explore reloaded.
        
       | troupo wrote:
       | How is this a "library for design engineers"? It's a collection
       | of one-of Dribbble designs. Bento Grid? Tweet Card? Animated
       | Backgrounds? These are showcases/cookbook/examples, not a
       | _library_ for design.
        
       | hasanas wrote:
       | Extremely slow and sluggish. Ironic to have UI library's website
       | not entice you with itself...
        
         | whstl wrote:
         | It is even more ironic than that, this library is seems to be a
         | framework for building websites that showcase other UI
         | libraries.
         | 
         | Due to how slow it is, it feels more like an attempt at
         | sabotage.
        
       | virtualritz wrote:
       | This website is unusable on my mobile, a motoG42. Not the fastest
       | phone but everything web I use it on is smooth.
       | 
       | Magic UI.design lags and stutters even when just scrolling up and
       | down.
       | 
       | That tells me everything I need to know.
        
         | pcdevils wrote:
         | Scrolled down on my pixel 3a XL and the webview crashed
        
           | nness wrote:
           | It's pretty awful on a M1 Pro too, at least until the page
           | has fully loaded. I'm assuming all of the inline styles are
           | forcing a few seconds of re-layouts and that kills the
           | initial performance.
        
           | datavirtue wrote:
           | Same here. Browser went haywire and was displaying mangled
           | fonts. Had to kill it.
        
         | knallfrosch wrote:
         | My Thinkpad T14s/Firefox combo can't handle it.
        
         | kuro_neko wrote:
         | The page loaded fully, I waited patiently, but it ran at a very
         | low FPS on my Surface Laptop 5 with an i7 and 16GB RAM.
         | 
         | It's very difficult to navigate.
        
       | SebastianKra wrote:
       | These look very specific.
       | 
       | I'd be interested in an analysis of common patterns in marketing
       | pages. We have a pretty good standardized set of components for
       | productive interfaces (buttons, fields, tabs etc.)
       | 
       | But looking at this makes me wonder if there really is a common
       | set of abstractions for marketing pages beyond just throwing out
       | 200 templates and calling them blocks.
        
       | p_l wrote:
       | This page is _IMPRESSIVELY BAD_.
       | 
       | I don't even care what it shows due to just how _audibly_
       | resource heavy it is while showing pretty much nothing other than
       | some simple copy.
       | 
       | There's no way in hell opening the main page should cause so much
       | load my computer sounds like I just opened Cyberpunk 2077 or Doom
       | Eternal at max details, especially given the amount actually
       | rendered (I just opened the page, didn't even scroll anywhere!).
       | 
       | Looking into Chrome's performance metrics it's as if there's
       | constant, ridiculous re-rendering of everything, with just
       | calculating the layering causing CPU fans to go to 80%.
        
         | djeastm wrote:
         | You are not kidding. I can't remember the last time a website
         | has made my scroll stutter so much.
        
           | datavirtue wrote:
           | Memory corrupted my browser. Required me to kill the task.
        
           | JackFr wrote:
           | Trying to type in search box causes screen covering popup
           | with a ton of latency, and typing in that box has crazy bad
           | keyboard lag.
           | 
           | Not a persuasive demo.
        
         | quaintdev wrote:
         | "I created animations. I gotta use them somewhere"
        
         | v3ss0n wrote:
         | Same here, I can't believe how a UI show case site could be
         | this annoying
        
         | itslennysfault wrote:
         | I'm assuming this is platform specific. It's totally smooth for
         | me on a M1 MacBook Pro. Thats with a bunch of tabs open while
         | on a zoom call (gotta do something to pass the time during
         | standup). I find it annoying for other reasons, but I'm not
         | seeing any perf issues on the page.
         | 
         | edit... reading through the other comments I see LOTS of people
         | are having this issue. Not sure why I'm the lucky one, but I
         | went back and clicked through all the pages, still no
         | perceivable lag at all.
        
           | jerieljan wrote:
           | I have an M1 MBP too, and while it appeared stable, I saw the
           | GPU usage skyrocket while that page was running in Chrome,
           | around 75% in Activity Monitor (View -> GPU Processes), and
           | reaching close to 100% in iStat Menus.
        
           | p_l wrote:
           | It does not lag on my computer, no.
           | 
           | But it's _audibly_ resource hungry, because it puts so much
           | load my computer immediately jumped to high power cooling due
           | to how much load it puts.
           | 
           | So yes, it's smooth, but that's more because I actually can
           | run both the aforementioned titles at max detail at 4k, not
           | because there's something secret breaking the site for some
           | but not all.
        
       | mantesso wrote:
       | looks good but made my gpu fans spin
        
       | keithnz wrote:
       | this feels more like something for NON design engineers, ie,
       | highly opinionated cosmetics and animations that you can just
       | drop in. It's not a UI library such that you could design UIs
       | with, wouldn't fit well if you have your own design systems, you
       | actually need a UI library that this would then layer over the
       | top of... but the perf impacts of this makes it feel more
       | "gimmick" than a good tool for someones design toolbelt.
        
       | ushakov wrote:
       | The reason your website is lagging so much is because of the
       | globe. I have reported this a while ago:
       | https://github.com/shuding/cobe/issues/78
        
         | p_l wrote:
         | Looking at performance recording in Chrome, it's not cobe.
         | 
         | Cobe does not seem to trigger huge time spent in Layerizing and
         | Style recalculations, which are the main areas the web page
         | spends time for me.
         | 
         | Curiously it's not as bad on corporate windows laptop that has
         | worse specs, and which was outputting to 30fps-locked display
         | (personal laptop was rendering to 165Hz screen...)
        
       | nprateem wrote:
       | Under construction page template doesn't have an animated gif of
       | a workman digging a hole. No flashing lights either. Hard pass.
        
       | Elfener wrote:
       | Someone took the advice of not trying to hit 100 on all the
       | lighthouse scores too seriously. This page would probably have a
       | score of 0.
        
         | martypitt wrote:
         | I was curious, given the feedback on this page, so I ran the
         | lighthouse test:
         | 
         | Performance: 81 / Accesssibility: 93 / Best Practices: 96 /
         | SEO: 100
         | 
         | Performance is on the lower side, but the others are all
         | tracking pretty well!
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | Love the design, I don't know if Vercel (Zeit) pioneered this or
       | if they even took inspiration themselves but it's beautiful and
       | minimal. The rendering has some issues though.
        
         | troupo wrote:
         | > it's beautiful and minimal.
         | 
         | What's minimal about it? Washed out colors, everything white,
         | and grey font do not make something minimal.
         | 
         | Come on, even the too lines in their call out slide in with
         | unnecessary animations. Everything on the page is moving,
         | bouncing, animating. If it's .minimalism, it's Michael Bay of
         | minimalisms
        
       | sunshinerag wrote:
       | Broken on Safari. https://snipboard.io/wM5smG.jpg
        
       | Waterluvian wrote:
       | The root breadcrumb isn't a link which was weird. And trying to
       | browse components brought me to just one. I couldn't find a list
       | of them easily enough.
        
       | datavirtue wrote:
       | Literally crashed the DDG browser on my phone. Never seen
       | anything like it.
        
       | pentagrama wrote:
       | Wow I always want to analyze the products and highlight the
       | positives that I found, but at least on Firefox mobile this site
       | was unbearable slow to the point that I have to quit. And being a
       | site build with the product it promotes, it speaks volumes,
       | sorry.
        
       | pastamania wrote:
       | What the fuck did you do to my CPU
        
       | jzig wrote:
       | It saddens me nobody builds similar libraries for Angular.
        
         | turnsout wrote:
         | Yeah, for better or worse, the era of framework diversity is
         | over. The industry has almost 100% converged on React.
        
           | digging wrote:
           | That sounds false to me. When was this era and what exactly
           | did it look like? React has been dominant for around a
           | decade, but Angular and Vue still see wide usage and Svelte
           | is somewhat on the rise. (Although retention/interest in
           | Angular has been going down.)[1]
           | 
           | Highly anticipating State of JS 2023 data though...
           | 
           | [1] https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-
           | framewo...
        
             | turnsout wrote:
             | I'm judging by what I see teams choosing for new projects--
             | both dev shops and corporate/internal devs. Even 5 years
             | ago they might have debated Vue vs React, but there's not
             | even a discussion anymore.
        
               | digging wrote:
               | Sure, but how many teams are you observing? My company is
               | split between Vue and React for different projects, and
               | while greenfield new ones are getting React, Vue is not
               | being deprecated here.
        
               | turnsout wrote:
               | Just a few teams per year--extremely anecdotal. But it
               | sounds like your company is in the same boat, with new
               | projects going to React.
        
           | LASR wrote:
           | Agreed. It's just so much easier to hire for React. It has
           | become the lingua franca of client frameworks.
           | 
           | There are still many teams that choose to use something else.
           | But experience in React is most easily transferrable. Even if
           | I had a project in Vue, I would still look for React
           | expertise.
        
         | sureIy wrote:
         | What's an angular?
        
       | toddmoy wrote:
       | Interesting how the Border Beam component uses the exact same
       | inbox example as ShadCN/ui.
       | 
       | - https://magicui.design/docs/components/border-beam -
       | https://ui.shadcn.com/
        
       | dankobgd wrote:
       | horrible
        
       | andreygrehov wrote:
       | These days, every self-respecting library must provide Figma
       | components.
        
         | chrstphrknwtn wrote:
         | I'm tending to think that Figma components should not be
         | maintained in a serious way... design artefacts should be
         | ephemeral and I think it's less effort overall if designers
         | reuse or create whatever they need when they need it.
         | 
         | Keeping a huge Figma component library in sync with a component
         | library / design system feels more and more like busy work.
        
       | darepublic wrote:
       | Good idea. Laggy on my android Firefox browser tho
        
       | abeppu wrote:
       | Setting aside the slowness, tho I am not a designer, these all
       | strike me as just visual noise. I think animated borders,
       | animated shiny text, animated meteor backgrounds today are no
       | better than an early 2000s page with animated elements. It
       | doesn't help communicate, it just attracts the eye until one
       | learns to tune it out. And it kinda tells me that we're not
       | really learning to build better stuff over the decades.
       | 
       | What is the difference between the animated Border Beam in this
       | library and the animated hr in the vintage example of an archived
       | geocities page?
       | 
       | https://magicui.design/docs/components/border-beam
       | 
       | https://blog.geocities.institute/archives/3879
        
         | dvaun wrote:
         | If this were splashed across technical docs then I'd agree.
         | That said, we're not the target audience for this aesthetic.
        
         | thomascgalvin wrote:
         | I agree that a lot of these components are more distracting
         | than useful. I do like the animated border around buttons,
         | though; that would be very useful to draw the eye towards the
         | "default" option on a page, as long as it was the only one.
        
           | cchance wrote:
           | This is the thing many of these shouldn't be used just willy
           | nilly, things like the chaser around the border of a
           | container, is awesome as a notification of a change for
           | instance, or the button effect same thing, i'd hate a site
           | that used these nonstop running, but something thats
           | triggered by an event happening is much nicer.
           | 
           | That said, WTF is with all these "libraries" thats basically
           | just collections of shit from codepen stacked in 1 place that
           | they thought was cool, shit most of these don't even have
           | cohesion from one to the other really besides... "cool
           | motion"
        
       | jslaby wrote:
       | Another JS UI, yay! How about we get some UI libraries for native
       | built apps?
        
         | lghh wrote:
         | Great idea! Do you have any ideas for how you'd like to build
         | it?
        
           | eirikbakke wrote:
           | FlatLAF is a great one https://www.formdev.com/flatlaf/
        
       | rmdashrfv wrote:
       | I very much dislike the tweet that OP uses on the Magic UI site
       | that's directed at Linear:
       | 
       | "Companies spend $30,000 and several weeks to get designs like
       | this"
       | 
       | Yes. Because being a first or early mover is expensive. You
       | commoditizing their style after they've put in all the brain work
       | to create or build it isn't the same thing.
       | 
       | Also, isn't the point of design engineering to be capable of
       | coming up with relatively original and innovative UI?
        
         | 101008 wrote:
         | Wow, honestly, I never visited Linear landing but after doing
         | so I see how they copied a lot of ideas / components from them.
        
           | swyx wrote:
           | https://www.linears.art/
        
       | salmonfamine wrote:
       | It's okay to just say, "designer."
        
       | uptown wrote:
       | So basically a ShadCN/UI rip-off?
        
       | gsanderson wrote:
       | Pretty ... but using it my CPU fan sounds like a jet about to
       | take off.
        
       | habosa wrote:
       | Some of these are very nice and not simple for most people to
       | implement (animated button border, for example). But some others
       | are so trivial I wonder why they bothered. For example Linear
       | Gradient: https://magicui.design/docs/components/linear-gradient
       | 
       | It's just passing JS properties to the `linear-gradient()` css
       | function which is already well documented on MDN. I can't see
       | what value Magic UI is providing there ...
       | https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/gradient/li...
        
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       (page generated 2024-05-23 23:01 UTC)