Hacker News Reader

Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

> The best way to tell about Webcodesk is to let you try it in action.

> So instead of an introduction, I would recommend you to complete the tutorial in the online version of Webcodesk. Click on the link below.

Please put a GIF of your tool in action on your github page instead of this message.

View on HN

I'm recording the video now. It will be available in two or three hours. Thanks for the advice

No problem -- Looking forward to taking another look at the project!

Here is the timelapse video: https://youtu.be/5b2MAk95W8s

Glad you got through making the video, but maybe it was a little unclear what I meant -- a short ~15 second GIF of moving about the app (not an introduction, but when you're being productive with it) would do much more to draw people in.

By all means though, embed the video onto the page -- it's at least a start. IMO it's not really reasonable to expect busy devs to sit through 1 minute of silent sped-up introductory content.

Here are some examples of what I mean (I searched "wysiwyg react" and "page builder react" on github and picked some good examples):

- https://github.com/jpuri/react-draft-wysiwyg

- https://github.com/BuilderIO/builder

- https://github.com/blocks/blocks

- https://github.com/artf/grapesjs

Not to go off topic but I find animated GIFs great for 5 second things & frustrating for things over 5 seconds. Videos tend to be easier to pause, fast forward, rewind & skip ahead.

I say this only because it seems to be a trend in some software dev circles where people post 15-30 second instructional animated GIFs to demonstrate something. It's incredibly frustrating to watch. If you miss something you're stuck either downloading the GIF into an editor or having to watch the whole thing again.

Builder is not actually open source

Blocks is alpha

Grapes is ok, but the repo maintainer is not the greatest

What in your opinion is wrong with the Grapes maintainer? The comment seems like an indictment of some sort without obvious evidence.

Take a look at how the issues are managed. Each time he replies, he immediately closes the issue without seeing of it is actually resolved, and then he had a lockbox which locks the conversations.

You can create GIFs of your product in action using this handy tool: https://www.screentogif.com/

On Linux there is peek for quick screen to gif/mp4 recordings: https://github.com/phw/peek

I agree with this. I scrolled through the github page, then I went to the main homepage, scrolled through that and closed the tab. I wanted to see what it actually did before investing more time reading about it and seeing how it works.

Same.

Asking people to upfront invest their time into something without first selling them on that thing is a big no no.

Yes even/especially for tech projects and libraries.

...and I am even this guys target audience, a React developer who makes a living with it.

Here is the timelapse video: https://youtu.be/5b2MAk95W8s

This is a good idea. It would also help sell people if the example was changing or adding something to a non-trivial layout.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com