We've considered it, and it's definitely possible (the core of Webflow right now is actually just Webkit), but we're currently focusing on making sure it works really well on the web.
3,663 karma · joined October 5, 2008
I'm a co-founder and CEO of Webflow (YC S13). We're cooking up some amazing tools for web designers and developers. If you're interested in joining our team, send me a note to vlad@webflow.com :)
We're definitely looking far beyond just being an editor. What you see right now was an important pre-requisite to what we really wanted to build - hoping to share more on that soon.
Absolutely agree with you about hand-coding. I'm one of those folks! It's hard (impossible?) to compete with the flexibility and power of pure code, but we can try right?
The CSS Playground is a preview of our CSS styling tools, and we'll be adding some of our other components (layout, adding new elements, code export) soon. Currently, it only works in Chrome, but we're working hard to add Firefox support.
Edit: Should be fixed now.
I've been thinking about this issue a lot over the last year, and it's really as hard as you state (and then some). We ended up having to create our own supersets of the DOM/CSSOM in order to keep track of individual elements/selectors as they are created/removed/changed. I would be very surprised (and pleased) if Mozilla was able to implement this in a way that works without lots of additional/manual inputs. If you think JS source maps are a hard problem to solve, I'd say this one is at least an order of magnitude harder.
Ben/Pinterest are probably the most well-known ex-residents of the Hacker Dojo. It is an awesome place to work, and there lots of promising startups that have set up shop here.
Speaking of hiring engineers, the 2013 Hacker Fair is coming up: http://www.hackerdojo.com/HackerFair3
[1] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/15/1187417/-Elizabeth-...
[1] http://knockoutjs.com/documentation/observableArrays.html
> In fact, if the world is to be saved, it won’t be through human devices.
> Our image of primitive man is that he was a bumbling, grunting idiot.
Since the author is Christian (shown prominently anywhere his name appears), these three sentences make me question what he means by the word 'save.' If he means it in the 'spiritual Christian sense,' then of course no app will do that. And the 'our image' of primitive man seems like the Christian one, influenced by the concept of original sin.
> The world is governed much more by human nature than we’d like to admit, and human nature doesn’t change.
It seems to me that human nature can very much be influenced by technology. Slavery used to be commonplace, with many people (including the strongly religious) having no moral opposition to it. Massive atrocities throughout history have taken place because they were outside the public eye. Hateful words were much easier to speak in the past, before being caught by a recording device was a possibility. The fact that knowledge can now be spread quicker to the rest of the world (something that apps these days can sometimes help with) keeps a lot of this 'human nature' in check.
Just looking at the world today, it's hard to say that technology has not made a significant (and probably net positive) change in how people think and behave.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/EjrIvJY.jpg
Edit: I guess someone at BlackBerry saw my comment and changed it several minutes later ;) It's now (at 4PM EST) a lot more relevant to today's events: http://i.imgur.com/HvGw9tF.jpg
This is vague recollection at this point, but I do believe that the family did have knowledge of photography (my grandfather visited her 10+ years after this family became 'famous' through Russian press) and the father did not approve of their pictures being taken at first. I can see how that, combined with their deeply religious and isolated world view, could have been a cause for her superstition.
When I was around 15, he showed me a video of their first encounter with her, and to this day I cannot get the image of the pure terror on her face out of my mind. She had multiple visitors before, but something about this visit scared her so much that she hid inside for hours.
It turned out that this was the first visit where someone in the crew had brought video equipment (one of those big shoulder-mounted VHS cameras), and Agafia would later tell my grandfather that she thought this thing would 'steal her soul.' She wasn't shocked in amazement at the new technology, this was pure fear.
Reminds me of one of the early silent film The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station [1], which allegedly was so realistic that people ran out of the movie theater screaming.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LArriv%C3%A9e_dun_train_en_gare...
I was more on the programming side of things at the time, but when I found out the difference between what I was paid and how my hours were billed to clients (also around 20x), I had the same sort of reaction. Since I was just barely starting college at the time (so no degree, but had the skills), I really think this was mostly just a function of the labor market around that area. I had younger/taller/thicker/balder/older co-workers who were similarly 'discriminated' with respect to their salaries as they were starting out there.
The high multiple probably had a lot to do with the type of clients this company was able to land. If I remember correctly, they charged something like 10x market rate for managed hosting, and clients happily paid because of the nature of the product.
Also, I'd say the unique thing about you that made (makes) you really stand out is not just the pixels, it's the glorious combination of both pixels and bits [1].
Edit: See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1165428/should-closeable-...
Do I start with vanilla JS? jQuery? Backbone? Spine? Angular? Knockout? Ember? I need to make my site responsive - how do I write that from scratch? How can I test in all browsers? Should I use Bootstrap? Foundation? Skeleton? What's a CSS compiler and which should I use? LESS? Sass? Scss? Stylus? Plain CSS? Should I still use PHP? Or is Node the new thing? My friend said something about Ruby on Rails. What the hell is a grunt? What's an asset pipeline? How do I gzip/minify/concatenate/compress/compile files? On and on...
When I got into web development ~12 years ago, I don't remember having to make many choices besides HTML and CSS. After that, it was a gradual learning process as web technologies developed. It seems that beginners today have a lot more tools at their disposal, but they also have a much broader set of technologies and practices to navigate.