Froont Wants To Keep Developers Out Of The Responsive Web Design Process | Hacker News Reader

Froont Wants To Keep Developers Out Of The Responsive Web Design Process

techcrunch.com

19 pointsmrspin18 comments

THIS is why Techcrunch is annoying. How many "in-browser" and "responsive" mock-up tools have already been launched? Jetstrap comes to mind immediately, and I recall seeing several others.

I appreciate them covering tech companies for less technical audiences, but it just seems like they follow a few certain VCs around, rather than looking at the technology that is worth GETTING VC funding.

I don't think this is a mock-up tool. If I'm not mistaken, this is a design tool that produces production-ready HTML.

"Froont is the fastest solution for designers who want to prototype responsive websites with their true content."

>at the bottom. It's for "prototypes."

During the process of developing the tool, it has evolved from a prototyping tool into a design tool. Unfortunate delay in updating the definition on CrunchBase.

Design is iterative by its nature – therefore FROONT can be used for prototypes and for designs, that depends of the stage and complexity of design. IT can be wireframing, designing responsive patterns or design with real content.

Hi! I would like to clarify what we are actually doing with FROONT – we aren't another bootstrap editor at all. We are aiming to give designers more freedom and control over design process so they can work faster and communicate with developers better building designs that can be tested on real devices right away. We don't want to automate design, rather automate repetitive parts in coding.

Oh, as in FroontPage. Totally need this.

Edit: Sorry for flippancy. I sense the challenge of the over-complete demo. Eventually, the design requires interfacing with developers who are then skewered for not getting it done as fast as the drag and drop mock-up.

It's probably not horribly worse than taking on an HTML5 template from your favorite template garden along with a laundry list of breaking customizations... I find it pretty quick to take the static images and build out without the baggage of more opinionated style work already "complete"

So I'm a dev who spent 10 minutes just now with Jetstrap and Froont; Jetstrap has component items such as 'navigation' etc., which can be easily tossed in. Froont has break points for responsive design. So while Jetstrap allows you to view the result on iPhone v. desktop; Froont allows you to set up very different parameters that change responsively to screen size 'break pointss'... or am I missing that feature in Jetstrap?

Is graphic designer now synonymous with ignorant? If not I think they would be fine dragging around some bootstrap text and refreshing a browser.

Seriously. Every time I see a tool pop up for "designers" the definition tends to be:

-code illiterate -drag n' drop syndrome -shortcut seeking -so visually oriented that they might as well be blind

It honestly makes designers look bad. Modern designers know how to code as well (or should). Why? So that they design with the development in mind and don't deliver shit that's too outlandish to implement, or more importantly, deliver shit that's ignorant of what's possible.

It is not about coding versus not coding : ) FROONT is about visually choosing web fonts, work with vectors right in the browser, see how designs perform on various screen widths as soon as possible! Using visual approach where it makes sense and speeds things up and coding to add something new to the project. I can't imagine why somebody, be it designers or developers, should enjoy tweaking cross-browser issues, dealing with scrollbars etc.

Congrats on the launch to Sandijs and team! Glad to have played a small role in this journey. Now that you're public, I can finally add you to StartHQ: https://starthq.com/apps/froont

I really appreciate the idea but most designers coming out of school (or self-taught) know how to manage building mockups in HTML and CSS. I might see how this could be slightly quicker but it still doesn't quite translate like the real thing.

It doesn't look like this allows me to add non-standard attributes. If I'm using AngularJS, I have to export this HTML, then add my ng-* markup, and then if I want to modify my design I have to do that all over again. Am I missing something?

How about letting me try it out without registering? :)

Love Froont - did some mockups and got valid HTML out of it in minutes. Genius.

Great to hear! Thanks!

Valid doesn't mean much, is it good markup? Millions of useless nested divs with class names describing the tags that should have been used instead of div is valid html, and also terrible.

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