First impression suggestions

[anon80961494]

Hi there,

Hope this post is in the right place. A few suggestions after a grand total of 10 minutes of use:

1. Shouldn’t copying CSS (or Static HTML / CSS) use OS-native line breaks? i.e. CRLF on Windows. Clicking that menu item then pasting into Notepad produces a garble of text without line breaks.

2. It would be nice if toggled menu items like Toogle HUD Mode and Toggle Presentation Mode made use of checkmarks like this beside them to indicate current state. I suspect this is a limitation of whatever framework you’re using for cross-platform UI but it would be nice polish.

3. Your menu items need Alt accelerators. e.g. Alt+F should drop down the File menu. (I do appreciate that you show shortcuts beside menu items to give users an opportunity to learn them for frequently used commands)

4. It might be nice if arrow keys (left/right/up/down) nudged the selected element(s).

5. I notice the auto-generated HTML/CSS has a lot of repetition, and does not resemble something I would want to maintain. Are there any plans to clean this up and generate it more intelligently? (e.g. Define repeated styles just once them reuse them throughout) Or am I using this wrong?

Keep up the great work!

[Ryan]

Thanks for the feedback! Some thoughts below:

Shouldn’t copying CSS (or Static HTML / CSS) use OS-native line breaks? i.e. CRLF on Windows. Clicking that menu item then pasting into Notepad produces a garble of text without line breaks.

Most editors (e.g. Atom, VSCode) will interpret the line endings correctly. (Notepad unfortunately doesn’t.) That’s the easiest immediate fix on this.

It would be nice if toggled menu items like Toogle HUD Mode and Toggle Presentation Mode made use of checkmarks like this beside them to indicate current state. I suspect this is a limitation of whatever framework you’re using for cross-platform UI but it would be nice polish.

Your menu items need Alt accelerators. e.g. Alt+F should drop down the File menu. (I do appreciate that you show shortcuts beside menu items to give users an opportunity to learn them for frequently used commands)

The joys of cross-platform development. Perfect OS polish tends to take a back seat to main app functionality, but we’ll definitely look at backfilling this as we can.

It might be nice if arrow keys (left/right/up/down) nudged the selected element(s).

Agree that this feels like a familiar/natural addition. We haven’t implemented yet because it’s not as straightforward as in a traditional drawing tool. It maps to a single self-directed element, but not a parent-directed element. Multiselect also complicates things: if you have a mixed section of self- and parent-directed elements, what should happen? (only self-directed move, nothing moves, etc.) In a multiselection of self-directed elements, each element is positioning relative to its parent—does this nudging method still make sense in that context?

Nothing that can’t be worked through, but a lot of moving parts to consider.

I notice the auto-generated HTML/CSS has a lot of repetition, and does not resemble something I would want to maintain. Are there any plans to clean this up and generate it more intelligently? (e.g. Define repeated styles just once them reuse them throughout) Or am I using this wrong?

It’s never been our intent to make a WYSIWYG straight-to-production web tool. If that’s the workflow that would best fit your needs, I’d definitely recommend Webflow. They’ve spent 6 years working on that particular use case and I think they’ve done a really good job.

The HTML/CSS export from Subform is more oriented towards being a head-start on production, i.e. a more usable artifact than a pile of PNGs or an inspector. We’re definitely open to iterating on it to make it more tactically useful. If you have an example of what kind of output would be more helpful, let us know.