We likely will just have to agree to disagree. Pinegrow is measurably slower on a Mac than a native app; obviously it makes cross-platform development easier, though.
Personally, I don’t think the interface is that bad. It is a bit dated, sure, but I don’t think that updating just for the sake of design trends should be a high priority. I would prefer to see emphasis placed on addressing feature omissions, but maybe I’m alone in this respect and I will switch to a different app.
Any app of this complexity will have a bit of a learning curve and what is intuitive to one person might be less so to another. I only started referring to the documentation when I couldn’t find the spell check function and I was surprised that it didn’t exist. Then, there was no table editor. Then I started to see more and more that Pinegrow’s visual editor really is unsuitable for writing content. Then, I started to make a list of features that I think Pinegrow needs. When I joined the forum, I saw that many other people had some of the same suggestions.
Someone who places a high value on a simple and streamlined interface probably won’t choose a webapp over a native one regardless — a native app always will have a more suitable interface for a particular OS — and likely would lean toward either a native code editor or a design app that doesn’t even have the underlying code viewable/editable. By their nature, these types of apps can be simpler. The advantage of Pinegrow is that it does both, but it has some serious feature omissions that really make it inadequate for someone who wants to use the app to prepare content.
I would like to see Pinegrow work better for preparing content — and I joined the forum because I care — but maybe this isn’t the road the app plans to follow and I will need to use something else. I like the experience of the Espresso app for code editing (although BBEdit works well enough for me already). Espresso definitely is fast and streamlined, but it doesn’t allow visual editing at all. If Espresso offered visual editing instead of just a real-time preview, I wouldn’t have even tried Pinegrow. Well, maybe I would have tried it on Linux, but I wouldn’t have bothered on the Mac.
We will see where the road takes us! 