

Codecademy vs. Scroll Kit - codybrown
http://codybrowntext.tumblr.com/post/17951263778/codecademy-vs-scroll-kit

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ookblah
My issue with having these kind of robust drag and drop html editors isn't so
much with the tech as it is the audience it is appealing to. As a developer,
unless this thing outputs compliant XHTML/CSS, it's much less useful to me
outside of anything like putting up a quick and dirty landing page. Just look
at muse.

Yes, templates can look generic and such but the whole point of that is to
control the design so that you end up with something that looks decent to the
average person. If you want something more custom, learn to code.

More often then not, when you put "robust" tools into the hands of people who
don't know what to do, what you end up with is just ugly. Giving the user more
choice is sometimes detrimental if they don't know what to do with it.

I think these tools are cool, but I'd like to see more development on editors
that teach core concepts like spacing/readability and selecting complimentary
colors and guide people through process rather than providing every type of
granular control.

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codybrown
"More often then not, when you put "robust" tools into the hands of people who
don't know what to do, what you end up with is just ugly."

I find this to be true with a lot of developers. They know how to code so they
have a "robust" tool set but have no idea how to lay out a page and end up
with something functional but ugly.

I very much agree that everyone could benefit from learning more core concepts
like spacing and complimentary colors.

Knowing how to code has never meant that you know how to build a good webpage.

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ookblah
That's true. Even knowing how to code doesn't mean the output will be nice to
look at. I guess what I meant was that providing granular controls that mimic
what a developer would do tend to bog down the average user.

For instance, let's say you allow someone to click on a div element and
specify the padding/margin/positioning. Now multiply that by 10 elements on
the screen and give them a blank slate in regards to layout/colors and that's
a recipe for ugly.

We seem to want that ideal of total control in a wysiwyg editor (ie build your
site from scratch and drag anything anywhere!) but I would suggest that it's
something else entirely for the casual website builder. Not templates, but
maybe a hybrid.

That said, scrollkit looks pretty awesome and looking forward to how it
evolves.

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BrianMatch
I was a UI designer at Homestead (and later Intuit) where we've had a drag-
and-drop website editor for years. The problem we we eventually faced was not
helping non-developers "develop" a website, but helping non-developers
"design" a website. A website that looked professional (we catered to small
businesses), readable (yellow text on red backgrounds is incredible difficult
to read), and contained the information their users are looking for (like a
phone number). Some users will get it and create great looking websites. Most
will not, and that's where templates become really helpful, if not necessary.

There's an interesting irony you might face. Helping non-developers create and
publish a website is an incredibly delightful experience for them. It's easy
to forget the time years ago when we wrote our first line of code and it
worked. It's incredibly satisfying and empowering. It's a great feeling to
instill in your users. But that doesn't help them design better pages. In
fact, it sometimes works against it. They'll add whacky text, images, and
background colors because it's fun to play and create. The more power they
have, the more they'll take advantage of it. For one-off personal web pages it
won't be a big deal. But for creating serious websites, it might become a
problem.

Good luck though! It's great seeing others innovating in this space!

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subpixel
Scroll Kit is a polished, advanced tool to put creative tools in the hands of
lay people. There's room for that in the marketplace. (Weebly etc. are already
doing it, but still, the beta is slick and a job well done.)

But man, it reminds me of Apple's Pages, which my mother used in December to
create THE WORLD'S UGLIEST HOLIDAY NEWSLETTER. When I got it, I was actually
embarrassed, wondering what hundreds of other people were thinking when they
got it (look at this - has P. been drinking?). I would much, much rather she
asked me for some help and allowed me to guide her to a) a better result and
b) a rudimentary understanding of how the tool she's using works.

tl;dr - startups shouldn't settle for making something possible for their
users - they should make it their mission to help their users become _awesome_
at something.

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RandallBrown
How does scrollkit compete with code academy? Scrollkit seems to be for
building websites, while code academy is for teaching people programming.

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kateray
I think that's sort of the point. I don't think they compete, but what's
interesting is people's perception that they do. It serves to highlight this
tension between expectations of tech literacy going up at the same time as
tools are making coding skills less necessary for building things on the web.

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RandallBrown
Oh I get it. People were ditching code academy because instead of learning to
code, they could just use ScrollKit instead. I thought people were actually
saying "ScrollKit is better at teaching me to code than Code Academy is."

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brudgers
"Please switch to Google Chrome to Access the Editor"

Well, I'm done with scrollkit.com.

~~~
kateray
Sorry, we'll definitely be supporting other browsers in the future. We're a
two-person team right now and haven't had the time to work out all the browser
compatibility issues. Looking to hire a 3rd person - interested?

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chimeracoder
> The difference between a div class and a div id ... [is] the kind of brutal
> lessons that first timers slog through and few master (and that’s the simple
> stuff).

Really? Just think of the class as a surname and the id as a social security
number - many people can have the same surname, and those that have the same
one have something in common. Only one person can have a given SSN.

What's hard about it? Okay, one is denoted by '.' and the other by '#', but
I'm not sure how something like _that_ gets more complicated.

CSS and Javascript can be a pain overall, but in the end, if you need to know
much more than the above, you should really just be learning to use the entire
toolbox, not picking and choosing the tools that you think you want (which are
oftentimes not the ones you really need).

