Codekit 2 is out | Hacker News Reader

Codekit 2 is out

incident57.com

49 pointssebgeelen53 comments

My goodness, this thread is actually worse then reddit. I never thought I would see such garbage in Hacker News before. This guy is releasing a new version of his product, of which thousands probably use. He just so happens to have a sense of humor (which anyone who has used Codekit before would know about) and you guys are picking him apart like a piece of turkey.

I actually can't believe what I am reading atm, has this industry really gotten to a point where nobody has a sense of humor or any congratulatory comments anymore? And everyone is force to pick apart every single thing?

HN has always had a vocal population of pedants who like to complain about shit they can nitpick apart for no good reason.

Combined with the other population who don't like to see tools and projects that let "lowly" developers accomplish the same things they worked so hard to do the manual/complicated way, and you get this thread so far..

Such is life...

I've been lurking on Hacker news for some time, and I'd say it's pretty common for threads to be filled with this attitude. I'd say it's a tad bit more common in threads that somehow is Apple related (this is a mac only app).

Agreed, this thread is ridiculous. Bryan is one of the funniest guys in the industry and his product is excellent

nonchalantly getting out credit card to pay for a great upgrade to an app I use daily to make a living while browsing through bitter comments from people that probably never even used the damn app

CodeKit is awesome and Bryan is a funny guy. I'm surprised that so many people don't get the humour on the website. I love it. Shows me Bryan's a real genuine person.

Oh and he's built an awesome product that makes my life so much easier... and he doesn't demand I pay the earth for it. #win

Looks very promising and like a great upgrade from CodeKit 1.0 of which I've been a happy user for the last 1.5 years. The creator has provided excellent support every time I contact him.

I LOVE the sense of humor in the testimonials section... LULz

My one concern is does CK 2.0 create standard config files for Bower, Grunt, etc... CK 1.0 did NOT do this and made collaborating with non Mac / non CK users difficult!

Codekit is a beautiful, comprehensive and powerful solution for those who don't want to/don't feel comfortable setting up Grunt or Gulp. If you're one of those people, it comes highly recommended.

Threads like this are why I don't waste my time on sites like this.

A bit frustration that it is a paid upgrade for Codekit 1.0 users - doesn't seem like that much has been changed, and it's not as if the first version saw a ton of updates.

Well, it includes some new tools, the refreshing of projects works better but the internal server is the really cool new feature. I really think it's worth the upgrade price.

I bought CodeKit 1 a while ago and about a week later he announced he had been working on CodeKit 2. Basically, my purchase was immediately abandonware. He's released no new features and very few updates (just library updates) since then. When I contacted him he wrote a short message back saying there will be no free upgrades to CodeKit 2. Stuff like this just teaches me not to trust these companies, I'm always going to get screwed. So, instead of investing myself to configure CodeKit and make it a part of my development pipeline, I moved over to Grunt. I didn't get to use CodeKit 1 on a single project because I knew it was already abandoned. It took me an hour or so to optimize my grunt file and get used to it but it's all been for the best. Grunt won't abandon me or gouge me for more money. I've also been using Adobe Brackets (and playing with GitHub Atom) a lot lately and it will probably soon replace the expensive Coda 2 that Panic never updates. I've never really been a huge open-source guy but the actions of Mac developers are pushing me that way.

He does offer a discount to get the update. Also, I'm sure you can still use CodeKit 1 if you don't want to pay for the update.

I like CodeKit. It safes me time/work to focus on more pressing matters.

I like what I'm seeing, however the main gripe I have is that it doesn't seem to be cross-platform; it looks like it's a GUI for Grunt configuration (it seems to have similar options) though.

Compare Maven / Ant / Gradle for the Java world, instead of builds configured in the IDE; said IDE's often have a GUI component for major build configuration files.

I wouldn't mind a GUI for Grunt configs, without sensible code refactoring, those can be a bitch to maintain.

There's a GUI for Grunt in the works: https://github.com/Mobile-Team/spock

I'm currently using gulp + browserify, it's basically the same set of features (modules, compilation, livereload), but free.

Maybe a little more configuration necessary though.

Set aside a few strange things you find on this website (e.g. testimonies sound fake...), CodeKit is an excellent program, I've been using for a few years.

GruntJS and Gulp essentially do the same thing of course, but CodeKit I guess 'interfaces' all those text-based configurations and once it's configured, well, it's pretty much done and you can just let it run in the background and forget about it.

Highly recommend it!

Damn, if I ever need to start taking web development seriously (right now it's only something I do for my little personal projects), I think I will buy this tool. The interface looks very nice, and it seems to integrate and simplify all sorts of useful features and workflows that I've seen described elsewhere (usually at length, with lots of documentation on how to get them working).

Another solution to the 'elephant in the room' - that frontend workflows have become too complicated for frontend developers.

Reading the testimonies made me wonder if this whole thing was a joke or not.

Looks cool otherwise though...

Are you kidding me?

The testimonials give the whola page a somewhat human touch. I - for one - am now pondering if there really is a story behind the "Mad at me since 2008" stuff about Apple's legal department :P

I had the opposite impression. My initial reaction was "how immature and technological incompetent are your users?".

I'm guessing the app is being marketed towards hipster frontend devs.

I'm far from a hipster front end dev I think; but I just happen to like the general 'tone' of this guys (if you're reading, sorry for referring to you as this guy) writing style. So probably I'm not in his target demographic.

Stuff like "Make Panic Jealous" target a really specific group of users (ye-olde average user doesn't know who/what Panic is) but really add flavour to his companies image.

Of course, to each his own. I don't like the writing style in Romeo and Juliet; does that make me a hater of the arts?

Wow.

Is double-edge sword as you may guess.

I think it's trying to parody itself.

I remember the days when I thought tools like this were cool. Like Coda for example.

CLI tools don't need to parody themselves, they're usually free, cross platform and I can retire them quickly because I don't feel overtly attached to them.

So it isn't a joke?

A few thoughts:

  - 2min and 54secondes of demo video to explain the localhost address. Sooo, boring.
  - At first, it sounded like another text editor but it's not.
  - It seems that's just a GUI skin to CLI tools

Yeah and Dropbox is just a GUI skin for rsync.

Sure, you got a point. (I've upvoted you.)

In the same time, Dropbox is more towards less savvy user and when you use Dropbox is more for the Cloud hosting than for its rsync capabilities.

Bittorent Sync then, who doesn't have Cloud hosting.

Prepros does all that for free, and it works in Mac and Windows. I could never get my shop on to Codekit because the developer refuses to port to Windows.

Does it? How do I get automated refresh in iOS (and Android) web browsers? How does Prepros help out in installing frameworks? Does Prepros have support for global custom frameworks? Is Prepros able to run scripts automatically?

To me, they are not in the same league…

Perhaps the best testimonials I've seen on an app.

I really don't see the value of having the compile toolchain in your editor. If you are making a serious front-end project, you will have created a gulp/grunt based workflow so that anyone with node installed can compile it. If you rely on Codekit's features, surely you're locking people into that editor?

Is it really so hard to open a command window and run a single command?

You grossly underestimate the number of solo/freelance web developers out there who just want to get to work on the project itself, instead of learning and setting up all those things (which may be overkill for their one-person project).

"Effort vs. Result" is an important metric, and Codekit lets you just "get it done" without needing to learn how to install and set up grunt or gulp, node (edit: and uglify-js, bower, image optimization tools, sass, less, stylus, compass, etc).. It just works.

And when Codekit becomes no longer appropriate then one can spend the time required to learn and configure grunt/gulp.

Is not like configure grunt or gulp is rocket science. If you are a solo/freelance that code to get the job done, 5 to 10 minutes of your time just for configure a grunt/gulp is not a massive lost of production time, also you get more control over what you want. Don't make it look like you would spend days trying to setting up that workflow when on reality it just take less than 10 or even 5 minutes for the avarege folk. Is really learning new things that scary, because for my understanding we as developers/designers need to learn new things every day so what is the hue?

While I agree that Grunt isn't rocket science, for purely front-end developers who aren't familiar with build tools, it can be quite challenging to get started initially. In order to start using Grunt you'd have to...

1. Install Node

2. Figure out how to use npm and package.json

3. Install the Grunt cli.

4. Install local Grunt.

5. Figure out exactly which Grunt plugins you need and install those.

6. Create the basic scaffolding of your Gruntfile, hoping that the references you use aren't outdated.

7. Figure out exactly which options each of your Grunt plugins need.

8. Do some debugging when you got something wrong in one (or more) of the steps above. Problem is, since this is your first time setting it up, you don't know which step you got wrong.

For someone unfamiliar with the Node & Grunt ecosystems, this could easily be a multi-day project. If you're simply putting out some static brochureware sites, then it might make a lot more sense to just pay for a GUI tool to handle a lot of this stuff for you.

I completely agree with you. And you might even not spend 5-10 minutes if you can find a Yeoman generator that suits your needs :-)

You're being specious here and you know it.

Sure it wouldn't take days to set up, but for someone who has never done it before, it will absolutely take more than 5-10 minutes to correctly set up and test node with grunt/gulp (and all the other tools you might need: less, sass, compass, uglify-js, bower, etc) to replace the various worklows that Codekit provides easily and painlessly.

Again I am not saying there's anything wrong with grunt/gulp, but as I said, "effort vs. result" is an important metric, and if a tool like Codekit gets me the same results faster and easier than spending time learning how to install and configure grunt/gulp and all the tools they automate, then that's a win for me.

To each their own though..

First of all, i don't know anything about my supposed speciusness (if that is not a word, then i just made it and you get it). But i would say that you are "effort vs result" matran is being a little over dramatic in this context. Setting up the workflow (grunt or gulp) would take minutes with a little "effort" from you hand, with the only cost being your time. Also we should take into account that not every "cool" people owns a MAC nor have the means to pay for the GUI tool that would like take time to get familiar with, you see what i did there didn't you?. "To each their own though..", i couldn't agree more. Cheers

For some people it is, I used to use CodeKit too (and I've used the beta) but at the moment I prefer using Grunt/Gulp, it provides me with more control over the building and others can use it easily by doing npm install.

But I assure you that there's definitely a market for tools like this.

Yes, a GUI is easier to use for some people than a command line.

This URL crashes Chrome on iOS.

And iOS7 Safari

Some people in this thread really need some tuning in their sarcasm detector.

"A Mac App for Cool People"

Did they really have to resort to a level that low?

Sounds like CodeKit's not for you then

Seriously. An embarrassingly bad slogan.

Self-deprecation has been part of CodeKit's branding since the beginning, when nobody had heard of it and the author had to put up his first fake testimonials.

The best thing on the page was the face palm user image.

“You don’t have permission to save the file ‘CodeKit’ to the folder ‘Library’.”

This crap doesn’t even start. Sent it straight to the trash.

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