Item — HN Reader

This actually has a lot of potential I think. It reminds me of https://bit.dev (obviously without most of the main features). But the core is there - the idea that components should be organized in a way that makes them easily reusable.

If you were to add a preview functionality of each component, this would already look A LOT like the Bit platform.

Personally, I've been trying to figure out a way to create a component library where my components are easily shareable and importable, but haven't yet come to a real solution. Bit is a good one but I am not yet ready to pay per component after my 20 free components are used up.

I think this would be actually extremely useful to me personally if you added these two things:

- component live preview (perhaps with mock props/data?)

- a way to store the components in the cloud so that they can be important into any project, where the source of truth is in this cloud platform

In the future, you could add things like:

- component-level testing

- AI features

- version control and PR reviews

- CI integrations / other integrations

2 comments

Thank you! I do see the use for these, though a few things are a little off target for what the app hopes to solve. Component preview and mock props is actually something I have planned for the future with a subtype of snippet for templates, so when you intend to have custom inputs there is a way to test with different data. First though I'd have to build a different system for live previews and a dynamic environment that can adapt to which component it might be hosting.

Storing in the cloud to grab them with something like a cli tool is super cool. I have a feature on the mvp+ list to download a list as a library or to fork to github as a lib, just converting it into a folder. But I'm trying not to let scope creep distract me from just making it as easy as possible to grab a quick tool without downloading a whole library, not trying to compete with npm or any other package/version manager.

At present the only AI features I can think could benefit the app are search tools and framework detection, but these can also be improved traditionally without the need for linear algebra or paying for use of any ai api I think.

Basic version control could be cool too! like storing previous versions if a tool was useful to you in different forms

I do overall though feel the goal of this is a little different from the Bit platform, but some lessons could be learned about what people want based on the product's popularity :)

I've been trying to build what you're asking with https://divmagic.com

It has most of the things you said: Create your own component library, easily share through cloud, import and use them, live view and edit them online at Studio [1]

I'm also working on adding versioning and a NPM package so you can refer to your components with unique IDs and directly use them in your code.

[1] https://divmagic.com/studio

Confused, this looks more like a tool that pulls existing HTML from other websites. Is the idea to create your component library by cloning existing components that are out there and modifying them? And then they are hosted in this cloud library of sorts?

Yes, the main idea is to clone existing components and to modify them for your own website (use-case) design. You can also create from scratch using the Studio. In both cases you can save and host the components in the cloud.