Avocode – preview and inspect PSD without Photoshop | Hacker News Reader

Avocode – preview and inspect PSD without Photoshop

avocode.com

83 pointsPetrBrzyBrzek20 comments

How is it different from the Adobe tool mentioned here earlier today ? (https://projectparfait.adobe.com/)

For one, you can export to CSS, LESS, SASS and Stylus. I think Parfait only exports to CSS.

We cannot speak for the Parfait team, but we think there are some key differentiators given that their tool is from Adobe. Read Q11 at http://avocode.com/faq.html

I know Sketch is mentioned in the FAQ as something that may come later. But, Sketch is quickly becoming the darling of the web design world, and the development world just hasn't adopted it yet. Want to corner the market? Support Sketch sooner, rather than later. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Avocode can do!

Although I think this tool is fantastic, and an asset to the design community, i think it is an attempt at making the wrong tool for the job slightly less wrong. Photoshop was never designed, optimized, or planned around UI designers - it's audience is photographers.

I applaud projects like this, but sometimes its just better to use a tool that was build from the ground up around UI design, not an app that can be hacked to the point where it can somewhat deliver the results that UI designers need.

I personally use Sketch and Sketch Mirror and have found that the native support for device mirroring, retina resolutions, and CSS layer styles have become an essential part of my workflow. Photoshop gets REALLY messy as soon as you get a few iterations into a big project, and although there are hacks to get around some of the frustrations, at the end of the day they are just that: hacks.

Unfortunately, you're right (about "the wrong tool for the job"), but just as you use the best tool for you and for the job, many designers love Photoshop and it is the industry standard. For now, this is the best solution unless you're both designing and developing.

I'm more interested in the cross platform thing from avocode than css generation.

As an webdeveloper on linux, doing the frontend development work from psds is always a pain, as gimp has only partial support (mostly : can't work with text and still have mis-rendering issues) and I don't see myself buying the overpriced photoshop and opening a virtual machine (or uploading any psd I may use) just to get font sizes and names.

I don't know anyone using sketch, but I suppose for what I see it's macosx only ?

This is amazing. No one who uses or likes photoshop for design has to switch, and developers never need to find a copy of photoshop again. This is a genius solution.

Also the fact that it's multiplatform is great. I'm looking forward to using this on linux.

Has anyone tried Layervault? I've never used them but they look like they do something similar. They also have an open source ruby library for inspecting PSD files called PSD.rb which is how I know of them.

LayerVault is a great tool if you want to keep your design files version controlled and nicely organized, which is the primary function. They have also introduced a handoff feature (http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/82302518939/introducing-as...) that is somewhat closer to Avocode. But Avocode aims to be your tool of choice when it comes to designer->developer interaction and VICE VERSA. Many services often forget those developers who must code the same parts over and over again.

As an aside, I was surprised (in a good way) at how well the video blended in with the page. Pixel-perfect alignment of the first thumbnail of the video with the slightly-animated image shown before, and near-instantaneous starting when I played. No flicker, no buffering, just play immediately.

Looks cool. Me and my friends are working on an API service that would enable anyone to build such an app. http://filepreviews.io

Just the sort of tool I'm after! Been using Gimp to open PSDs but it's quite finicky and error prone. I can't justify myself a Photoshop license just for inspection purposes.

Interesting .. how good is the PSD support ?

If it's based on existing 3rd party libraries then I imagine there are some things that don't work, on the other hand it might do something a bit more exotic like sandbox adobe apps.

Parsing the PSD format is quite a challenge given its "half-open" nature. We've looked at many different libraries out there and basically took the best from each. Now we're also contributing to the open PSD.rb implementation.

This looks great! I wanted something sim(ilar|pler) for inspecting psd iOS mockups (to extract size/font info, etc). This is clearly geared towards web, but looks like it would work well for any sort of design.

"Right now Avocode is focused on the web but we would like to offer the same experience for mobile developers too" - Question 12 http://avocode.com/faq.html

How can I test it. Put my email down and on a list now.

Also your email subject says subscribing and at the same time there is no unsubscribe link.

Maybe change subject to "Thank you for showing interest in Avocode"

Thanks for noticing. We are going to fix some of these mistakes.

This looks way better than what Adobe is doing with https://projectparfait.adobe.com/

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