LiveWeave Editing the Bomb!

I just found a site called LiveWeave. I am a Codepen user normally but as of late when I moved my internet kinda sucks so I have been having issues with Codepen reloading and not saving properly. I went on the look out for a different set up and found that JSFiddle wasn’t working for me because they do not support the new Foundation xy-grid. I may jut being doing it wrong but I do not think so  because you just add the CDN and go. I did so and it doesn’t work so there you go.

I then searched for a Codepen Alternative and a few came up. One was JSbin which I rarely use so didn’t try. I decided to try Liveweave and I am impressed, especially since it looks as if they haven’t had much action there from the custodians in quiet awhile. The Twitter page is weak and other posts are from 2012. I have a hard time believing that this functionality was available five years ago. The things that I did see were github repos that are associated with this are all four years old. The editor is ok and it doesn’t support Foundation at all. Now wait a minute! I just said that I didn’t use JSBin because of that? Yes, I did, but when I saw the other functions that Liveweave has I was excited. Even if I do not use it for Foundation I still can test CSS Grid because that is a native browser feature.

Liveweave has what they call CSS Explorer.

That is exactly what it is. You have some sliders for some common transforms like skew and rotate plus so much more. You get drop shadow and columns plus ability to edit the actual text. Colors are also available for gradients or background and text. There is more but I think you should check it out for yourself. I’ve added some pictures of the CSS editor. It’s not ground breaking but it’s very nice to have alongside an editor. You also have a Color Explorer not unlike Color by Adobe. You also have a Vector Editor, believe it or not, that accepts SVG’s. I mean why the F&%! haven’t I ever heard of this before? All the tech that this editor is using is pretty old which leads me to believe that it itself is an older Editor. I think it is a great idea and if it’s that old then why hasn’t someone picked up the ball and ran with a new version of it? If this was made four years ago what do you think someone can do with it these days? I mean you can really get something accomplished with this one editor and I don’t know if I stressed this enough but this is a Browser based Editor. You don’t have to down load anything. I also don’t think I mentioned that you do not even have to sign in to use it! It is really cool and like everything I know it could be better and have a few more things but I tell you what it wouldn’t be much.

 

I think I will use this for a while and possibly do a proper review on it and try to find out a little more info about Liveweave. I mean if this thing is left abandoned it would be a great thing to emulate with Electron or something.  So let me know what you think about it if you get a chance. As always I may be a DumDumDev but I ain’t stupid! Keep the code Open and Dry!

CSS Grid and Flexbox the New Web

I am sure you have heard about CSS Grid and Flexbox by now. If you haven’t you had better think about your dev skills. Go give a long hard look at what you’re doing cuz this is the future of web and may just replace all the frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap. I only name the most notable because there are a ton of them. The CSS frameworks should be especially worried about their existence. Do not take this is the wrong way, I am not saying that we will see this happen tomorrow or even next year but at the rate that Browsers are making these core standards, it is possible this will happen sooner than we may like.

I am a Huuugggee fan of Foundation and if we look closely we can see they are scrambling to keep up. At least this is the way I perceive it looking from the outside in. They have had some frequent updating lately, unlike Bootstrap who is seemingly lackadaisical if we compare the two. Foundation has pushed out at least two major updates in the last year and probably have been planning for this much longer. Will we continue to use these frameworks when it is so easy to implement a responsive grid with less code and possibly better operability with the advent of PWA’s, Amp plus Vue? I almost see frameworks struggling to survive unless they make the decision to team up with some of these Javascript libraries and of course making it easy to implement. With how the Browser based drag and drop Editors are advancing you would be foolish not to use them if you have a quick mock-up or site to kick out. Have you seen some of these in the last few months? I will mention one that I have found to be very useful lately. Webflow is pretty easy to use especially if you use Adobe products. Webflow has designed their editor to be a similar experience to Adobe products. At least it feels that way to me.

I am pretty excited about the latest advances to CSS and what it means for marking up a site. If we really embrace these technologies I think it will greatly improve the look and feel of our sites and totally speed up the process. We have major control of the whole layout without all the hacks now and it isn’t very hard to implement which makes me think this is finally the right direction. When I was learning CSS I felt like I was just hacking things together and now it just feels right. It seems intuitive and natural to the way my mind works and I really think that it will stand the test of time. It also makes it much easier for these browser based editors to implement their editors to output much cleaner code. The problem they have had since the beginning. The reason many people didn’t use those editors was that they were pushing out huge amounts of code which in turn made their sites very slow. Now with the easy markup, those editors can reason about much better and implement a decently coded site that is fast and clean. Advancement all around which is better for some not so much for others. Developers will have a tough fight ahead to convince someone to use their wares instead of using one of the drag and drop editors. The point I make here is that a developer needs to embrace these new technologies so they can make better sites than these editors can. Using Javascript frameworks to make sites very, very fast and mobile ready and most importantly usable when offline. Something the drag and droppers cannot do.

This article is getting too long and this topic will be discussed further in future. This issue will get more and more interesting as time goes by and will warrant many more talks. As always I may be a dumdumdev but I am not stupid! Happy coding dumdum’s!