[matthewhager]

We've been working on solving this problem for over two years with a decent sized team. Designers and developers use different tools that don't understand the same formats causing hard handoffs and conversion steps to get a digital product to the customer.

This is an extremely ambitious problem to solve because it requires building an entire Wix or Webflow that also speaks and outputs some sort of web component (in our case React). It needs to allow designers to work in a completely visual way without worrying about tools like Git while developers can at the same time add logic and state to the otherwise static design. You have to remove all hard handoffs that fork the source of truth and keeps ideas from flowing from the canvas through the development pipeline. InVision and other tools are "glue" that attempt to solve this, and they definitely make things easier, but the handoffs are still there.

Many of the tools I'm seeing get close, but they don't go all the way because it would be insanely expensive to replace all the tools in the pipeline (InVision included) and make a single environment that everyone works in to produce a full UI from blank canvas to prototype to production. Gamers have Unity, that's what we need in the web/native app development arena.

We've been working on it here: http://www.shift.studio. While I'm sad to see Pagedraw go (and I've reached out about getting lessons learned from the founder who responded and was extremely helpful/nice), I still believe this is a good idea and we are going to push forward and get it done. I also really love seeing that others here agree that something like this needs to be built.

I would love to hear from HN, what do y'all believe is the fundamental list of features required to tackle this? (no matter how bold/crazy the request)

[garyclarke27]

Agreed a Unity like toolkit for general purpose UI would be awesome. I would be happy to pay a reasonable subscription for such for my team. A killer feature for us, would be easy wiring up of forms and display grids to Postgresql functions and views for storage and IO - we don’t want direct to table. Maybe you could somehow incorporate PostGrest for this.

[pagutierrezn]

My wish list is short:

- A look and feel similar to Pagedraw would be perfect

- The output should be just: js, html and css. No frameworks.

- The tool should not offer its own components, only the possibility of integrating off-the-shelf webcomponents (w3c)