Yeoman.io - Quickly build beautiful web applications | Hacker News Reader

Yeoman.io - Quickly build beautiful web applications

yeoman.io

201 pointskevincennis49 comments

Where does the "beautiful" part of this come into play? For whatever reason I clicked through assuming I would be looking at a way of actually creating, well, aesthetically beautiful web applications.

I came here to say the same thing.

'Beautiful' has been diluted in the same way 'disrupt' has. It's becoming a real joke, and I can no longer take posts seriously that claim to be 'beautiful' on here.

This comment is beautiful.

> It's becoming a real joke

It has always been something of a joke. No one is printing out screenshots of their favorite web apps to hang on the wall.

You're mom is beautiful. WTF why isn't anyone talking about the fact that Google is releasing cool stuff developers actually want to use now!

I don't like sounding so negative, but that was the most uninformative video I've seen in a long time. The bullet points below it present far more information than the video itself.

Actually, I really enjoyed a new project where the bullet points actually had the info in the video. Nothing kills me more than a marketing page where I have to watch a 5-7 min video to understand the project. I'm much more willing to watch a brief video with talking points underneath.

I completely agree, but that's when the bullet points present the information in the video. Here the video didn't even convey all the info in the bullet points.

Looks a lot like a customized version of grunt.js -- backbone-boilerplate is another example of a suite of tools built on grunt.

https://github.com/cowboy/grunt

https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone-boilerplate

For anyone else who didn't recognize the term AMD:

http://requirejs.org/docs/whyamd.html

Here's the spec: https://github.com/amdjs/amdjs-api/wiki/AMD

edit: updated link.

Can always count on companies like Google 'launching' projects without source code. Would we really be that okay if an open source developer published vapourware with an email signup form?

Isn't that a textbook MVP?

Not if you're claiming open source.

Very cool looking. This is all the stuff I use for front-end dev but currently set up from scratch for every new project. I love what Paul Irish does, I love what Google does, I can't wait to see this in action.

Tangent: the '.io' TLD seems trendy. Why? I see that it means "Indian Ocean". I associate it with "Input/Output." It would make sense for "Internet of things" company IO Bridge, which is at iobridge.com, to be at bridge.io.

Is there any particular reason for Yeoman to be a '.io' site?

Yeoman was launched today at Google IO.

It's become a standard name for IT products (more so than .it!) due to input/output connnotations, and as the other commenter said, it's especially appropriate for a Google product launched at IO.

Also a lot of names sound cool as .io, e.g. cloud.io can be read as "Cloudio". And due to the relatively high cost, a lot of .io names are still available. Just 18 months ago, a ton of 2-letter domains were still going (http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/two-letter-io-domains-ava...).

The current trend for the .io TLD is of course a playful resurgence of the 80's hip-hop exclamation "yo".

And now you can't help pronouncing it "yo" !

Totally trendy and a good example of why the new gTLDs won't break the Internet. Most TLDs stopped really meaning anything a while ago.

Noticed addyo in the terminal during the video; here's a more descriptive explanation on the how and why from his blog:

http://addyosmani.com/blog/improved-developer-tooling-and-ye...

https://github.com/yeoman/yeoman.io

That appears to be the website's source, not the actual yeoman tool source.

Here's their supplemental video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s6Yv9pVXZc

The video starts with "Hey guys, eh, so today at Gooogle IO we announced a new project we've been working on for the past month called Yeoman". Does this mean that the project has had about 2 man months of work behind it?

Well, the rationale behind it doesn't seem exactly new or extensive. Sounds doable.

Probably a fifth of that. I'd imagine it's a 20% project.

Bottom of page says 'Copyright Google 2012'

It was presented by Paul Irish during his GoogleIO session just a few hours ago.

Looks like a Google project. Interesting

Commits from Addy Osmani and Paul Irish. Definitely promising.

It is a Google project - they just demo'd it at IO

That's explain no fb like button ;)

Pardon my noobiness, but how is this different from a full fledged IDE like Netbeans or IntelliJ? For example on Netbeans you could have a good workflow similar to Yeoman. By using shortcuts you can push changes to your test instance, it has plenty of integration with Ant, Phing, Hudson/Jenkins, Github, other bunch of plugins, etc. It has a fully functional bash shell window, shortcuts that trigger the browser. You barely don't have to switch to anything while coding on it.

I get that IDEs like Netbeans have a bigger memory print, but what I mean is that using a tool container that gathers` all your other tools together is really nothing new.

Am I missing something here? What do you guys think? oh and I don't want to start a vi vs IDEs war here. I'm talking about the concept.

I use Brunch.io currently. It scratches the same itch. I don't see anything here that would instigate me to change, but I can see how this could work very well if you wanted to use Angular.js.

From the feature list of Yeoman it looks like Brunch has way more stuff going for it. Brunch hasn't bought into a framework and allows you to configure your assembly workflow. It's fine being opinionated when you're giving up freedom to choose but gaining speed of development. I just don't see what harm it is for frontend assemblers to allow you to pick and choose between template/CSS compilers. Throw in the framework and you could see some automation not possible if picking one css and template language.

EDIT: Just saw the package manager :) That's something!

Personal note: I can't keep up with all the new projects. I'm feeling overwhelmed right now. Should one just disconnect?

Just try stuff out on a personal toy project. Think of some little thing you might wanna do and do it (no job too small) and just try out the tool in a low-risk environment. I am giving jamjs (& require.js) a whirl in a little side project, I'll probably do the same with this. If it blows up, who cares? 1. get sandbox 2. play in it. :)

Seems like it will only help the very first part of making a web app, where you have to set up directories and libraries and such (scaffolding.) There is a package manager, but you could also use something like [Volo](https://github.com/volojs/volo).

> Why, hello!.

That "!." surely hurts. Even more being a Google project… And the use of 'beautiful'. Seems that I'm not the only one. You could argue that it helps you use Bootstrap and other 'visual frameworks', but still.

Wanted the site to more informative. Video dosen't really convey anything. When I clicked on the title: "Quickly build beautiful web apps"- I was expecting something totally different

Video is cute but not descriptive enough.

I think if you scan the bullet points just under it you get the idea.

It's basically the HTML5Boilerplate Build Script [1], with some nice extra's - Bootstrap (and compilation), package & dependency management, unit testing, preview server, etc.

1. https://github.com/h5bp/ant-build-script

You definitely need "awesome tool and made with love" on your page. :-)

Is this really a Google project?

As always, "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder.

People that write tools that are interacted with via a command line interface are only hurting themselves. I just can't comprehend why this trend is on the rise. It is 2012.

Being able to reliably build something with complete control over the process isn't going out of style anytime soon.

I think you overestimate the level of functionality a quality GUI can actually express. This is a tool for developers, and developers will always need to know the command line.

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