Pinegrow Offspring -- Pine Seedling -- Designer App Coming?

[Pinegrow_User]

@Emmanuel

A tool, however powerful and visual it may be, will not give anything really good without a little talent (and solid technical knowledge). Whatever the application used (Pinegrow, Webflow, Bootstrap Studio etc…) I had the opportunity to see creations as awesome as others were insipid. Very often, the best creations come from the predefined templates available in the above-mentioned applications and which, unsurprisingly, are made by professional web designers. In the end, whatever the application used, all too often, beginners or web designer apprentices are reduced to cloning (which may be satisfactory to some extent but does not really reflect - in my opinion - “professional” work) or producing sites with a disappointing visual.

It will be interesting to see how & what this new Pinegrow designer based app offers to circumvent feature and workflow hindrances found in other apps in this same designer based product space. Instead perhaps allowing ‘Professional’ designers and anyone else to express themselves and leverage their talents or desires more freely without simply taking on a cloning or template based approach.

@Emmanuel

A tool, however powerful and visual it may be, will not give anything really good without a little talent (and solid technical knowledge).

This type of situation is not limited to web design.

Indeed. That holds true with most anything, even a common toothpick.

Creative talent and thus creative outcomes can vary widely with the same tool regardless of its purpose. Talent always wins out, unless its being wasted.

[Emmanuel]

@Pinegrow_User

It will be interesting to see how & what this new Pinegrow designer based app offers to circumvent feature and workflow hindrances found in other apps in this same designer based product space. Instead perhaps allowing ‘Professional’ designers and anyone else to express themselves and leverage their talents or desires more freely without simply taking on a cloning or template based approach.

I would like to point out that my previous remarks do not concern a - currently not existing - new application in the Pinegrow range, but the current iteration of Pinegrow .

[Pinegrow_User]

I would maybe refute the “not existing” though.

@Emmanuel

I would like to point out that my previous remarks do not concern a - currently not existing - new application in the Pinegrow range, but the current iteration of Pinegrow.

It must exist somewhere out there in the rainbows amongst the unicorns and pots of gold.

@matjaz

Yes, we are working on a Pinegrow sibling.

Fair enough though that it was not referring to this new app. But most of these designer based apps indeed fall within those statements.

[schpengle]

@Emmanuel

A tool, however powerful and visual it may be, will not give anything really good without a little talent (and solid technical knowledge).

…Damn It! … sigh…

[Kal]

New forum member here, just trying out Pinegrow (along with a stack of other apps) to see if I can inject a bit more speed into my hitherto hand-coded workflow (using Coda). (Of all the apps I’ve tried so far, the clear winners are Webflow and Pinegrow, but I’m not about to hand over $420 USD per year for the luxury of having “unlimited unhosted projects” with Webflow, so I’m liking the look of Pinegrow!)

Interesting discussion! My first reaction (as both designer and developer) was, this sounds confusing. I’d prefer just one app, adding any technically feasible designery features you can, while maintaining complete round-trip editing. However…

My second thought was, the two-app strategy might work if the new app was marketed as a design and prototyping app—that is, it’s a useful first step in the Pinegrow workflow (for everyone), where you can very quickly mock up a nice prototype (including interactivity and even animation), and then, once the design is approved, export it to HTML/CSS for further development. It’s not ideal maybe, but if the apps appear to fulfil completely different stages of the workflow (regardless of sharing a codebase under the hood), then the customer knows not to expect round-trip editing between the two apps.

From a design perspective, the interface and usability of this new app is going to have to be top-notch to compete with all the design apps out there… from oldies like Illustrator, to Affinity Designer, and newer prototyping apps as well. That’s just to woo designers over. (No small task methinks!) From there, the benefits are, one company making the tools for both designer and developer, with a consistent visual language between the two. (I could probably be wooed. )

As for names, I have to be honest… ‘Pinegrow’ didn’t appeal to me at all. It wasn’t until I read your homepage that I started to get excited, thinking ‘these people actually get it!!’ Perhaps the name will grow on me. In any case, you seem to have a bit of brand recognition now, so I’d stick with it across the apps, rather than introduce any new, cutesy names. Something like Pinegrow Designer and Pinegrow Developer. (Or, if you fancy a bit more alliteration, Pinegrow Prototyper, and Pinegrow Producer. Hmm… no, on second thoughts, now it’s sounding like you produce plantation timber.)

[m-artin]

@Kal

My first reaction (as both designer and developer) was, this sounds confusing. I’d prefer just one app, adding any technically feasible designery features you can, while maintaining complete round-trip editing. However…

Welcome to the forum Kal! This was also my first thought …
And I liked for example the idea of the ready-made Bootstrap Blocks from Pinegrow, why not go one step further with it.

[Thomas]

@m-artin

why not go one step further with it.

… because a real designer doesn’t necessarily needs it!

Cheers

Thomas

[Printninja]

I built my first PG site using Bootstrap Blocks, but they’re limited to Bootstrap 3.x, and Bootstrap 4.x is just a far better framework. Nevertheless, using the pre-made 3.x blocks in PG actually spend up my understanding of how the program works, especially because I modified them considerably, making it easier for me to create my own elements going forward.

Really, once you get a good handle on the Bootstrap framework, you don’t need blocks, and they actually become a bit constraining.

[m-artin]

This was only meant as an example for something similar that is already integrated in PG.
Of course the ready-made concept should be replaced with universal and highly customizable Blocks/Modules for the new plan to come.

[Emmanuel]

@m-artin

should be replaced with universal and highly customizable Blocks/Modules

Can you please elaborate?

[m-artin]

Sure, one of those all-in-one themes with page builder features are good examples in my opinion:

https://yootheme.com/pro
https://www.semplice.com/features

[schpengle]

mmm, you should have a look at those two sites with Javacript disabled.
Not very Universal really

[m-artin]

Technically, I don’t like them either.
But it shows how far you can go with a concept and workflow of customizable blocks and elements.

[Pinegrow_User]

@Pinegrow_User

Sadly, thats a common misconception which I see largely throughout the web being spoken by many people when referring to and talking about Pinegrow. They perceive it solely as a “Bootstrap Builder”.

Perfect example:

https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/9yo8mc/pinegrow_vs_pingendo_vs_webflow/

“Pinegrow was a little better in my research, but is still very similar, in that it’s more of a bootsrap editor than a visual programming tool in the same way as Webflow. […] This was quite a while ago, so maybe the tools have evolved since then. But from the websites, it doesn’t look like it.”

Much of this “misconstrued public opinion and perception” has to seemingly fall directly upon Pinegrow’s branding and marketing efforts of the products. Unless the actual goal is too in-fact be mostly known as a “Bootstrap Builder”? If so, then that no doubt turns off many developers and potential customers, if thats what is actually perceived by them. Such examples can be found throughout the web describing Pinegrow like this.

[Terry44]

@Pinegrow_User

Sadly, thats a common misconception which I see largely throughout the web being spoken by many people when referring to and talking about Pinegrow. They perceive it solely as a “Bootstrap Builder”.

Now it is turning into a Wordpress editor especially marketed in the interface itself.

[Emmanuel]

See my answer here: Number FIVE.....is.....ALIVE!

[Terry44]

@Emmanuel

At this point, I reiterate the prerequisites I was talking about earlier in this discussion: If you select modern, robust, very efficient and interoperable tools for any of your particular needs, as long as they can work independently and natively on any of your desktop computers, communicate each other, are able to read/write any genuine HTML/CSS/JS documents and don’t leave you trapped in proprietary formats or processes that does not correspond to standard practices, your pro life will be fine.

To my knowledge, and I’m proud of this, in the list of available visual webdesign applications, there are few candidates who meet all these criteria but Pinegrow is definitely part of my/the perfect mix

I like the idea of a purely visual editor for design but unfortunately I have never seen one that does not create garbage code.

I develop a lot of code by hand and bring into Pinegrow to help work out visual stuff but I do not like that my code gets rearranged or reformatted. If you can create a visual designer that works within existing code on a page without changing the structure and just work on the visual CSS that would be wonderful.

Have you looked at vue.js? I am starting to delve into this and similar frameworks like react and the things you can do with this is just amazing BUT they are javascript manipulating the dom. Bootstrap on steroids maybe?

---

I am talking about a purely visual editor and not the current versions of Pinegrow. Frontpage for instance and some of the applications mentioned in this thread. The code is horrendous and if you are designing from an SEO stand point with semantic tags. the result is, nasty in these purely visual editors…

[Terry44]

@Emmanuel

See my answer here: Number FIVE.....is.....ALIVE! - #7 by Emmanuel

Responded there…

[Terry44]

@matjaz

Regarding Bootstrap:

There is nothing in PGS that would tie it down to one particular framework…

So instead of reinventing this, the current thinking is to just take these boilerplate stuff from Bootstrap.

This would then be a Bootstrap platform. Tying PGS to well… bootstrap framework.

Box model & designers

CSS grid removes a lot of limitations and drawbacks of the legacy web box model. At the same time, it still forces us to use an underlying structure for our layouts. Can’t just put elements wherever you want. And, in my view, that’s a good thing. The power of the web comes from its structure and organization, both on content
side and on the design side - if your end goal (as it should be) is a positive user experience.

If you stick to standards compliance with implementing web structure and formatting you shouldn’t have a problem in the end. Some of these frameworks veer off into their own area on some of this.

Proprietary styling

@earnoud and @Pinegrow_User touched on this topic above.

When creating a tool like PGS, that aims at making a part of the workflow (for example CSS styling) less complex and more direct, you have to give up the ability for the tool to be a general purpose editor. There is no way to have both: the ability to edit any HTML/CSS project and a smarter, non-CSS way of styling elements.

The visual design is CSS. You can make things happen with JavaScript but in the end the css style is what is telling the browser how to display the page elements.

If the tool could work within the confines of the page it is given and purely manipulate through CSS without touching the code of the page itself. Do that!

For technical reasons, PGS generates SASS code on the fly, from styling information that is saved in a XML file (XML works better with source versioning systems than JSON). So, the output is clean and extendable SASS and CSS code, but of course, as soon as you edit SASS code directly, the ability to continue using PGS for styling is lost.

Create a separate css file and embed that into the page, the link… link to a separate file and place that at the bottom of the style links. Natural flow of precedence will take over. The last CSS style will be used, so if your css generated by PGS is linked in it will take over the display of the elements it targeted. Unless there is inline css then that will over ride but you really should not use inline css.

Get away from embedding css inline.

That said, you still have the option to include non-PGS stylesheets into the page, where you can do whatever you want, also override PGS styles.

Should be the other way, UNLESS you are starting from scratch within PGS.
Embedding, including PGS styles into the page and not other styles into a PGS page unless that page was actually created by PGS… semantics here I guess.

And, you won’t get locked into using PGS. If one day you decide not to use PGS anymore, you’ll just continue to work with its SASS or CSS files.

Should take that approach from the beginning and not have PGS be the focus here. It should be INVISIBLE and not be part of the end product.

When looking at the code, you should not be able to tell where it came or how it was created.

Branding

Another topic where your input is very welcome:

At the moment, the idea is to keep Pinegrow name/brand for both apps. So, we’ll have the existing “Pinegrow Web Editor” and the new “Pinegrow X” where X is some smart-sounding word, like Squirrel

Don’t confuse people. If you want to have PGS not be confused with Pinegrow then do not use PIne or Pinegrow in the name of the new product other than as a tag… ‘By Pinegrow’ or something similar.

Do not refer to it as Pinegrow lite or Pinegrow X… Call it ‘Squirrel’ or whatever name and not Pinegrow Squirrel. Spin it off onto it’s own site.

[Pinegrow_User]

@Terry44

Have you looked at vue.js? I am starting to delve into this and similar frameworks like react and the things you can do with this is just amazing BUT they are javascript manipulating the dom

React, Vue, each were both mentioned recently and met with no response (not surprising). It was also pointed out that the Angular version in Pinegrow is outdated, like the Materialize version in app, etc.,