zackbrown

6 ms·

1.
by zackbrown 2y ago
On the other hand, video games enable a wide breadth of intellectual experiences. Being a simulated guitar hero and simulated pro skater is more enriching than the likely baseline of having zero experience with either. And, video games can
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Thank you for the follow up and suggestions! We did post on r/rust with solid reception[0] and I've added r/webdev to our channels list for the next push. Will also capture a GIF, makes a lot of sense; just gotta nail conden
3.
by zackbrown 2y ago
That's great to hear! C# was my first love as a programming language, but it's been some years. We would love to support it with Pax.
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Yes, supporting additional languages is straightforward; just need to write language-specific SDKs with bindings to the necessary Pax APIs, which are exposed through an ABI / FFI. (a major advantage of building at the systems level.) M
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Thanks for this report! It seems one of the demo videos on the mobile site was too large; we have deployed a fix. Highly recommend trying out the site on desktop, where you will get an interactive preview of Pax Designer.
6.
Show HN: Pax – cross-platform GUIs with an integrated design tool(pax.dev)
19 points by zackbrown 2y ago|8 comments
7.
by zackbrown 2y ago
Pax's primary goal is "designability" — to enable a vector design tool to read & write the same content & behavior you may write by hand. (.pax files) Our solution requires language constraints — a hermetic separation
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Agreed! Markup-as-content-backbone is one of many things HTML/CSS do extremely well, and I agree not building around something like this was a major weakness of Flash. Silverlight sought to do this with XAML, but it had other problems
9.
by zackbrown 2y ago
> just tools that build HTML/CSS for you 1. not Figma or Flash: it's not practical or performant to manipulate HTML/CSS to achieve the creative freedom of a vector design tool[0] 2. the rest of these that build on HTML: no
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Thank you for the tip!
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Primary goal of Pax is "designability" -- any project can be opened and edited visually at any time with Pax Designer, which is a vector design tool. The difference between Webflow and Figma is immense; Pax unlocks a Figma-style v
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by zackbrown 2y ago
I won't claim Pax is better than any of these, but that we seek to solve different goals. Unlike Flash: driven by a markup language, fully open source, no plugin required, solves a11y, compiles to native apps incl. mobile Unlike Silver
13.
by zackbrown 2y ago
Both Figma autolayout and HStack / VStack are careful subsets of flexbox; not quite the same thing. Consider whether a marble statue is "just a subset" of the block that contained it. None of these is a perfect technology, bu
14.
by zackbrown 2y ago
> Alternate layout engines for the web might be a fun experiment, PhD thesis, or talent retention program, but it's not practical. Flexbox was once an "alternate layout engine for the web," as was Flash player, as is Figma
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by zackbrown 2y ago
> Care to point us to a better combination than HTML/CSS when it comes to layouting flexible interfaces? HTML/CSS is pretty good! SwiftUI's HStack and VStack are solid, though they suffer from ambient API complexity &
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by zackbrown 2y ago
> HTML and CSS is pretty good considering the problems is solves. Agreed: pretty good. Shouldn't we pursue excellence?
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Closer to "yet another Flash," but 100% open source, and no browser plugin thanks to WebAssembly
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Point taken! And yes, especially for developers (our core target demographic,) you are right that hand-writing should account for >5% of code volume. Syntax is fairly contentious. "One man's trash is another man's treasu
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by zackbrown 2y ago
I don't think the world should abandon HTML, nor break backwards compatibility across the HTML spec. The first cars drove on roads designed for horses, and horses are still around. At no time did we gather a committee and decree that
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by zackbrown 2y ago
We chose an XML-like syntax because it's clear & explicit & established (HTML) — you can know where you are in a hierarchy clearly at any point thanks to closing tags. The major downside is verbosity, both for reading and for
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by zackbrown 2y ago
It sounds like we agree about the good parts of HTML. > There has never been a better markup language. > It has been the best thing for accessibility we ever came up with. I observe past tense in both sentences above. So perhaps we ag
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by zackbrown 2y ago
> I hope in the process of doing it we will find new ways of doing things. HTML & CSS themselves have become a major bottleneck to quality and creativity. The arcane layout model, the baggage of backwards compatibility, the cognitiv
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by zackbrown 2y ago
A cross-platform UI kit that's also a vector design tool: https://www.pax.dev/ Sort of like a new Flash, but open source, compiles to WASM or LLVM instead of requiring a plugin, and driven by language all the way down.
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by zackbrown 2y ago
This is really cool. I've been building a GUI system in Rust that features an expression language[0] — and we ruled out using CEL a while ago because the canonical Go CEL interpreter would cost several megabytes of runtime footprint (
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Not a perfect comparison, but probably closer to mycotoxin exposure than smoking.
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by zackbrown 2y ago
^ This is correct. > (digestive problems vs anaphylaxis) ... and would probably be better classified as an intolerance similar to lactose is misinformation — "digestive problems" and "intolerance" drastically underst
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by zackbrown 2y ago
> one common complaint in the celiac community is that gluten should also be a major allergen As a point of interest, most of the developed world already requires labeling gluten as a major allergen. The US is the outlier / laggard
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by zackbrown 2y ago
> I apologize for any inconvenience my current licensing terms may cause. Friendly advice from a stranger, worth what it costs: I believe the greatest inconvenience of a commercial license will be to _you_, as opposed to end-users. The m
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Let's Fix User Interfaces(developing.pax.dev)
1 points by zackbrown 2y ago|0 comments
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by zackbrown 2y ago
Budget was cut because priorities were stacked and Flutter wasn't high enough. That's exactly the existential risk when beholden to "the hydra."

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