Pingendo – Free, simple app for Bootstrap prototyping
pingendo.com
pingendo.com
Without any customization you have this typical thousands times seen Bootstrap look. Only few of the available Bootstrap themes have an original and from Bootstrap outstanding look but then you add even more bloat to your site figuring out what CSS you could leave out. You could also customize yourself but again why not quickly do the stuff without Bootstrap? FE development got quite far these days and today's CSS and JS is not your daddy's HTML anymore, Flexbox is great and there're tons of specialized and modular libs.
Besides, Sass and Less were never my favorites but this would be a minor pick. They are ok to get along.
Last but not least they claim to be mobile-first which is IMO far off and the biggest deal breaker. Just open the Bootstrap page on a newer iPhone (eg 6) and open the menu. There's some significant lag until the menu opens and then the menu-open animation sluggishly stutters running at very low framerate. This could have be done with native CSS and hardware-accelerated 3d-transforms in a responsive and butter-smooth manner with a just few lines. Just having a responsive grid-system doesn't make Bootstrap mobile-first.
I believe that Bootstrap could be good for non consumer facing sites where the audience is less demanding. Eg you need to build an internal reporting dashboard for some company departments and it doesn't have to slick, smooth or sexy. Just a dashboard which is faster and more flexible than sending Excel sheets back and forth. Then yes, Bootstrap is a good choice.
Don't want to be too negative, maybe it's just my cluenessless but could somebody enlighten me: why do I need else Bootstrap in 2016?
Coming from someone whose PHP skills aren't too shabby but his graphical design skills stink, I'd say no.
From the very beginning of my current project, I've had difficulty finding a partner with strong UI skills. In fact, I chose my early frameworks almost solely upon needing to rely on the UI design of others. UI just isn't a strength. Hell, I don't even match clothes well and (I kid you not) I still keep a note in my phone about which colors of shirts and pants match together.
Although Bootstrap is fat, as you suggest, for someone like me having to do almost all UI on my own and who's been told his logo looks like it was done by a toddler with a large paintbrush, it is wonderful to be able to drop Bootstrap in so I can focus my attention elsewhere. A tool like Pingendo makes it even easier for me.
But if you ask me to build an interface from scratch with bootstrap I'm going to end up curled up in a ball on the floor.
> Hell, I don't even match clothes well and (I kid you not) I still keep a note in my phone about which colors of shirts and pants match together.
It's definitely not a better way to create fluid-responsive viewports.
And the whole grid obsession has gone too far. Among graphic designers and studio artists, a "grid" was always just a fun-to-try curiosity for noob artists to learn composition. Grids are only seriously used by "op" (optical illusion) artists and a few OCD artists with an unhealthy obsession with geometric alignment, like maybe Edward Hopper.
The problem is, non-designers are buying and selling these frameworks and themes. Often designers aren't even part of the purchase process. And how many designers would object: "You're making a mistake because you will regret the technical debt of this." Hey, more billable hours for everybody when it comes time to maintain the grid within the grid from hell, which was FUBAR code from day 1, further obfuscated by some proprietary WYSIWYG. Wow, the screenshot looks great though! How many designers even use the Bootstrap grid properly, assuming it was a good idea in the first place?
The fundamentals of composition haven't changed in hundreds of years. This is false: "Not using a grid is the sure sign of an amateur." Yes, grids go back to the Renaissance, but it's more often a crutch for a new artist copying a master, or for an OCD personality like Edward Hopper. You can feel the cold, painful rigidity of his work, it's amazing--but if the guy was my personal friend, I'd say he needs to loosen up and take off the training wheels. But hey, that's just my opinion ;-)
Some very famous graphic designers used a grid as the basis of their designs.
http://www.amazon.com/Grid-Systems-Graphic-Design-Communicat...
Anyway, my real complaint about grids is all the technical debt it adds, and in the case of Bootstrap it's bad, in my opinion. And it's totally unnecessary. If you want two columns, just work from 50%, you don't need a complex system for that. It's harder to make changes when there's a cryptic grid system in place. When I see code like class="grid-12c" next to class="grid-9b" I'm thinking what the hell? Is that supposed to be human-readable? To me, it seems like a bad trend. If people want grids so bad, then why did we stop using tables 15 years ago? Seriously. I thought floated divs were a step in the right direction, more akin to how designers/artists work, like I can just imagine Matisse saying, "Float that margin a little lower. Perfect!"
That's what you'd think, but intuitive CSS working differently, or not at all, depending on your browser is what made Bootstrap necessary in the first place.
Bootstrap's great feature is that it works at all. I assure you that rolling your own site with a level of functionality provided by Bootstrap is a massive pain in the ass.
Tables were a pain in their own way. Don't you remember "font" tags?
This makes more sense in a context where they are dealing with a lot of freelancers and don't want to deal with 25 idiosyncratic ways to implement a dropdown menu.
http://simpleqode.com/preview/paperclip/1.3.2/ui-elements.ht...
For a programmer I have a pretty good graphic design sense, so I can limp along and build my own components while keeping an overall consistent style. A lot of other programmers are awful at this and I've seen some hideous stuff. Rando freelances are the extreme case, but even if you're stuck having a programmer without UI horse sense do UI work, having a framework based UI toolkit is a huge help.
I've been prototyping a lot last year, and it was never straightforward because I have to compose with provided elements to build something looking a minimum like what I wanted.
Pingendo will allow me to do just that: quickly add, remove, switch components the fastest possible, and just focus on the product. This is the most important thing when wireframing.
This sounds like another good reason, I didn't think about it. Could you elaborate on this? Thanks
> 4) Why use Bootstrap? > Because Bootstrap is the most widely adopted development framework, with the largest thriving community and most extensive documentation.
How about something a little better than "because everyone else is using it", such as:
"Bootstrap gives us a common vocabulary of classes and components that makes it easier for beginners to build fully-functioning markup, and makes it easier for developers of all levels to communicate with one another. It also provides constraints on the otherwise-unlimited possibilities of HTML+CSS which makes it possible for us to build this GUI tool that interacts with it."
Also, the more CDNs using it, the more likely is to be in your browser cache, and the easier it is to find devs.
And if you really wanted to, you could supplement it: "...making it the most widely adopted development framework."
Totally love the fact that there's a real browser behind and I can just add bootstrap classes on elements I want. Great job, instant hook.
This is even more weird when you consider that laptops that came with 10.7 went out of AppleCare a few months ago.
Even Apple has stopped supporting 10.8 and below.
3) Is Pingendo free? Yes. What is free today will be free tomorrow. Premium services are coming and they will pay our bills.
I think if the target audience is "non designers" who just want to get something done, it's perfect. I generally throw together UIs at work and pass them on to our designers who of course throw it out and put in real stuff, but at least they know they're starting with a functional product to work from. That's where I think this tool will really work for people.
(I agree that it's annoying to have to do that though)
is there any difference?
the app felt very clunky. As a developer, I felt very restricted.. This definitely not intended for developers...
Pine in Pinegrow comes from Pine trees and no code comes from Atom. Besides Bootstrap, PG also supports Foundation, plain HTML, converting HTML pages to WordPress themes, master pages, smart components etc and aims to be a kind of modern Dreamweaver replacement.
And sorry that you feel offended by my kids having to eat.
firebug / chrome dev tools are great, I still use them along side pinegrow, but they aren't pinegrow. And pinegrow doesn't do everything perfect. I will ocassionally open up the same files I'm working in pinegrow inside a code editor for more robust tools, BUT pinegrow has been excellent to work visually on some of the mindnumbing things I'd have to do in code if I didn't have it.