[1qaz2wsx3edc]

I think something that could really help this app succeed, is sharable UI elements.

There are a lot of common things I don't want to redraw (date pickers, dropdowns, file uploads, etc, etc). However, I don't want these provided as a static set, because the web and my needs are always changing/growing.

If I was able to browse the community's drawings and add them to my profile for quick insertion into a mockup that would be great or even create my own for reuse.

Just my two, - Cheers

[dwwoelfel]

Curious what you think of our current approach to this.

We're worried about people spending a lot of time searching for the perfect component instead of just sketching out their ideas. That's one of the big problems that we see with tools like Omnigraffle.

But we recognize that people can work a lot faster if they don't have to keep sketching out the same components in every wireframe. Our approach is to use copy/paste as a mechanism for creating custom components.

We're already keeping track of everything you copy/paste from the canvas. You can delete them, star them, and insert them into the canvas from the "Clipboard history" in the menu at the top left. Our next step is to make them easier to insert into the canvas.

[1qaz2wsx3edc]

Right, that works to some extent. However there is still an upfront cost of drawing each component I want to use.

I think share-ability is important (seo/community, think of github repos). I'd like to do something like google for "precursor datepicker" view/fork or 'save'/star/insert it or maybe search in app for "datepicker"s.

That just my two cents, I think it creates a community and then as a whole everyone benefits, while the tool still remains uncluttered (the workflow remains the same, but components could be incorporated). Consider this: I could have say 4 tabs open which I then copy & paste some components I found into a mockup I'm working on. No searching in app, no component drawers, just simple copy & pasting between tabs.

Also, tracking a clipboard doesn't really classify something as "important", I mean, won't that list just get cluttered, I don't necessarily want to look through 20 copies to find the one time I copied the whole component. And workflow to update it might be a bit weird, do I edit it, re-copy it and re-star it, delete the previous staring?

Really, just my two cents, food for thought, great work, I'm sure you know better!

[dwwoelfel]

Thanks, I appreciate the reply!

You may be right about share-ability being important. It would be nice to see some validation of that. For example, users sharing Precursor docs full of their custom components, encouraging other users to copy the items. We might build a couple of those ourselves to see if it gets any traction.

> Also, tracking a clipboard doesn't really classify something as "important"

We anticipated that problem. You can delete the clips that you don't want to keep and star the important clips to keep them at the top of the list. They're also ordered by creation time, so the cruft will just fall to the bottom.

For updating clipboard items, you'd have to go through the steps you describe. But it wouldn't be especially difficult to allow people to edit the clipboard items from the menu.