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> Before Compose took over as the new direction for Android app development, the Android Studio designer IDE had a very VB6-style designer where you could drag and drop components, while the underlying UI files were all XML based.

It's important to note that pretty much nobody used the visual designer though. The resulting xml was pretty terrible, writing the UIs manually (in xmls, while looking at preview) was infinitely better

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That's just Android though. A good example of doing this well is JavaFX with Scene Builder. The XML corresponds to the UI tree 1:1 and the designer makes XML that looks hand written (or vice-versa). FXML is also a pretty intuitive schema and there's a dialect of CSS intended for UI that I find more intuitive than web CSS.

Plenty of apps used the visual designer. You could tell because the UI would be a right mess the moment you didn't use the app on a screen that matched theirs.

Good apps were using semantically correct design layouts but there were, and still are, tons of bad apps out there, just like there were a ton of VB6 applications.

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