Having worked a bit in a conceptually similar product, in my opinion the real problem is how you define the layout of your UI, not the individual components.
There is a sweetspot for nocode where you don’t try to
be too general purpose. Concrete examples would be Excel, IFTTT, Airtable, and many of the startups that convert those into apps.
The sour spot is things like Bubble, which while being a fine product suffer from “ok now am really coding but with a clunky UI instead of a text editor” which is a problem inherent in making universal nocode solutions.
With this in mind I think layouts and connected components should be provided to
non coding users as templates. E.g. a site where you log in and can show notifications etc. is a single template. You then extend and style that.
Yep. And I’m still on the fence about how to tackle that, but I’ve got some ideas.
My favored approach is to use what I’m calling a “this goes here, that goes there” syntax.
The idea is to give designers a conceptual framework that mimics how they understand layout, and allows them to describe positioning using a syntax that feels as close to natural language as possible.
Much easier said than done, of course. And there are good arguments for allowing the platform dialects to handle those more complex features (in addition to things like scrolling and animation).
