Hi Norm,
I’m with blocs since ver. 1.0. I have purchased every upgrade up till current version.
Looking back I can’t answer my self, why I was doing that but this version is the last I have purchased. let me explain why.
First, I believe I need to say few words about my self so you will have a bit of understand who are you talking with.
I’m 54, currently holding position of Senior UX architect, also a design team manager in company with >200k employees. In my past I’ve also took positions of a programmer and web dev. Hobbies – writing music, photography.
Portfolio site
Music site
Now to the topic.
I’m about to release new album and started to do album page.
God, you won’t believe how many bad words my family heard during the work with blocs.
During my life I haven’t worked with a software with such weird even ridiculous logic and workflow.
This is app for no coding, right?
If user stay in the template paradigm, I believe all be more or less good. The problems rise up if user need to change something in the standard blocs or template element.
Even drag n drop truly weirdo. (I’m not even talking about the fact that the user must be super duper careful to throw the element where he wants) For instance, if I drag an element in layer panel and drop it into the new place, why all my customisations gone? Why I need to go and apply everything from scratch to the dropped element? Is that the principle of simplicity and flexibility?
Why there is no simple thing like “contain image aspect ratio” what ever I would do with a container.
Also, working with the app I’ve noticed that I afraid of click anyway to avoid destroy something, coz the misclick and press “command Z” crazy high in the app.
Obviously I’m not confident of what to expect while working with blocs
Some of the basics and primitive functionality missing. Why no center alignment for the container?
After the ver 3 I have receiving an error for Leto font. I’ve tried to do EVERYTHING, even a dances with a tambourine, but I could get rid of the error.
This is an app for the no coders, basically for visual designers, right?
I can record a video along the work process with my comments, but, Norm…
I’m done, no ver 6 for me.
Thanks.
Thanks for reaching out and sharing your experience. I appreciate the frustrations and we know Blocs is not the perfect app, but with every release we always aim to make the app better than before and wherever possible, easier to understand.
This year for example, we knuckled down on bug fixes releasing them almost every week. I think this year may have been our most focused year on bug fixes, so we are working hard to make Blocs work great for everyone.
But of course we are realistic and know we can’t please everyone.
Thanks for your support over the years and I wish you luck with your music projects and finding a replacement for Blocs.
We will continue to do what we have always done and work relentlessly to make Blocs brilliant and as reliable as possible.
So sorry to hear that you’ve had these problems. I personally have not experienced any issues like what you have -maybe we build websites differently!??. I’ve done a few music websites for artists for album launches where they have also had a live stream of them performing the launch and then we gave everyone watching the live stream and login code where they could download certain tracks for free - they looked great!!! Hate taking down my stream sites down after the event.
I have tried many other builders over the years (as I’m nosey!!) and believe me looking at your Music website - blocs Is by far in my opinion the best web builder on the market for your needs - but blocs can take the site to the next level with some love and time.
The homepage on mobile is not responsive? I personally feel with your knowledge and your experience as the website is not that big this will take literally just a couple of hours to Start this website again create an amazing homepage and site as your album artwork is absolutely stunning! And from listening to some of the audio - brilliant!
I will take a listen at 2am on my drive home.
I have been in the entertainment and live event industry for 33 years, so I had a quick look at your music website while actually on an event waiting to go on stage in one hours time. I have a huge interest in music etc.
If you do move - as @Norm has said good luck and keep making music!
//This year for example, we knuckled down on bug fixes releasing them almost every week. I think this year may have been our most focused year on bug fixes, so we are working hard to make Blocs work great for everyone.
Do I understand correctly all bug fixes will go to ver 6 onwards?
Apologies for my tone, I’m just full of frustration, I still working on the page and it getting worst.
How on Earth to centre columns inside this container (not the content of the columns)?
The parameters between these two blocs are totally identical, why are they differently aligned?
How to to do bulk apply styling parameters to all blocs?
Thanks @AdieJAM for your kind comment – all music I write is free to listen and share. Please have a look.
I do agree with making a site just with standard blocks and templates is easy. Maybe something inside me need to customise everything default – don’t know.
And this is where blocs suck.
Idea is great – implementation frustrating.
Sorry @Norm for the criticism, from my point of view main thing is – slowly enrich only after bugs fixed. The concept of modal form factor view is great, but implementation is very very complex. This could be done WAY much easier.
Asset manager is super annoying – in case you have selected something in your page and you accidentally clicked on the any asset – it immediately take place in your design, and the worst thing, you could not notice that, just after sometime you working and then BAM, what, how that thing got here?!
My major concern @Norm – if you made your app for designers, not coders, make workflow similar to design apps with all similarity you could replicate. Make behaviour of the elements similar, this is great for intuitive workflow. As long user can predict future result, performance and comfortableness leap ahead
Your new layout for two level display Layers and Pages not great, sorry. Every time I change the page (and I do this pretty often) I need to switch between page that I need to switch again to layer. Why not to consider put all page in smaller ribbon on top of the design with the ability to collapse/expand? User just clicks on the page thumbnail and all layers will change accordingly?
Why I can operate with normal human values of proportions of that column? Why I can apply this to all container objects? Like
Container 100% > Columns 40% > Alignment Centre > Padding 10% > form factors > All, Custom
Sometimes if your using other software for long periods of time and after months then open Blocs that as all software it can feel very much alien like (if that’s still a term!!)
When I made the shift from RapidWeaver to Blocs it sent me crazy!!! But after a few weeks it made sense and I realised how backward RapidWeaver was at times.
Same I had when I shifted from photoshop to pixelmater. I was emailing them how to re-design their layout! Now it’s 2nd nature.
Do you use classes? - I do as much as I can with classes as I love global changes on everything.
//Do you use classes? - I do as much as I can with classes as I love global changes on everything.
Yes I do.
//When I made the shift from RapidWeaver to Blocs it sent me crazy!!! But after a few weeks it made sense and I realised how backward RapidWeaver was at times.
I never used RapidWeaver, After Dreamweaver which I have mostly used for design and coding I have completely switch to WordPress and Blocs. My portfolio is WP.
//Same I had when I shifted from photoshop to pixelmater. I was emailing them how to re-design their layout! Now it’s 2nd nature.
Agreed. Habits are sweet shackles. However, UI intuitiveness and predictiveness based on common logic and psychology. These things deeply integrated and better tp keep this.
I.e. why all scrollbars are place on the right hand side of a page/block/frame?
RW > Blocs: I’m highly likely to drop RW after a main 3rd-party dev abruptly closed up show. Was looking for alternatives and have been exploring Blocs. Same experience - my initial reaction was “what is this fresh hell?”, but kept playing with it, and can agree that RW seems pretty backwards now.
「Also, working with the app I’ve noticed that I afraid of click anyway to avoid destroy something」
I’m a novice when it comes to programming, but I feel this every day. I don’t have the basics of “it should be possible,” or “this is how you should do it on a Mac,” so I miss out on the "excellent part of the Mac, which is to use things predictably.
I would like to see improvements
Without seeing exactly how it’s been constructed it’s a bit difficult to say, but my thoughts are that one may have inherited settings from another breakpoint - purely guessing - and this could answer a few of your frustrations.
Would outline mode help you see how everything is positioned.? I’ve not really had any of the problems that you have had. Maybe a complete re-write of the website? in the latest version. So that there’s nothing glitchy from the site being built in v1 and passed over? (just suggestions).
I would also recommend maybe checking out @Eldar video tutorials which might change the way you work and could possibly help. May seem drastic or a lot of work, but from experience, sometimes it’s just better to start again from scratch with the knowledge you’ve gained then trying to fix something that may never work properly.
Yeah I totally agree - I mentioned this too, the site isn’t very big and wouldn’t take long at all to re-build this and eliminate any build errors from the past, as we all experiment when building.
In what areas? - I think changes would totally damage what we are used to.
The hard thing I would say is that people are requesting more and more features and these need to be brought into blocs In a way that does feel natural.
I honestly think as a user blocs Making changes to the interface would just confuse everything. It’s pretty streamlined and in my view things do come natural. Yes, I do have my Foggy memory at times, which unfortunately has happened since I caught Covid, So I do have to go to the documents or forum to find out where certain things are, but these are only things that are more in-depth and not something I use all the time.
One statement I will make is that blocs Is actually moving in a rapid pace vs its competitors that are very stationary. Yes, things do have bugs…… But these are squashed pretty quickly, as long as feed back is given the right way.
Even Apple have bugs on software and they have 4 million people beta testing as well as thousands in the company and they still miss out the most basic things.
I would focus on bug fixes and workflow improvements rather.
It is not necessary to deliver only major releases.
Again, just on an advise level.
Every product going it’s own way, however it’s very practical and good to do researches and understand the progress from the similar.
I.e some of the workflows could be definitely done in a Figma way.
