
Show HN: UI builder for web developers - crcn
http://tandemcode.com/
======
terragon
From your page, I don't see any way I can evaluate it. Either some video with
an example, or a quick way to install a beta version would have been good.

I like it in concept, but there's been an explosion of UI design tools
recently and if you want to keep our attention, we need more of a demo.
Perhaps the show HN would have been better postponed a bit.

~~~
crcn
Thanks for the feedback! I figured that short videos throughout the website
would be enough to describe visually what Tandem is, but a short video at the
top would probably be better.

And yeah, there are a ton of UI design tools out there on the web, it's been
my #1 concern when building this thing out because they all promise similar
tooling. Though, I'm trying to position this app as more of an Atom, or
VSCode-like since it's geared to be another kind of extensible development
environment. I figured that open sourcing it would be a first good step for
that since developers would probably need to understand the internals before
writing plugins for new UI tools, code writers, etc.

I went ahead and added a "Fork me on GitHub" badge to make it more clear that
this is open source.

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techdragon
I noticed that you show the logos of PHP and Ruby in your graphics, while not
actually supporting either.

It certainly left a very unappealing first impression on me after my initial
enthusiasm at seeing those logos was bludgeoned by your actual supported
language list further down the page.

~~~
crcn
Sorry for the confusion there, I went ahead and clarified the descriptions.

Tandem runs any application, but needs the appropriate extensions in order to
write code. It has the capabilities of writing PHP, but that isn't implemented
yet.

The code writing aspect of Tandem is really just a small feature of the whole
application - The focus of Tandem is really to provide a preview (or many
previews) of your application with tooling that makes it easier to fix visual
bugs.

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taqwasd1
Why use this over writing basic html/css/js?

~~~
crcn
Ideally you'd use Tandem along-side your text editor. It's not meant to
replace writing code - I think in most cases it's easier to write code by hand
than use a visual tools. Though, I think there are cases where it's easier to
use visual tools against a live application preview for making small
adjustments - that's where Tandem fits in.

Here's a better video demo to help demonstrate this:

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/pc50x5m991j71ot/html-css-js-
demo.m...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/pc50x5m991j71ot/html-css-js-
demo.mp4?dl=0)

------
redindian75
Is this something like a opensource version of WebFlow?

~~~
crcn
Yep, I made Tandem open source here:
[https://github.com/tandemcode/tandem](https://github.com/tandemcode/tandem)

It is a bit like WebFlow, but focused more-so on the coding aspect. Tandem
integrates with your text editor, encourages you to write code instead of
using the design tools to all of your UI work -- they're mostly there for UI
adjustments, and to create features that are hard to code by hand.

