(Answered by @dvnabbott)
Yes! A few early adopters are currently supporting my work.
Not without a lot of effort. It would be hard to use without being a contributor or getting support from me. You'll run into bugs, missing features, and missing documentation. If you're interested in contributing or support, open a GitHub issue or reach out to me on Twitter!
Absolutely! While lacking features, Lona Studio is totally usable, and the generated Swift and JS are working and correct for most Lona Studio features (albeit a little ugly in some cases). If you try it and find the lack of features or documentation frustrating, better wait a little longer though!
While Electron is fantastic for cross-platform desktop apps, building cross-platform adds a lot of engineering overhead. Airbnb designers and engineers all work on Macs, so I was able to move much faster by focusing only on the Mac platform.
As an example of how building native helps me move quickly: native code has a much higher threshold before performance becomes a serious issue. In my experience building Deco IDE using Electron, performance was an issue I had to address frequently – it was always solvable, but definitely required time and effort. So far, Lona Studio performance has been mostly fine without any optimizations. The app gets slow with hundreds of canvases, but that's not the core use case at the moment, and I'm sure it can be solved with effort.
As an added bonus, it's also much easier to interop with Sketch. For example, Sketch stores some text styles as encoded NSAttributedString objects (or at least, it did when I started the project) and uses native Mac text measurement. Lona Studio is able to read and write these directly. It would be difficult to do so in a non-Mac environment.
Yes, but I don't really recommend it. Sketch pioneered an incredibly effective workflow for rapidly iterating on ideas. The infinite canvas, instant artboard duplication, and intuitive hotkeys are key to translating an idea into digital form. Designing in Sketch should be easy and playful.
Designing in Lona Studio, by contrast, is intended to be powerful and precise. A much greater degree of rigor is required to build the same thing you mocked up in Sketch. You won't have the same ability to rapidly play with different ideas, look at all 10 of them, and continue moving forward from your favorite. Instead, you get to see your design on 5 screen sizes at once in all possible configurations using real data.
Lona uses flexbox with under the hood, with a couple key differences:
- Lona Studio applies one major simplification: it automatically handles switching certain properties (
align-items,justify-content, andflex) based onflex-direction, so you don't have to. - There is no support for
flex-wrap. This doesn't translate well to other platforms.
When compiling to Swift, the flexbox layout is converted to autolayout constraints automatically. It's pretty magical!
When I started Lona, it was my first time writing a native Mac app, and I had practically no Swift experience. The blame entirely falls on me for this. Contributions are welcome!
Time constraints 😅