Show HN: Shoelace.io – Visual Bootstrap Grid Builder and Teacher Beta

http://shoelace.io/

by eflowers • 12 years ago

158 46 12 years ago

shoelace.io

coderzach• 12 years ago

This is great! It's always so hard to explain how bootstrap css and html work to non-technical people.

ldec• 12 years ago

This is awesome. love it. Thankyou Erik and Shaun.

eflowers13• 12 years ago

You're welcome. Saving is broke right now.

Be sure to check out the Less Mixin mode where you can name your rows and columns and use pure Less to make the grids.

Fun fact - it's all clojurescript.

findjashua• 12 years ago

As someone who knows Python/JS/some html, but very little css, this is absolutely fantastic. Thank you!

PS: you mentioned Clojurescript, are you using Om?

bitroliest• 12 years ago

As a backend engineer, this is fantastic. Thank you!

ohitsdom• 12 years ago

I had this exact idea (but didn't think I had the skill to pull it off), how cool for people afraid of code. Well done!

larme2• 12 years ago

Can you change the column type from lg to others like xs?

eflowers13• 12 years ago

What do you mean? You can change them to any by clicking on the left side different "views" and then change the column width to anything, and when you click back and forth between the responsive sizes you'll see it change live, and you'll see the HTML and Less change.

larme2• 12 years ago

Now I get it. Thanks :)

radicality• 12 years ago

This is great! I can't figure out how to nest containers though, is this supported?

eflowers13• 12 years ago

You'd never nest containers using bootstrap. Do you mean rows/cols?

lpsz• 12 years ago

FYI, Erik's great post that was here yesterday may be useful in dissecting containers vs. rows vs. cols. [1]

[1] http://www.helloerik.com/the-subtle-magic-behind-why-the-boo...

jaunkst• 12 years ago

Probably want to nest a row in a col. nesting containers is something you don't want or need to do.

rows will reset the col padding so nesting rows in cols will have the correct behavior.

tcfunk• 12 years ago

I like how no one really answered this question, but just pointed out that you asked it incorrectly.

I would like to know this as well...without the ability to create nested rows, I don't really see myself using this tool.

zapt02• 12 years ago

+1, nesting would be the killer feature

seivan2• 12 years ago

This was really useful, thank you! I've always had a hard time visualising the grids. Is there anyway I can add text, images and buttons? Mostly for testing layouts.

eflowers13• 12 years ago

Nope. This is all it does and all it is planned to do. There may be more features to extend the way it works, but it's strictly a grid tool and learning tool, not a builder.

I wanted to attack the problem from a different angle than bootply and some of the others that recreate a WYSIWYG like Dreamweaver in the browser. This is JUST for seeing the grid and learning how it works, and seeing how the Less mixins work.

It's a narrow purpose, but I want to focus just on 1 thing and do it better than anyone in the world.

seivan2• 12 years ago

Yeah I wanted to say I am not looking for a builder. I just want to visualise how text looks like with those grids.

Grids on their own isn't as important as grids with content.

Still a great tool though, will come in handy.

manug102• 12 years ago

After messing around with this, is there any reason to use any of the other sizes besides xs? With xs it seems like every device is covered, from the phone up to the large desktop.

DoubleMalt• 12 years ago

You might want to have something as a grid with three columns on the desktop but as full width boxes on a phone.

Then using another size as xs let's you define the grid for bigger sreens while on small screens the content is just stacked vertically.

eflowers13• 12 years ago

XS keeps columns in a phone view, but often you want to just stack the cols and not use a grid so much as just "a shelf"

90% of my designs use col-sm-*, and then if stuff needs fiddling at md or lg I do it there. For xs I just usually let it default to stacked 100% cols.

lominming• 12 years ago

Really nicely done. I do not really see it in my workflow much because typing is faster than dragging around for me now and I am pretty familiar with grid concepts, but this will be very useful to explain the concepts to people. Very impressed with the dragging and snapping.

Suggestions: There are some bugs. Sometimes I cannot drag to create an offset, sometimes I can. Also, sometimes I can only resize the col from the right. Would be nice to support containers (fluid and non-fluid) and we can better visualize how it impact the behavior in relation to the width of the device. Also, I think you can easily support Zurb Foundation grid too.

benbristow• 12 years ago

This... is awesome. Such a time saver and very nicely designed too!

yellowapple• 12 years ago

Quick nitpick: all the links on the bottom (with the exception of the "Code by Shawn" link) appear to be non-operational.

eflowers13• 12 years ago

Yeah, an bug from posting this in a hurry and problems deploying it from github to heroku. Fixing it tonight =D

schmidtc• 12 years ago

Thank you! I've been trying to get my head around responsive grids for a while and after using this for 2 minutes I finally "get it".

jetro223• 12 years ago

That's great. Before clicking the link I thought "who the hell needs this"? But after trying it out for ~20 seconds... great - I'll use it.

eflowers13• 12 years ago

perfect response.

jxm262• 12 years ago

This is awesome! I'll definitely start using this. I've seen JetStrap before for building the full UI. But this is great for alot of my uses.

lowmagnet• 12 years ago

Offset appears to be 'sticky' in that sm-offset-0 is possible by dragging the left most cell offset bar to the right then drag the whole thing left.

Really nice visualization; I'll use this if anyone needs an explanation/sandbox on my team!

eflowers13• 12 years ago

That's a bug. Offset inheritance and reverse-inheritance was a real bugger of logic. Will fix.

jitl• 12 years ago

Is there a way to re-arrange columns? I couldn't get negative pulls to work :(. I think bigger column names, or different column colors would improve the usability once you have push/pull in. Right now if cols are different sizes its a little tricky trying to figure out which one is which.

You could auto-name them with silly generated names or something; like what github does when you create a new repo

punkmouse• 12 years ago

Hey, quick note, the "About Shoelace" link in the bottom doesn't work for me (Safari 7, OS X). Cheers, good stuff.

eflowers13• 12 years ago

For anyone still reading - I fixed the save/preview feature, its really cool.

Example: http://shoelace.io/#2aed04bc819c4c7da28a

tianshuo• 12 years ago

The site is broken for China, since the prettify js code is hosted on Google Code.

est• 12 years ago

Ask your local ISP or local authorities for your local problem.

Gigablah• 12 years ago

In other words, "screw Chinese users".

yzzxy• 12 years ago

I think pinning this one on the developer is a pretty hard argument to make.

kanakiyajay• 12 years ago

Good Work !

Had made something similar before : http://jaykanakiya.com/bootstrap-grid-builder/

S4M• 12 years ago

This is pretty awesome!

One suggestion: would it be possible to add old browsers as well? I am working on an app that doesn't render well on older versions of Firefox. I'll use Shoelace all the time for the front end part if I can use it to spot rendering problems with all kind of browsers.

Show HN: Shoelace.io – Visual Bootstrap Grid Builder and Teacher Beta

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