hypermachine

Guess we have a competitor now :)

How do you deal with features that cannot be modeled as pure functions or are too computationally heavy to rerender on change? For example, user selections, copy and paste, ray tracing.

Also I recommend using the Rete.js library for the underlying nodes editor instead of rolling your own.

I have tried many, many website editors. Wix is one of the better ones. Among the big three managed website builders of Wix/Squarespace/Weebly, Wix has the most powerful editor. Sure it's very unintuitive if your are a frontend web developer. But it maps very well to pre-2008 desktop application builders. Take a look at the Retool editor if you want a better explanation. The ideas behind them are similar; rapid development based on pixel grids.

You can divide UI editors generally into two categories, those that allow arbitrary positioning and sizing, and those that don't. Those that don't are much more familiar to web developers as the underlying structure is based on relative positioning for different screensizes. In other words flexbox and breakpoints. It is also easier to use variables for fonts and other elements as there are fewer hard constraints. But if you try to use a website (or any UI) builder without arbitrary drag and drop, it gets very frustrating as your UI feels as if it is "stuck" to a particular design. Weebly and Squarespace don't even allow much changes to layout at all by the visual editor outside of pre-built components so they are significantly less powerful than Wix relatively speaking.

The hardest thing is making things pretty and flexible while maintaining ease of development. Newer UI kits like Flutter are basically architected like game engines. This is a challenge that UI framework designers will have to confront if they want more native alternatives to electron. Whatever replaces electron must at the very least be similarly easy to use, accessible to many languages and runtimes, and trivial to style with non-copyleft usage license.

Setting the cursor position is still available in the Windows API, it is the basis of how most RPA tools work.

We went the other way round and built a VBA interpreter instead.

Join our mailing list :) Give us a try when we launch, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Their biggest mistake was not scaling the VBA/Excel/Access stack beyond desktop and updating it. Where is the WinUI integration for VBA? The product and language was fine but it has been abandoned by Microsoft. It is easy to learn and use but they never tried to make it a cross platform technology.

I personally believe that Microsoft has lost their way when it comes to low code (which is why we are trying to build a replacement). PowerApps is a lot less powerful than the traditional VBA/Excel/Access combo.

However they did manage to add RPA to PowerApps, which is a plus.

They accepted Dendron, conceptually similar. Try again!

How to use the same low latency tricks as the Tonari mirror in other applications. E.g. cloud gaming, conference calls

Because in 2021 developer tools are fundamentally not profitable. Jetbrains is the exception, not the norm. Developer tools are loss leaders for large corporation to acquire developer goodwill and mindshare. Previously we sold developer tools/PaaS. Programmers do not like to pay for their tooling. You have to sell to management, and when your target is management, then the metrics are completely different from what developers want.

This is why no-code and low code are so much more successful than developers tooling startups in terms of revenue and profitability. The people using are the same people who are running the business. The value proposition is clear. "Better developer experience" alone is not sufficient for selling to enterprise. And programmer productivity cannot be quantified in lines of code written. This is hard point to explain and get across on HN because this forum is inherently dismissive of the value of RPA and RAD software.

What's your stack? Mostly C++?

Tech question: do you plug in to the native compositing UI system or do you have your own cross-platform UI compositing code?