#19 Webflow Conf and Framer Reactions

Did it work? We're live. We're live. Okay, we're live. Well, it doesn't show for me correctly. Uh, so I don't see the comments. That's in the process. No, I do. Have you got your Instagram? Yes. Well, we join you live from my parents, not my parents' bedroom, my bedroom at my parents' place. So, slightly unconventional setup here. I'm on my iPad, which is far from pro. You'll see me rotate in a bit. They just just hollow when you see me rotate because iPads just do that for some reason. So, thank you, iPad. But I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be here, Baza. I'm grateful to be here. I'm glad to have you here. I I believe um the Instagram didn't work.

So Oh, good. The last time it didn't work. Are we live on Instagram? I don't see. It says tick. It's got a tick and I guess it wouldn't necessarily let me do that unless it's got a uh Where's Where's my phone? Get my phone. So I Let's see if Can you please There you go. Stream key if it's not live. It's live. We're live. Okay, cool. Um let's let me let me Well, hang on. I don't know if you're live, but uh Instagram's live, but I'm just going to double check now. No, it doesn't look like we are. Well, what was where was the stream key that you gave me before? Edit. Okay, I can edit.

I can edit. Remove Instagram. Remove uh gonna add a new one stream key. It's got a tick and you saw on my video. So, uh no, it seems like I'm not live on Instagram. Okay. Well, um, can you use the new stream key, please? Another one. Yeah, I Well, the second one. I've used the second one. This is what the second one is now. Okay. So, we are going live now. I see. All right. We are live. We are now live on Instagram as well. Good. Yes. Yes. Yes. I see you. Super cool. Yeah, awesome. We'll wait uh for people to join. Well, we continue. Don't wait, but we have quite a few things to talk about today.

Um just Web Flow Conf alone would need like a few hours of stream if I if we would like go too deep in it. I have so many questions. I want to ask you so many things about it. So, well, I know the answer. That's the worrying thing. You have the answers. Well, which one is more important? The answer or the question? Maybe that's a dumb question. Anyway, so are we live everywhere? So, can we Yeah, we can. I think so. Awesome. Uh, I'm going to also prepare my screen. Yeah. All right. I'm hoping my battery will last. I have I have one one little dot on my portable battery and 40% on my iPad battery.

So, that's good. That that should last quite a while. Well, with a camera. Let's see. Yeah. I mean, it's just a tiny camera. Yeah. Let's see. Hopefully someone will be home because I'm home alone right now. So I don't know where anything is. So hopefully someone will just be like, "Oh, here's a USBC charger or whatever." Oh, I can show you what happened. Yeah. Ah, show me. I'm like, you broke your stuff. Yeah. So, yeah, I've got this thing. This is my plug, and it's got like three USB things, and it's got a US adapter. So, if I've got a world adapter, I could just use this. Just plug it in. Yeah. Um, but that that snaps up like that.

And then this plug, which is currently in several pieces, the converter just broke. And that that that just that just slots into that top like that. I bought one of those when I traveled to London last year. Yeah. Um, really good plug. It's like really, really good. But yeah, I had it like sticking out of the train socket yesterday by my feet and I just moved and kicked it out and then this broke. So I have all the pieces. I just need some super glue. If I can get some super glue. Or you just need two pieces of wire and just stick them to the thing. And I could do that. I could do that.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or my tongue. Yeah. My tongue my tongue might be a good conductor for that. Yeah. But yeah, so if I had some super glue, it would work. Um or Well, yeah. I I I thought I I thought I might be able to get some sort of pinfall or something like that. But I'm like, I'm really playing with fire here. So, yeah. Yeah, I'll have to charge wisely this weekend. We'll find another solution. But everything else I can charge wirelessly. Like we've got wireless pads everywhere, but just not a freaking Anyway. Anyway, I've got limited battery. What were we even talking about? Uh let's uh let's crack let's get into it. Um did your mic change?

Um probably. I don't think so. I don't think it did. No, it's still my AirPods. Okay. Okay. They're pretty good. Anyway, so uh we can go with the intro and then we just start. Okay. Have you written an intro? Have you? Yeah, it's fine. Like the last part, you know how to go about it. Okay, I'm good. All right. So, this week Meta revealed their super advanced Ray-B band glasses. We had Webflow Conf and Framer showed us their new direction with their new update. All of this in today's episode. This is Command AI. I am Kabarzal. I am Sam. And this is a week in AI design and dev. Cool. So, we have this out of the way.

Now, let's get into it. So I would start by sharing my screen and showing a few cool things. Maybe we quickly show this just a tiny bit that you guys know that we will be talking about this in a second. But before going into this, maybe we just quickly touch on the meta uh Rayban thing. Uh it was pretty cool actually. Like I saw a few videos about it. I don't know how many you saw. Apparently maybe we should like I didn't prepare anything for the like video recording. Maybe I should start from scratch. So uh yeah, let me actually do this. All right. We can't What page is Oh, this is Meta's own. Yeah.

Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to show this Yeah, I think it takes like a second. Guys, I want to show you this and I promise this is like so cool. At least to me, this was so cool. All right. So, this week Meta, you know, Facebook, they announced these super new cool glasses and the presentation for it went well, a few parts of it went super well. For example, this one where they are live broadcasting what Mark Zuckerberg is seeing. He's just literally wearing the glasses and you see like things pop off and that part works. But later on in the conference they are trying to do so many things and it just doesn't work.

And to me it is you know a good representation of the stage of this product where they have like super cool hardware because of the parent well or the company that they bought um what's it called? Oculus I believe these are also from the Oculus. Yes they bought that company. the the hardware is amazing, but the software it seems like everything is meta. So, it's not like a Google call or like something like this. It's just everything is from meta and it's it's buggy. Many things didn't work and yeah, people are calling it trash, but the hardware looks so impressive. So with these glasses that are barely heavier than normal glasses, you get eight hours of uh battery life, right?

And you have essentially like a screen in your peripheral vision that is like a colored screen. And apparently people can't see it. So this depending on who you ask could be a nightmare. Like I could be talking to you wearing these and you could not see what I'm looking at. What you could say, you could know that I am looking at something because I'm not focused, you know, on you. So I'm looking at it. It seems like that I'm zoning out. Yeah, I was going to say people people have a look when when they're not they're not listening to what you're saying. People have a look about them. They look glazed over. So, it'll probably be Oh, there we go.

Super nerd over here. Yeah. So, this was missing. This is my Google glasses. I I don't have battery. Oh, I didn't even notice you were wearing Google Glass. I didn't even notice this. This is how we going with the rest. So, gosh. Yeah. The presentation apparently didn't went uh didn't go well. I saw for example they tried to make a call just a simple call and it did not work and they tried to do a few things like with AI to to help with um like kitchen stuff with cooking and the guy wasn't even starting and the AI would say well continue. Oh yeah I saw that one. It was asking the same question right?

Yeah, exactly. And to be honest, um, what I'm really happy about is that the where the tech is because I see, okay, if they have this by the latest, I don't know, in a year, uh, other companies can pick up on the tech and have like similar things that is not from Meta because I really would I really would love to get these glasses, but I probably won't because they are from Meta and I I just can't I don't I don't want to. Um so I'm I'm waiting for I don't know maybe Apple, maybe other companies to pick this up and do something cool with it and with better software because the software is trash.

What is really cool about the software uh well one part of the software is apparently working like super well and that is that uh wristband that uh he's wearing. He has something on his wrist. That is the controller. So this reads the essentially what your brain is sending to your fingers. It reads that and based on those gestures that you make, you can control your headset. So it's not like the one from Apple, the vision pro that looks at your fingers. This one reads the neurons. That is that is insane to think about. You know, apparently it's it's you give clues uh before you actually move your hand and things like that and it can read those clues.

So, it feels just sort of like slightly ahead of what you want to do because it's insane. Yeah. Yeah. That is cool. Well, uh this is the future, I guess. And one cool thing that I saw about it is apparently you can uh with your fingers you can kind of like hold a pen but not you don't need a pen. You just Yeah. Like you're holding a pen like you are like you do. Yeah. And you can write things and it knows what you're but I guess really soon or some sometimes there are like uh companies like um what's it called? Neuron Link, Neural Link that uh there are competitive companies that are reading like your brain waves without uh like the implementation that neural link has without the surgical process.

So I guess soon we won't even need that. Maybe I don't know but maybe sometime in the future you can't just your glass because it's sitting on your skull somehow maybe could do this. I don't know. Maybe there was um there was something released this week uh and I I didn't have time to prepare it for this um this this show, but there has been something released this week which is able to read your I'm trying to remember it now. It reads you can speak and you don't have to make a sound. You just need to speak and it can basically read your mind and and you'll be able to do things and whatever. Um, that's as far as my story goes, unfortunately.

But there there has been something. I don't know whether you saw anything about that at all or whether any of the viewers have seen anything about that, but it's like Neurolink, but without the surgery that is H. Have you guys seen Black Mirror? I've seen Black Mirror. So people are comparing this to one episode from Black Mirror when the guy can like record everything and remember everything and yeah that is dystopian and this is the closest we've come to that and it's it's kind of there like you wear this glass you can constantly record people well I guess not constantly but we can't you can just record people without them knowing you can read stuff.

Uh you can communicate with your glasses without like showing any without saying anything and even your gestures barely happen. So you they can be really refined. You can have your hands in your pocket and move them and uh control your glass. Imagine you like I I saw so many like crazy posts about this. people saying like um building crazy crazy apps for this and some people apparently already have. So you can um build an app for example to recognize people and give you like information about them. And what if you build an app that can tell there are apps like this that can tell if a person is lying. So you look at people imagine you go like you know you get to know somebody and you can tell you can know every information about them you can tell if they are lying and I don't know the AI gives you red flags I guess um and tells you like everything it's it's just insane.

It's it's insane. is interesting and it on on surface level it sounds very scary and dystopian at the same time like we don't know the implications of this and it could be negative that's all I'm saying here but it also could be very positive in that we are a more you know we we don't lie as much who who wants a who wants a world where everyone's lying right um there's there's definitely some things you can throw out into Oh, I'm sideways again. There's definitely uh ideas and things you can throw out into the world as a consequence of this um this this tool, this technology, but it's yet to be seen whether it's good or bad.

You don't want to lie, but you also, you know, you don't want other people to lie to you, but you don't want to have a tech that is constantly whispering to your ear like what? Well, maybe maybe we'll just get better at lying then. Maybe it'll kick us up the ass and be better at lying because at the end of the day like there's there's no one way that someone like someone says you look up and to the right or like you do this like but actors are lying all the time you know and like it's Yeah. But then you know and it can only it can only say that it feels like this person's lying and then it's up to you then to like take that next call and be like well I know this person so do I actually trust this tech?

But anyway, but it's interesting like a few a few just a few observations on what you were talking about as well. Like so I don't know whether you saw it but hello look at this happen all the time now. I don't know whether you saw it but Meta did do a concept glasses about three four months ago. They were big and bulky things and whatever and it demoed a lot of this technology that they've now managed to and these were beyond comprehension expensive glasses. Um I think Marquez Brownley viewed them but a lot the wristband technology for instance the the projection technology for instance and um I will correct you it's not quite in your peripheral it is quite front and center from what I see um from the from the um reviews and whatever I've seen.

But that's that's quite miraculous in that the there is a pair of glasses that are very it's basically I think they basically show you basic notifications, whatever. They're a pair of glasses that are publicly available now. You can go buy them. But in certain lights, you can kind of see where it's being projected. It's like I don't know. I don't know whether you've seen matte a matte screen iPad, but you can kind of hold it up to the light and around the perimeter you can see the gloss, but then on the surface you can see the where it's being, you know, whether it anti-glare. That's what these glasses are like. But it seems like this they've managed to find a way to completely remove any remnants or apparently you can see it in the dark as well.

You can see it when it's dark. That's that's the only caveat here. So if it's or if it's or if you're um you know your your cuz they're they're interchangeable lenses which a few of them are you can see it then but all that to be said you know it it's cool tech and I will say as well everyone who's bought the previous version of the Ray-B band glasses think they are the best technology released you know last year everyone has loved them particularly families you know when you can when you can play with your kids and you can just um you know, you don't have to worry about like pressing record and whatever. Great for all that.

Uh they are great. I've put them on, but they're very I find them very uncomfortable. They're very just everything's rigid about them, the frames and everything. I I don't find them comfortable, but people have been very impressed with the version one. This is just now taking it to the next level. But it's meta. They're soaking up every bit of data they can from you. That's just, you know, these glasses are probably worth 10 times as much, but they sell them to you cheaper. Saying that, these are $7.99, so they haven't quite subsidized as much as the of the version one. Yeah. Yeah. Uh well, yeah. All of that being said, we've come a long way.

Uh I'm still holding on to these just as a piece. I can't believe you've got those. That's like iconic. Yeah. This is kind of like a museum right now in my drawer. Yeah. They they work but just for a couple of minutes very buggy. It's uh they don't have a software. Did you buy them secondhand? Like how did you get hold of them? I'm just going to I'm just going to use this camera because it's uh Yeah. Yeah. Well, long story long story I have to tell you another time. But yeah, I um still the man. Yeah. But really cool. It's really cool. And with these you do see what the other person is seeing kind of and it's insane that this much like this thickness has changed uh now by a whole lot.

Anyway, so this was meta news things going wrong but still people are very excited about it and I I really want to try these glasses. Going to the next update. Uh I don't know if you've seen this one or not. Uh you have played with framer, right? Updra released an update this week uh one day before the web flow conf and they showed us the direction that they are going. So now they have this thing that call is called design pages. Previously you you had essentially this view to have one page. This was one web page, right? You had this one web page you could design in it. And inside of this canvas, you could zoom in and out, but you had only this one page.

And if you had like a contact page, you would go to a different page. So these are like different separate pages, right? Now they have design pages which is just like Figma. Here you can have frames, right? I I can and they call them frames as well, right? They are actually called frames. They have been always called uh frames, right? Mhm. Uh I believe so. Oh yeah, because of course. Yeah, because it's uh framer. Yeah, I believe so. Anyway, so you have these frames and you can have like as many as you want and you have like the canvas completely free for yourself and here you can design. This is not like the rest of the framer that you are designing a single page, a specific page.

Here you're designing whatever which is really cool. It's just like Figma. It's nothing new but it's new to framer and it exists now all in the same place. And once you are ready with a direction let's say you make a bunch of designs then you put them together then you have like a frame that is ready to be uh to be developed. You are essentially here you can just rightclick on this uh okay uh right click on this and then you say create web page and here you have under pages a new page that is that frame that you were working on. So it's kind of like you're designing but at developing at the same time but in a free form canvas.

So all they added is a free form canvas where you have the same features. It's nothing new. Same tools. Okay. It's just it just in a new environment and it just makes sense. I was surprised that they didn't have it. I kind of knew that they don't have it, but I it never occurred to me that oh it that specific thing in this way is missing. It just felt like, oh yeah, now in framer you have like different pages and that's how you do it. But now that they have released it, it totally makes sense. Uh, and this shows their direction. They are going after Figma really bad. They want the whole piece of the cake.

They don't want just the development part. They are not saying, "Oh, hey designers, you can design your portfolio directly inside a framer." No, they are saying like you can design inside of framer anything and then you just have it uh ready to be published. So, and you it what do you think more than just I think it's great. Um I didn't know that it was basically the same thing and that you just it's great for iterations. It's great for you know coming up with lots of iterations and being like right this is the one assign that as the contact page. How easy is it just to Can you just like in an instant switch to a new design for the contact page?

Uh that's what I thought. No. Uh but I guess like you would put all the things from one uh into that page, I guess. Mhm. Mhm. Or you just uh or you just like if you if you don't like this instance, you you make a new one, you call it something else, and then you make a web page and then just change the link, I guess. But I I know what you're asking, but I don't know if you can actually um click swap. I mean, you know, it is what it is, but um yeah, this is great. And I don't think it will necessarily kill Figma because remember more than just web designers use Figma.

You use it for your thumbnails, right? Um a good friend of mine Susie, she she's in she's app so she's doing more she's doing app design in it. And this isn't going to replace all of that. This is just taking the web designers and giving them the complete end toend flow for web designers. So that's really great. And I think what the what this what this is great for, you know, the classic meme of designers coming up with some crazy frigin animation or like this or that or skewing and doing all these things and developers are like how the hell am I going to create that you know? Yeah, that's because in part due to the fact that because Figma is so well uh featured to support app designers as well as web designers as well as graphic designers, it's going to give you things that you can do that you cannot do in the web.

And that's gonna that's a point of friction and a point of um apprehension for designers thinking well what can I and and designers are thinking well I wish I knew more about development because I don't know what you can and can't do. Well this is doing this is going to be a very condensed version this is like Figma light where you can only do things that can work on the web. You can only do you know that everything you're designing in here is going to be for the web. Granted you you might be able to get a little bit clever with what you do. I can see you're putting together some sort of button or a switch or something.

You might be able to get clever with certain things to create what you need, but ultimately you you're pretty certain it's going to work for the web. Whereas, yeah, Figma is a bit more daunting because certainly blend modes are a bit of a pain. And blend modes are not good for for web. And if you and I see a lot of people use blend modes that you could achieve through other means that don't use something that's so graphically or or processor intensive as a blend mode as an example. So yeah, all in all and 100% free, unlimited pages, unlimited canvas, 100% free. So framer of um they're going after the web, they're trying to seize the web designers from Figma for sure.

Yeah, definitely. Uh this feature is for free, but just to um like for people who don't know like framer is quite more expensive than Web Flow and this is what people don't realize because the like the starting tier is very generous and then it's like5 pounds, isn't it? 5 something like that. Yes. For something that I believe nobody needs. Uh it's just so limited. Uh but the moment like you have anything serious like we have clients and I can't use any like uh reasonable plan from framer for any of my clients if it makes sense. So it's something that my clients are paying 20 bucks a month for at framer would cost 80 bucks a month.

Okay. So, this is like for 90% of my clients, uh, Framer would be extremely expensive and 80 bucks a month for a builder. Um, it it it's a stretch. Anyway, I want to show you also this diagram that I just made. I I have talked about this in the past. Um, and this is maybe a time that we can talk about it. So there are things that you can do in Figma that you like a designer can't do them in development and vice versa. You know that there are like things that you can do in one and not in the other. Well, I guess you could do pretty much everything in development if you knew how like to perfectly code with WebGL and whatever, but that's one of the points.

So inside of if you are only a designer and have no idea about the code that's the point. If you have no idea about this side of the equation and just live inside of design you are missing out. For example we have slots you know component slots they don't exist inside of Figma. like with v var variations varants inside of Figma you don't have slots you have a variation and like multiple ones that you can mix together but like the way you can do it for example even in web flow you can just build so much like exponentially more with exponentially less um like uh components you can build many more because you can just mix them something that Figma doesn't support yet.

That is not something visual. This is like functional but still missing. Something visual that is missing is like the the WebGL effects, right? There are tons of effects that can happen in the development side that you're completely uh are missing when you are just sticking with design. Um so yeah it could be webgl it could be animations even the animations that uh Figma has is a small portion of what is possible. So the best would be to do what you want to do like follow what you like to follow but also just get informed about what is possible in the other so you are not missing out. It's it's been it's an age-old thing like when I was working in corporate like you would always get the designers that were frustrated or or again just worried that they're designing things that a developer wouldn't be able to achieve or couldn't do or something like that you know and I think as developers we need to be more bold and ambitious on what we can do or what what we can achieve particularly with newer technologies and with AI now you and um have the AI figure out how you're going to achieve something complex.

But ultimately just a little bit more compassion for you know or not compassion but just you know um our communication probably needs to be better in in guiding our designers and and helping them like every every design is going to be diff every developer is going to be different in their capabilities and um you're going to get some who are really and what I'm seeing more of some most developers are really functionalheavy they don't care about design well not they don't care about design but they're just good. A lot of them don't know CSS. A lot of them don't care for CSS anymore. They just really they all they care about is linking all of this functionality together, having the having this two-way interactions and passing state.

And it is it is a lot more fun than doing the UI stuff, which is why often developers will use Tailwind and they'll just approximate the design because they just don't it's not interesting to them. So that's another that's another thing. Uh, I think designers need to be aware of it. They're going to be working with some developers who really just don't have an eye for design and don't really care for it. And not really an answer to any of these questions, but just maybe a bit of um understanding of from a developer perspective what you're contending with or what you're dealing with. You you might not be dealing with a developer who um well, that's another thing as well.

you I I don't think designers truly understand the amount of um responsibility that a developer has. So whilst a designer is like I want them to do the design this this design is everything and it means so much you're just one of the plates that a developer is spinning. Obviously I'm very biased right now but you're just one of the plates a developer is spinning. Yeah. They've got an they've als they're also spinning security. They're also spinning accessibility. they're also spinning just deployments and then getting it live and uptime and things like that. So yeah, it's a it's a messy field and I think it's just the answer is just being curious, understanding and um sympathetic to to everyone's role and just getting out there and just yeah just just trying your best, you know, for everyone to get a uh understanding for this.

If you're like wondering what like what is that so easy in design and difficult in development just imagine forms like with a form a designer typically just you know create some simple forms but as a developer you have to manage the states and you need to make sure what sanitize the inputs you know make sure it's not people ain't hacking it you know yeah and uh how you are sending the data and what you are showing going to the user after sending the data and so much of this uh can be designed but what I see in reality very often designers miss these details so yeah uh all that to say there is a lot more into it with that uh let's go to our next topic and this is the most interesting part for me to uh to see like your reaction and to to hear from you what do you think about each one of these things that Web Flow released.

We could go into some of them in details and with some other we can just um you want to go through that real quick and I'm just going to go speak to my mom and see if I can get a USBC charger. Okay. All right. So, yeah. Yeah, I'll I'll do that. So, Webflow just released uh well, they had they released their new conference and they released a few. Well, they haven't released that's that's what I'm trying to say. They haven't actually released them. They announced them. There's a difference. Uh so, the none of these features are available to me um as of a few hours ago that I checked. So, we have Webflow Cloud, which was announced before.

They just kind of like uh mentioned it again. Component canvas. Uh this was super new. I had no idea about it and looks really cool. Uh their ho hosting infrastructure is now and kind of like new. They have it with uh Cloudflare and they talked about AI traffic that more of our traffic the web basically like people are reading your website less instead it's AI bots that are reading your website. Uh we have we have Sam back. Are you back? I'm on mute. I've asked for a plug. Yeah, all good. But I've been I've been listening. Uh, okay. We we had some updates around how you can essentially make your like manage your website in a way that that brings more business.

So that is to understand how your visitors behave. Uh have some goals for your website. for example that is buying something or clicking a button to sign up for something or it's newsletter whatever your conversion looks like you have these goals and now you can set them in web flow and uh with some AI you can manage those and also get some reporting uh which is really cool uh we had real time uh collaboration shown to us which was announced before I have tried it this is I I tried the beta version and It it feels so good. Um the cursor is missing though. So you can't see the cursor of like other people in the uh project where they are exactly at with their cursor, but you see a box around where they are.

I can actually show this here. Yeah, the demo didn't go too well on that either, did it? Yeah. Yeah, the de I want to say this. Yeah, the demo went uh pretty bad and it seemed like the person who was handling uh who was supposed to do something, they didn't know how to do it. Um they didn't know like the web flow side of how to do it, which is a bit strange to me. Anyway, you see like these boxes around um like where people like what element people are working on and multiple people can click on the same element by the way. And what we tested like I can create a class and then right just like after I press enter you can start typing and that class shows up for you and you can uh use that class on a different element or do animation with it or whatever.

So that is super cool that uh it's truly like synced at the same time. Uh you have the charger now right? No, but we're we're good for the time being. I just wanted to make sure once Okay. So, let's um I would say like instead of me just reading through them, I think it's uh quite it's a bit boring. Uh I want to to just kind of like have it in a two-way conversation. They they showed their AI assistant again. And this is the part of the live that went super bad. anything else was like either technical or it was boring. This was boring. It was bad and people they yeah they didn't react really well to it and it was super awkward.

So the AI what what changed in this what changed in the AI assistant other than just obviously its placement nothing essentially. Uh okay. Yeah. So there's lots of other AI things as you've already said, but just the AI assistance specifically like what's changed. Yeah, I I can show it to you and man, I I wish I I felt bad for them, man. Uh well, I don't I shouldn't say this. I don't particularly feel bad for them. Like they decided to show something that is undercooked. It it doesn't bring any value. They know they know that the community is not really happy about this because this is AI slop like what is so yeah you're not appealing to anyone in that room right now are you like the AI assistant is really it doesn't solve a problem it doesn't solve any problem like we we didn't we do it and it was like well this is great for someone who has no idea what they're doing but most people especially in the professional like Web Flow is not an amateur to tool anymore which you know just to briefly bring into the the framer question framer has given up competing with web flow just because web flow is just such a professional tool basic AI assistant stuff is like we haven't we haven't even spoken about Figma's release by the way and I think that's quite a nice maybe a nice middle ground they've what have they called it did you see didn't they call it a um oh I don't know what do you remember what they called it Figma uh the the Figma AI you mean?

Yeah, they they phrased it in a way where it's just like it takes your design and it just variates it. Like that's their that's what they're saying. You can take your design with a prompt, right? Whereas web flow they're saying do everything and and web flowers aren't asking for that aren't asking for it to create. It doesn't save them a lot of time. Yeah, we we'll get into somewhere potentially very exciting with Web Flow, but this is just not it to me because the quality is not there and this is not what I It might be a good starting point though. Don't Don't get me wrong, like just creating that it might save you a few minutes just to be like, can you create me just a testimonial section and then it gives you a starting point to then do your magic.

This is the question. Who is this even for? because I would not I would just use like my existing like I have structures by the time that I'm this deep in the website I have like style guides and structures and I'm much faster that way than some AI slop if the AI quality is good which we see clearly it's not good she asked for a different layout they gave it a picture and it came up with a completely different layout than what they asked ask for. So, it's not good. That's why this one got the the lowest rating for me. So, yeah, I I I just I think they need to frame it differently. And that is that it it gives you a boost.

It gives you a head start for you to then go in and do your magic rather than have it just create things for you, right? It's just it's all for me, it's all in the language that they should have used, all of all the context in which they need to frame it. you know. Yeah, for me um they they should have put this under like web flow lab that is something that cool we are playing with right then I would be so happy to see it. it would be like, "Oh, cool. Look, they're building something." Uh, and it's like the start of it, but now they are selling it uh somehow. Um, it's just unclear who who it's for and what problem solving everywhere.

Anyway, so another update that is super small, everybody is saying it's so small, but I'm so freaking happy about it is a new share link system. So now you can share your website as a sandbox link. So I guess this is like a read only and then we have a comment link that you can share with your clients and they can just open the site in a commenting environment and they can just comment on it. And uh this is awesome. This is this is like super awesome. even uh yeah I I think no other tool has it in this particular way which makes it uh super interesting to me like you when you share a comment link apparently they don't see anything else they can't see like the code or the layout or the structures that you have they just see like the preview with the option to add comments which is which is really valuable because uh markup up.

Do you know Markup? Have you used markup? Um, it's for reviewing websites, right? So, Markup.io, we uh we used to use that, but they they removed their free tier and now they're they just cost like 80 bucks a month. It's gone up. Yeah, I remember using it. I've never used it free, but I remember using it a lot cheaper than 80. But it is a very very good tool. Um well I don't see any need for this anymore. Well in with web flow yeah with web flow yeah with web flow you don't need that. Then they had an update for interactions with GSA. Previously the new Gap interactions didn't uh support breakpoints. Now it does.

And did you know about this that it didn't support breakpoints? No it didn't. No it didn't. It was still like super early and beta. Uh well, technically it wasn't beta but didn't support it anyway. And now it also supports reduce motion. So this is great for accessibility. You can create an animation and you can say on reduced motion settings go to the end of the animation. So users don't miss the in well they miss the animation if they choose to but they won't miss the end of the interaction which is sometimes super important. For example imagine a popup coming up. Um it will just pop up and users will see the end state and they are happy with this without seeing the interaction the animation if they choose to.

And now with Gab you can uh do that. Next update and this one is a super interesting one. So they this thing called component canvas and I want to actually show this somewhere else. Component canvas. Maybe I can't find it here. Oh yeah, I do. Man, by the way, these like these graphics were brutal. They were just just so not it. So, uh let me go full screen. You see what is um what is up here. So, we have this canvas that you can just move around and we have this UI that does not look like web flow at all. Like we have width, fixed and height fit. These wordings are not from Webflow world.

They are very marketer friendly. Uh, and we have the variations and we have these that's what that's what Figma and Framer use. Exactly. Isn't this Huh? Yeah. I want this I I really want this to be um to become bigger and something where you can potentially design in. Why not? Framer is doing it. Figma is you know going that direction like each tool is trying to essentially capture the whole vertical that is from ideiation to production that is what framer and Figma are doing and web flow could very well do this I mean what is stopping them like there there are also like open-source tools similar to Figma that they could plug into they could also try to acquire ire a company.

I would really love them to see to do that. I can't imagine my team. This gets me excited just to imagine my team instead of like designing inside of Figma being able to design inside of Webflow and then we pick it up and like build something with it. Why not? Even if it's limited, if it's not like animated or if it can't convert directly, it's still like to me a very exciting idea to to do that. This isn't this isn't what everyone wants though. You got to remember they are very much and a lot of these companies are taking the Apple approach, the walled garden approach, capturing the users in in just their ecosystem, right?

And interestingly uh the EU specifically particularly are very much against that the interoperability between tools and systems is what built the web you know it's this is web two right and to build an API the reason why um a lot of the stuff works is because people wanted to build an API um so that other tools can interact with it. So, there's going to be a real conflict here between, you know, this is great, but like I'm stuck with web flow now and like um well, you're the open source right now. You're stuck with the designs that you have inside of Figma. Like there is no interoperability between the designs you have in Figma and Webflow.

They're like tools. They are building like tools but these are not exactly like tools to that's not true. you have you have Figma to Webflow plugin and and whilst that is not like that is not even like close to being functional like well it would be interesting to compare Figma to web flow versus web flow's attempt to at capturing the Figma market right because I don't know whether maybe for me the I didn't use Figma to web flow but I used other Figma to you know um web studio, Wix studio and for me it was just about understanding where the limitations are and again having having that um head start but time will just tell all I'm guess is all I all I guess I'm saying is is that there is there is a world where you don't want to be I understand that almost OCD nature of want having everything you pay one subscription everything's there it's all nice and neat and tidy.

But we al are also missing out on a big aspect which is really nice uh interoper interoperability between tools. Um if they worked a little harder on that then how far that could go uh is only is yet to be desired because they're not going down that route. Yeah. Because well it it's from both sides. Uh Figma is also taking on on Webflow's uh they are like trying to get their market and framer's market. Figma is trying to have like a web builder. So why not uh Webflow have a design tool. Um they've been a tool for designers uh since they started. So why not give designers more tools? Um that that's all I'm saying.

and give developers companies grow and they expand. It doesn't mean that the interoperability has to be sacrificed. Uh that's how I see it. Anyway, the next thing that they showed was code components and this is something that I had uh early access to and I couldn't tell you. Uh so this is the reason why I was doing some react. So uh so with code components you can have your uh code in your like your own environment and just push it you just push it uh to web flow and then inside of web flow you get like a new component and you just use it you just use it inside of web flow and it renders and it works and you can connect some properties and for the start the properties as you see are very they're not they this doesn't look nice right how should I like compare it to I mean to me it looks very much like WordPress how WordPress used to be before exactly um just just fields but you know um this I mean like this is I like don't mind this this is not nice but this is like it has a wider variety of like fields and types and more control and what web flow lacks is this kind of like there is no slider.

What what you could do sliders but what you what you I suppose they can add more um that's what I'm saying widgets they will add more uh input types. So it right now you change the radius using a number field but in the future I will be able as a developer to decide if it's a number field or it's a slider with you know that has like nicer controls that's all I'm saying and it's the same whether it's pixels whether it's rims things like that yeah and uh there is no color uh field either so if you want to choose to change color you can still but you use um like a text field to read the color from.

And realistically, I think what would be the best and I'm just thinking off the top of my head right now. What what would be the best thing is that because I know code components can read from variables, right? And it can read from um yeah, it can read from variables. Am I misunderstanding that? I thought I read that it can read your sites variables. I don't think so, actually. Um interesting. Okay. I thought I read that. I thought I read that. Uh there is something else that one can read your var variables. I but uh code components. I'm not sure actually. I don't know. Maybe I I ideally you would you know you wouldn't give someone such free reign access to one two three four pixel you know radius border radius right?

it would be defined and um constrained to the the the style guide, right? The variables you've set up. So, there'll be already a framework. Obviously, you can, you know, depending on the needs, you might want to allow for a slider to to do that, but realistically, it would be a drop down to say small, medium, large, you know, or and and those would be tied to variables and stuff like that. But, um the flexibility is there at the very least. Yeah. Uh, and it's really cool that it's uh being rendered on this, you know, directly on the canvas and you just you just see it even though it's in the code environment. Um, but I um I'm I'm a beginner obviously in this realm, but it felt like I needed some sort of like continuous deployment.

I don't know if it's even a thing because every time I made a change, I had to uh sync it sync it through the CLI and then inside of the web flow uh I had to update it and then it I it required like quite like I don't know I mean they'll improve that obviously this is is it is it in beta now or they have they officially moved out of beta was beta your pre um I was accessed beta beta closed beta. I wonder if it's in anyway to to answer the question because obviously like I made my my video just reacting to the bits that I'm obviously interested in and then I did some further research and yeah you can you can do a continuous it can sync up as a continuous deployment pipeline where you can constantly keep updating your uh components through GitHub.

Mhm. Um, and just I mean I don't again I don't know how much of the tech you have looked into but it's it's all using Sorry, hang on someone's on the phone just out there. Um, it's using Dev Link as a backbone to all of this. So designers can also go in and change the the the um Oh, actually this is an assumption. And I'm not going to say this is it, but because it I do know that it uses Dev Link as as the the backbone. So theoretically designers can also come in and change these components um and update them and then the developer can then pull them back down. Not sure if that will work through GitHub, but that's it doesn't work that way yet.

So these components are so far they are completely one way. Oh, so it's just code. Yeah. Is it it's code to code components or it's web flow? So you you you have the entire like the the entire thing in your own code environment and you push it to web flow and you can't change it inside of web flow. You can, but when you change it, it doesn't reflect. You cannot pull that those changes to your code base again. It just the changes are only with the fields that you define in your code by the way. Yeah. So, and these are not obviously like automatically defined. You define them in the code. Yeah. Right. Uh, and it's all React.

So, yeah, which is a get well I suppose we'll get into them betting on Astro, but like um and Astro uses React, but from what I saw or from what I understand, it would be interesting to to know which flavor of React they go with inside of code components versus, you know, um, Web Flow Cloud Vibe Coding. Yeah. Um well we we'll get into that in a second. So they have this nextgen web flow CMS uh update this in a community meetup we had uh people were like super excited about this. So now you can have many more CMS items per site and many more like fields and uh multi-reference collections and like three level of nesting and um just just more of the current CMS.

What what was completely missing for me was like any sort of like enhancement to the current CMS structure like the rich text right now cannot we cannot pull in a component inside of a put it inside of a rich text. I would like to see something like slots like component slots inside of rich text uh and that is obviously is missing or some sort of like drag and drop. So I can change the order of things uh or uh like repeater fields if it makes sense. So you define a field and the the editor can decide how many of them that field they want. I mean I'm sorry to burst your bubble but there there won't be a slot inside of a rich text field because technically that is not possible.

You know why you you because a rich text field is a um is a text area, right? Or it's sorry, it's a Oh, no, no, actually actually I take that back. I'm thinking text area. like I'm just thinking as a just a regular text area. But no, there could there could be uh I think the um you know, you open up a whole new UI to get it to position and and whatever nicely, but if you just wanted heading text like as we're looking at right now, and then this image that you've got on your screen is, let's say that's the component and it's just block level, you know, whatever that probably pretty pretty straightforward, but um it is simple in my head because um like they have component slots.

I don't know if you've used them or not, but with a component slot, it's essentially it's a div block and you can set it to display flex or grid or whatever. And then the components will obviously sit inside of it based on that. You need to you need to create a um a wrapping uh container around it to to keep the um well I'm thinking of putting things in columns and stuff like that but it just it would just need a a new UI to be able to facilitate proper I don't think so. Why? Because we have slots. We already have slots. Yeah. But I'm talking about positioning. I'm talking about how it interacts with the rest of the text the text um rich text fields.

Let's say for instance you wanted a header paragraph and then you wanted the rest of the paragraphs to flow to the left hand side and on the right hand side is your code is your component. some sort. They have this already with the rich text you can like float uh or like the UI for that exists and also you know you can add like a code component. So I would just imagine a UI where you where you like do slash component or like you click component and then it just opens the the component panel just like the asset panel the component panel and they use and we already have like component canvas as an update.

So the user could write you know click on the component and add it and once they added it there we already have the UI uh for the component properties to show so they can you know add the content there. So it's to me bringing it together but it might be something that is coming. They didn't hint at it at all. I don't have any, you know, information, firsthand information on this, but I just hope that all of this because they called it a full rewrite. They said a rearchitectured um CMS. So, I hope that this is going to come next. Well, as part of that, I don't know whether you're going to get into it, but as part of the CMS stuff is also the API layer.

Yeah. What is new about that? I think you just have more access to the items and things like that. Um, and I mean I don't know the specifics around the rest side of things, but being able to pull in CMS into your code components and I think Web Flow cloud components or Web Flow cloud projects being able to pull in CMS items through that and that is that is amazing. That's really good. Okay, that Okay, cool. Um yeah, we had some update to the forums which was not really any update. So um I I have some friends with like uh you know form have you heard of like form connector? Uh so form connector is a web flow app uh that essentially replaces the web flow form.

It actually plugs into your web flow form but then you don't need the deliverability of your web flow form and you use form connector to you know get your forms uh informations um anywhere so submissions anywhere so I have that connected to my notion and it's pretty nice it just works so you connect the web flow form to the form connector app and then you choose the destination and it just works. Uh, Web Flow was supposed to like introduce some like new form UI and bigger update, but no, they didn't. They just added some like bot uh blocks and spam filter and things like this that existed already, but now you have control over it on an individual form level, which doesn't make much sense.

Like you just want to filter spam altogether. Anyway, yeah, why would you not want to filter spam? Yeah, they they update they showed some update to analyze. I don't know if you're interested in this. I not really because web flow analyze. Um, yeah, I just use Microsoft clarity, web flow analyze, I I I believe I fully believe Web Flow Analyze should be free. It's a paid feature. It's an add-on and I fully believe it should be free just like Microsoft clarity is and then they can charge money for uh optimize which is their AI reading the analyze data and you know making adjustments based on that. These were like the smaller things and uh the main two big things that we didn't talk about were um are the um AI powered codegen and we have like two updates here.

So to show you here we have codeg gen apps and we have codegen code components. So just like these uh where the like code components we have code gen code components. So that is AI powered. Let me show it here. It is probably like easier. That's really where I was getting confused about the two-way thing. Yes. Like so if you AI generate it, you're able to two-way sync it. Uh so this is the code gen. Uh no, this is the code component uh AI code component AI and it's not a two-way sync. The code here does not live in your environment. This is the code that lives inside of your web flow. So we have like these it's kind of messy, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So this is all inside of Webflow. And you see this update button. This tells me that you you can fiddle with the code and update uh as well as well as like you know using the AI and yeah it would be crazy if this is not a two-way sync like I should be I should be able to two-way sync this. Um, yeah, cuz otherwise the other one is just reverse dev link. Then you've got like two single way dev links that one is one is in one is initiated by the designer that the developer can pull down. One is initiated by the developer that the designer can pull, but they both cannot interact with either of their um products, the things they've built, the components they've built.

Um whereas this because it's all code 100% code generated by AI but it's 100% code. Um, so in theory, okay, so in theory, you could create a you could design a a component developer can sync it down with dev link. Copy that code, push it up to whatever, sync it over as a dev component or paste the code into here and you can start you've got a two-way thing going. Yeah, it it's it's quite messy, but it's very early. So, and I'm sure the technical aspects are a bit underestimated of getting all that to work because yeah, we basically we're asking for a web flow-l like UI on any code component that's been built and not even framer have figured that out and they're the pioneers of the code component.

So, or uh framer, yes, framer. Yeah, always get confused with Figma. Uh I I I don't think that any company has this uh figured out because we still don't know like how far will AI get us you know we still don't know that I I was watching a video on um like from uh primogen and a few other developers and essentially in very short the video is like one hour long but in very short they don't either use AI or they use it for very simple tasks because it doesn't do what they want to. Not they not because they are against AI. They try it and then they see that it's trash. At least that that's what they are saying and I believe them for what they are saying.

Um yeah, the result AI shouldn't carry us. It should it should help us do things we we need it to you know what I mean like and they they gave a a really good example that I could kind of like understand even though I'm not that technical on that side. The guy was saying like if I ask it if I tell AI to go to do this architectural change it can't do it like we try but it can't it it messes it up but let's say we have like 50 versions of like a similar change uh and I do one of them I do this architectural change myself I do it and I say to AI hey this is like a template go do this to to the rest as Well, now it can do it.

But then the question is did AI like write the code or just like help me with kind of like adjusting it which you know um is interesting question itself. And another thing is these companies are saying how much of the the code is being generated by AI. Which companies? So let me actually phrase this differently. of companies who are selling you AI, they are all about how much of the code is being generated by AI where in reality we don't measure the quality of a developer by the amount of code they produce. You could actually argue for the opposite. You could say, "Oh, this guy, he's a such a good developer since he has joined this company.

he has been able to remove 20% of our code while things are still uh running. So that would be a great developer. But with AI, these companies are saying like 70% of the code is written by AI and it's like two billion lines of code. Who cares? Like since when is this like even a a metric to measure like quality? I mean some companies do unfortunately but I you know the point remains but but the reality you know it was never like it was never about the amount of code produced. It was always about the quality and actually like reducing the code but now all of a sudden um anyway so you're completely right about all of this.

Look at this look at this prompt. It's kind of funny how long it is. This is a prompt that they pasted in um and it for the code component the it didn't work really well uh in my eye but this is like AI it's at this point I don't think like web flow or like lovable or framer or whoever else has a particularly like best AI because they are all using the same APIs They probably not even have they probably don't even have much of a base prompt, you know, a system prompt on top of that. They're just they're just and a lot of these companies are doing it. I spoke about Replet being one of the only companies who are actually layering on top of the AI, whereas all the rest of them, they're literally just taking the prompt and just doing that and just they're they're just this middleman which they're not offering any particular, you know, that's just an assumption anyway.

you know, doesn't seem like Web Flow would do any any different from that. Where I think Web Flow could potentially have an upper hand in the future, and correct me if I'm wrong, is where like with Figma and Framer, you are kind of abstracting the code layer from the user and it's like so designer oriented. And in web flow it's so much more exposed like the CSS and the the HTML is exposed to me as a user even if I'm not technical. So would that in theory make it easier for the AI to plug in and you know build B and you know develop based on that. where in these other tools they have their unique structure and that could potentially make it more difficult for the AI to replicate um the same code and you know continue based on I would say the complete opposite of what you've just said.

I think the fact that they yes because they can abstract and they have their own way of doing things. Whereas web flow because people because of the flexibility you can build the same thing a million different ways and people have preferences on how they like to build things. So in some ways you know you're you can throw something out there but it's not going to satisfy everyone. It's not going to be like well I didn't want that to be an article. I wanted to be a section. I didn't want to didn't want to um you know I didn't I didn't want that section to be display grid. I wanted whatever you know what I mean.

There's so much uh it's so open to interpretation that it would be hard. It would be easy to implement but hard to actually nail and and do a good job of it. I don't know. I mean again everyone's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. where where I ask this like my question is coming actually from a data uh quality point of view sort sort of like the structure that a framer site outputs a framer user outputs is much more unique at least in my head I don't have like you know data based on but it like the classes the naming it's react it's all generated it's very it's very generative ative and random in a way where with web flow we have like structures and the rest of the web the rest of the web is more similar to web flow than it is to like framer and figmas that's where I'm saying like the code that an AI generates it's closer to a code that a web flow developer generates therefore it might easier to plug it in and why why I'm asking this is because we see um we Companies like lovable they are starting at no co well they're starting at a prompt and then giving you a UI you know slowly they are adding UI pieces that you can choose a heading and change the style manually where web flow has the complete opposite framer and Figma they have the complete opposite they have all the UI for control and now they're adding the code gen and somehow they're trying to probably like map the UI um because Framer and um Figma are doing this.

They're adding like these like properties that you that the designers can um can have in the code. So, we'll see how it goes. Yeah, interesting feature. Anyway, yeah, and the last feature that they uh mentioned was AppGen. the most interesting one especially because you can you can write a prompt for an entire app and then pull data from your CMS. That is very exciting to me and you can pull from your components. So these could be components that are handcrafted by a designer made with AI or made by a developer. any of these you can pull them in and then it spins up uh an as we now know an Astro project and it's a completely different environment.

It looks like it's inside of Web Flow but it's for all you know purposes it's not. It's a different layer. It's Web Flow Cloud in a new tab essentially. That's what Yeah, that's what I was going to say. So from my understanding, this is just this is now an interface a design a UI for web flow cloud. Um that just so happens to spin up an Astro project. So what is Astro? Be nice if they gave you the choice. It'd be nice if they gave you the choice between Nex.js or Astro. I don't know why they haven't done that, but yeah. What is Astro? Astro is just a serverside rendered um app buer just like Nex.js.

So it's a framework that's it's all React. It's all it's all built on top of React. All React components, but they're saying you build it in this way and have your folder structures in that way and this and that. Um and then at the end of it, it bundles all that code together on the server and um and yeah. And web studio was also built on Astro as well, funny enough. And I think interestingly, Web Web Studio is probably well much more positioned to do the things that Web Flow is trying to do because the website itself is already built on Astro. If the if the if the web flow website that you're building inside of the UI, inside of the designer, inside of the canvas, if that was from the get-go just developing a Astro project or Astro website, they'll be much better positioned to be able to two-way sync the dev link and have all this sort of working together.

So yeah, it's it's um it's a it's an open-source framework for building React websites in a sentence. Cool. Uh why do you need Astro? Why don't you just use React? Because React is not Well, I need to look into server components a little bit more. But React is not a is a it's a clientside library. So what they've done is they've they've they've modified it or they've built a layer on top of it so that it can re render React components but on the server. Okay. And it you know it adds React aims to be as lightweight as possible. It's just a component framework has a few hooks, has a few things that you can tap into, but it tries to be a very lightweight library that you can you can implement it as you want.

An analogy might be oh gosh, I wouldn't know what I'm trying to think of a house ring rings a bell for some reason, but it's just yeah, you can you can do what you want with React. You know, they Nex.js JS and Astro just so happened to put it in a node server and implemented everything it needs to to build a serverside rendered website. I see. So what is the difference between uh Nex.js and Astro? There'll be many differences. There'll be tons of differences in the way you build a website, the way the folders are structured, the way that they deal with um events and things. I think Astro is a a signal. they prefer signals and whereas Nex.js of just leaning into the hooks.

There's just they'll just have different ways that they prefer to do things. I'm not well verssed on the nuances between the two, but ultimately achieve the same thing. Okay. It's just your preference on how you like to write or create projects. I would like to I need to know more of Astro given this change but um yeah no one's going to I I don't know what the maj is there a do you want to get on the screen right now nextJS versus Astro and we can look at the the comparison what people have highlighted as the differences. I mean Astro might even have it on their bloody website but it looked like it was a little bit faster.

Let's see. We just want a clear little diagram, you know. This one is uh from a migration. I don't know. So, here we This is from Maybe there's a video for me. Maybe there's a video for me right there. Yeah. Yeah, that it is. So they are saying this is re real world uh sites with good core web vitals. Mhm. So this is essentially saying that websites that use Astro have a good core web vital but it doesn't mean that Astro is causing that. This is a case of correlation with versus causation. That's that's what it is, right? Um, optimize your website like no other web framework can leverage Astro's unique page load performance to improve.

Okay, so it might be uh but we don't exactly know. It's the percentages of Yeah. Uh this this is not you know the Anyway, no no no. Um, so Astro can work with React or Swelt as well, right? By the looks of things. Yeah. Pact, Vue, Solid. Yeah. I wonder if Web Flow are are I mean, it would make sense. They talk about React and this and that. It would be crazy if they to say, "Yeah, but the app builder um it uses spelt." Yeah. But spelt is pretty much like React as well, I think. I think it's not too far removed. It's JavaScript, right? Yeah. Um Okay. I mean, there's I don't think many people I don't know whether you've got real dieh hard Astro fans or next year's fans who are going to turn around and be like, "No, they shouldn't have gone with that."

Like I think we we're we're splitting hairs at this point with frameworks, you know. Yeah. Okay. Well, that that's fair. Like that's fair to say. Yeah. Optimized image. Okay. Um, I would have just liked to have seen that that you can spin up a project in Nex.js or Astro because that's what you can do on Webflow Cloud. You can you can send in Next.js projects and it will work. Well, I mean, I'm having trouble getting it to work, but that's for another time. And you've seen, did you see like the article Web Flow uh donated $150,000 to Astro? It's an open source apparently. Um, is it it like open source? But I think NexJS is open source too, but they have cell kind of as a as a daddy or you know hand.

They got daddy's credit card. They got daddy's credit card. Well, uh, now Astro has a new daddy and it's web flow. Well, how far can 150 grand go? I don't know, you know. I don't I genuinely don't know. I'm not saying, "Oh, they're they're a premier." Um, what is the size of uh Verso? They're massive. I think they just they just bought who did they just buy? Well, they didn't even buy them. They just gave them a bunch of money. Um, forgotten who it was, but So, is like Versal bigger than Web Flow? I would probably probably. Yeah, they have a very they had a very clear value proposition. Um, and just I think they were they used to be called what do they used to be called?

Something um I don't know they used to be called something else but it they just flipped the script on how easy it was to deploy apps you know one button sync with GitHub and it's like whoa like this is amazing. So very very quickly demonstrated a lot of value. Uh I should they operate on AWS. They operate on AWS. So yeah, that's what I've heard that that Versel is a AWS rapper, but they just work and it's easier to work with. Um I should have had this conversation at this very start because this is more interesting to me than the first we talked about because I'm learning something. What are you learning? like the differences between these and what they are used for.

I mean I guess I could do research but um but Vel it's it is a AWS rapper. You're right but it does offer a lot of nice things. It does like I've my personal website uses an um SQL like database you know through neon integrates with neon but they have functions they even I mean they own v 0ero as well which deploys to versel but they they have a lot of features that you know you can deploy your apps to and yeah a very generous hobby tier like all of my software runs on versel and it's all not costing me a penny you know they made varies is dependable. They've made themselves very dependable, given us the dev tools, Nex.js, and we're left with we're just left with Versel at the end of the day.

I think all all of their escapades all result back to Versel. This is uh on Versal as well. Yeah. Was it static static website? Is it HTML? Yeah. Yes. Yes. But but with this part of the the code we have it on GitHub and there we are deploying to Versel and yeah but this is what I I have no idea like not much about it. So they were like let's do it with and they have their own commenting system too. They have their own markup.io io commenters. So you can go in and comment and highlight things and whatever. That's all built into Versel. That is cool. So it seems like Ver V vers Versel has a bigger daddy than than um what it Yeah.

Yeah. Well, they are. And and Netlefi would be Next.js's competitor. I do like Netlefly, but like um it makes it easier like you this would be well yeah Netlefi has got its own thing but Netifi is the is the competitor to Versel. Yeah. Should we sponsor Astro like throw 200K just so we are like above Webflow? Yeah. Yeah. I wonder I wonder who's gave given them the most. But but that's interesting like 150k we are right it's not much like if if you hire a good developer it will more than yeah it's like one developer salary not not even one developer in um you know I don't know either coast of the US um would cost probably more than this like a higher yeah for sure crazy when you when crazy when put it like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, um Okay. So, anyway, that is it. And like just uh to finish it off, I guess we talked about everything um that ran all the way today and they showed a few things that they did with this AI and it worked by the way the Yeah, it was a calendar thing, wasn't it? It was calendar. it and it worked and they were surprised that it worked. But I mean with AI it's always like this to be fair. I'm not picky on that. I'm more picky if they're like it will create something great and look how beautiful it is and everybody's like ah no it's not but if it's like it's AI it might work it might not.

And that's the true state of AI anyway. So if you look at this does this look like a fork of VS Code to you? I mean, uh, I can't really I'm zooming in. Uh, does it look like a fork of VS Code? You've got the No, because you don't have a navigator in VS Code. You don't have that. Um, it's Yeah, it's just uh I mean, it's just um uh file system and you know, you see the code and you have the code and preview. And this to me looks so it's it's not even beta. I mean this it says AI assistant. Was this a surprise to you? Did you know about this code gen?

Uh no I did not know about it. But but last week you said what would Yeah. Because last week you said what would bring you back to Versa and you said like a replet experience and that's more like what this is you know. Yeah. Replet. Uh yeah, I would completely bet on it because if they wouldn't do it, they would at least show it in a way that hey we are going this direction because every single company on the planet is going exactly this direction and if they wouldn't that would be their end. But yeah, you see this there's a preview button here by the way and there is this preview button from your web flow site and this is a tab that is called appgen.

It looks so um kind of like disconnected from web flow. This is just yeah cloud as a just get it working. Let's give people a UI to pres but this isn't launching until next year, right? Yes. And I would love to see this being mixed more and more and more with the Web Flow UI. Imagine you could have these pages and uh whatnot with the Web Flow editor. Uh but saying all that, you can have all of this right now like this. Don't don't be fooled into thinking this is offering you anything more than what Web Flow Cloud is already offering, right? You're going to as it stands right now, you develop something in cursor or claw code or whatever, however you do it.

You vibe it, you build it, ask it to develop you an Astro project or you use the Web Flow, you know, they have a a CLI where you just you Yeah, exactly. You just you just say Web Flow um new web flow cloud project Astro builds you the framework and then you vibe away, push it up to GitHub, it will sync over and then you've got it. like it's it's not Yeah. Don't be waiting around for this to come out and feel like it's going to offer you anything more, particularly when it first releases, you know. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And also, you got to buy my course, you know. That's that's the only other expense needed.

Yes. I mean, this is a perfect plug. uh you have a course where you teach people how to use web flow cloud with AI as well I assume right well I think that's what we should be getting into you know we should we there should be a there should be at least a module to say look this is how you would you would develop it but it's it's not going to be groundbreaking it's the AI is going to detect that it's an Astro project that you've spun up uh using the web flow CLI and you're left to your own devices to say add this add Web flow haven't released much details around what you can do like you we've mentioned CMS you know you we've mentioned like co- components and all this they haven't released anything how web flow cloud is going to be able to interact with those things right now so we're kind of just left with barebones Astro project for now once all that information comes in then you might want to start you know pulling starting a project in this appg gen stuff But as long as you write the code, but they should I don't know they should probably allow some sort of proxy that you can run where your Astro project can get your CMS items from your um CMS.

Yeah. Um locally when you're running this when you're building this locally because they still want to facilitate the local build of a project. you know, I want to be able to use cord code rather than web flows. Um, makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. So, here in the documentation, I guess this is still old like the first that they tell you like next.js, you can do it with Nex.js and then Astro is second here. And then uh this is I guess how you do it and and it's a mess this documentation because like probably you've got it open there. You've got add storage and then in you got add SQL light. You've got add key value and you've got add objects.

Have you got up? Oh, you you found a third place they've got it. But yeah, so you've got data storage, but you've got ad storage as well. Look up. Yeah, here. And these two there's there's variances in how you do these two these two pages or at least the last time I checked. So, it's very very confusing. Um, and I think there's even um one under bring your own app, but I don't know. Um, but yeah, it it it starts to get very confusing. So, I'm trying to pick these apart and break it down for you in my course to to help you just get up and running so you have to pick through all of this because one version of this um of these this documentation doesn't work.

Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, I had issues with the documentation as well. So actually like having a developer who does it and tries it and you know gets it working is appreciated. I think you should also get into the web flow slack. you should send them a DM and someone or I can facilitate that. So you can get in touch with developers uh who are you know developing these features because uh to me for the web flow for the component for the code components the documentation was not working. I showed it to my developer and he said this is clearly wrong. He knew it somehow. So he was like, "It's not your fault. It's the documentation's fault."

So I ran it with Web Flow and they were like, "Oh yeah, the documentation they um they didn't have it updated." So I'm speaking I'm speaking to Zack, whoever that uh maybe his second name is here, but I'm speaking to Zach. If you if you speak if you Yeah, it's just Zach. Um yeah, whatever. Um I'm still waiting on a response for them. I sent them a bunch of logs and things like that, but um I can connect you. No. Anyway, so this was it and it's quite interesting where the uh all of these companies are going and the the new tools and I'm excited to try them. My my take in all this and where I share a frustration with AI all the things is I feel like I don't know I'm not inside of Web Flow I'm not inside of Framer but like I feel like these tools they're building lack a clear northstar on who it's for and what it empowers them to do.

My big statement was really undermined by the fact I was uh sideways. Um this I get completely. Yeah. It feels like they're throwing stuff out there without really a clear direction of what what we're trying to enable right now, you know, and that's fine. Inherently that's fine. That's what humans have always done throughout history is just we've got to experiment. We've just got to throw stuff out there. Sometimes we don't know. and just sit back and observe and then through that we start to navigate. Okay, marketers are the only people who are using AppGen, you know, and then deal with that deal with that data. But, you know, similar to demoing broken software, maybe it seems it seems like we've lack we're we're we've lost the art of finesse.

I mean, video games are the clearest example. when you ship that cartridge, there ain't no going back from that cartridge. So, yes, glitches appear in Mario 64 and whatever glitches. Um, glit glitches were and you couldn't there was no DMC or whatever you call them, you know, downloadable content. Um, so you need to get it right, you know. So there maybe there's a bit bit of finesse that's needed for these for these bits of software just to identify like why are we doing this who are we doing this for um you watched the pres I didn't really watch it from end to end did they did they did they ever say like this is for the next generation of designers who want to enter the world of development did they say anything to that effect on any not that I remember and you know uh you're touching on such a good point.

I think web flow completely dropped the ball there with their communication, their marketing and communication who are who they are for and what they are trying to do because they used to say that what you are asking they used to say we are enabling we are democratizing uh the web building in on the web uh enabling more and more people to design and build websites. So that is that problem statement is really nice because and it's still broad. It's still like anybody who wants to build on the but it's it's still like a clear statement and right now no they don't have that. And when they showed these AI stuff that were at the start by the way I asked that in the live comments and other people were asking alongside with me they were like who cares?

Who is this for? Like who are you trying to sell this to? I I never asked for an AI assistant that is, you know, half as working. And sure, do experiments, but don't sell it to me as your main selling point. And if you do experiments, I will actually I am I am in the beta. Yeah, I was gonna say they've got a group. I would love to try new features. I'm not like against you know these features but um I think they are like lost in the direction they are lost in the maybe they are not lost in the direction but they are not capturing the imagination of people who get excited about cool things that's that's the soul of a company or you know as content creators we should have that as well capturing the interests of people by sharing things that are genuinely interesting.

At least they are genuinely interesting to us. So they they will be interesting to other people as well. We saw this in the keynote by the way when everybody else was presenting the comments. You could see it. The comments were painful. Even one of my teammates, he said, "Why are you being so mean to them?" He told me. And I was like, "I'm I'm frustrated. I'm I'm just showing how I feel because people were not enthusiastic about you know the presentation and I understand like people get you know stressed and but you can still see through this you can make a diff you can you can tell if somebody is stressed or somebody's just bored out of their mind and I feel this was more of the latter um but when Vlad when Vlad the founder of web flow He joined the state the stage and his name was not in the speakers.

We talked about this you remember we talked about this but he joined and he had this like energy with him and this enthusiasm and this that's what a founder brings isn't it? Yeah. And the look for the future like look this is what we are building. That's what I want to see. Like I'm not a part of the conf to see the updates that they shipped two months ago. They did that. They showed us old updates. I want to see what you're building for the future. Um, my in my opinion, one of the last great innovations that Web Flow had was it was a point around this time last year where they released um page uh page builder page builder or um where you were able to define a bunch of components and then marketers can then add them all in and you know move them around and stuff like that.

Why they didn't why they have they've kind of and and also um class properties around do you remember do you know what I'm talking about this kind of era we have we have this and they are like super cool use them really super cool exactly and so why and and I thought I I me personally and this is this is free advice for web flow take this advice why you didn't take why you didn't add to this momentum with AI I don't know why um why you couldn't give a marketer the ability to spin up a page with AI but using components that web the designer has already done like that's where I feel like AI could really add a lot of value and a clear kind of definition to it by allowing designers to still work with web flow and use web flow for what it's for because now it's not you know the the appg gen doesn't really compete or sorry it puts on a level playing field with everything else, you know, it's not really adding to these these um tools.

I fully agree. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why they have uh you're cutting off. That's why I'm trying to cover up. Go for it. Go for it. Uh no, it's okay. You're back. You're back. And I fully agree. they could um introduce so many of these things to marketers and then we would know like okay they're trying to sell this to marketers. So as a designer I as a designer I felt like I'm um being I felt offended by the designs that they showed the AI created and they called it good. Oh yeah yeah yeah. That felt bad. that that didn't I was like that is that is the opposite of that is a wireframe that is sloppy not even a clean wireframe it was a sloppy wireframe with some a little bit of style to it was just had a few purple colors that was it don't call that nice but what you said that that web flow should pay you for it they should they should create a video hey we use AI to you know the designer can create the designs and the variations manually handcrafted beautiful it has soul and now a soulless marketer I'm sorry for uh soulless marketer comes in and says I want a landing page using these systems with this copy and the AI takes the copy expands on it based on the context of the website and uses these components that the designer created with love and create a page based on it.

It totally makes sense. It goes it goes back to what I was saying when it comes to clearly understanding and clearly defining who this tool is for and what they what they're trying to achieve. And so rather than they can still announce the same sort of things I in some ways I guess but like they need to understand that web flow users the people who use that design. Think of the three um uh what do you call them build mode uh design mode or whatever. Yeah. People who work in the design mode categorically do not like AI. So focusing on a focusing on all that time building a platform or a system that helps them do something they don't want help with or not just that they don't want to help with.

Again, it comes down to the framing of it. Have it kickstart your design. Don't have it do your design because that's no that's what you want to do. you want to do that like yeah I'm a fan of basically building me a simple six column grid system just to get me going and then then I can add all of my on top of it right what I'm saying is but it feels like they're lost in who who they need to identify their different users and what those users want AI to do for them they've taken that they just assume that all designers want to not design or or all web flow users want to not use web flow.

They just want AI just to do everything for them and I don't think that's the case whatsoever. Yeah. Every company is assuming that which is wrong. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so yeah, like if they if I think their their AI ambitions should have been focused on their their marketing targets or their marketing audience because they have a strong marketers audience as you know with analyze and Seth Goden being there and stuff like that there there was a that's a they have a very clear audience of marketers that's one of their biggest selling points I think 5050 to designers is like designers who want to build websites without writing code and marketers who want to work on websites that have been defined for them and they can easily just craft more and more pages.

Designers are the next generation of the developers. I believe this is uh where you know companies decide uh what tool to go with because web flow does not have the respect of developers like true hard you know it slow it slows us down if anything it really does and web flow should be fine with that they should try to get people who are you know junior developers who are trying to become developers but they just get stuck at CSS and a bit of JavaScript. They can't completely get these people in and forget about like the hard you know like the the crazy uh developers like ninja developers and designers should be the heart the heart of the product because they are the decision regardless.

Yeah. Marketer is is useless without a designer anyway. Yeah. It's an interesting point like yeah I I don't as a developer I will use web flow as a developer but not for me I will use what I when I interview a client I'm talking to a client I'm looking I'm listening for them wanting to do things themselves once it's been developed or or created or whatever want to sometimes people don't want that you know sometimes people literally just they want to build a product and they want to they want to work on it for for a year and and several years and constantly that sounds like the where a developer would fit in. But if they just want to build something that they can just create pages from and add content, it's like cool, web flow is your thing.

I'm going to I'm going to dislike using it, but it just doesn't need a developer's continual um you know involvement. So yeah, I don't know. It's they need to be clear about who their target market is. And I think you've identified it. There's two major two major. It's the designer and it's the marketer really. Is it do you think there's many more? Um like I would say like junior like super junior developers. um potentially, but they don't get exposed to anything. And for that, no, they could they could. I I I believe they could. Like one of my friend I could I could, you know, I could he was on the show. He's a crazy developer, right?

He um day in day out he writes code, right? He doesn't also he's not an AI lover. He does AI like research and development stuff but he doesn't like like the quality the current quality of the AI generative AI output with that being all say I'm saying all of this to say he started with web flow he started yeah he started with web flow and imagine like so many more people like him could start with web flow just knowing that like communicating this This is where I say like Webflow is missing with their uh or failing with their marketing efforts and uh like social communications that with our tool marketers can do these things, designers can do these things and developers you can we are not hiding away uh we are not abstracting away the code.

We're not uh hiding uh you know the complexity from you. We are just enabling like designers like to work easier but as a developer you can start from an easy start and go as deep and as you want and one day you might decide to not continue with web flow because it's you know too confined and too small for what you are trying to do which is completely fine. Um yeah web flow is not communicating any of that. Instead, it sounds like they are trying to sell to big corporations who want to have a a systematized uh website, which is easy to manage. Not bad, but that should be like the byproduct of your platform.

Like the platform has the tools that can drive such results, but people who choose to use Web Flow are designers. uh like it or not the all of these companies have designers and these designers might not be the final decision makers but I this is what I see I I've seen companies move away from web flow not because web flow was not delivering any of the things that they want actually quite the opposite they downgraded quite a few of their aspects of their website by going to framer but they did go to framer because uh the designers who work at these companies, I know them and they are more familiar with framer. So they were like if I'm going to manage the website, I can't deal with web flow.

Uh I'm I'm familiar with framer instead of web flow. So I'm going to use framer. And the companies, they're like yeah, this designer is doing like 10 other things and that on top of it. So just rebuild the site inside of framer. Uh a downgrade. Yeah, whatever. They they take it in. So, that's where it's coming from. I'm not saying it based on just some imagination. This is what I see. Uh, I've been hired for like crazy work like some like enterprise level of like work and I was um like they they recommended me like a designer saw my videos and he recommend and that happened actually like two or three times already like designers seeing my videos seeing like okay this guy is knows web flow he's you know technical or whatever has a taste whatever and like let's hire him.

So the designer kind of like drives the decision making there even if they don't do it themselves. Um so that's been my experience. I mean you know zooming out just a little bit you you said about developers you know very very young developers or early developers finding that through web flow. zooming out and talking about this whole idea of democratization like I think I think we need to be more proud and um excited about that whereas I feel like I feel like a lot of people are hold their craft very tightly and the moment it gets democratized and it gets easier they they start to double down on it's like oh it's rubbish and whatever and this was highlighted to me through my nana banana post on LinkedIn where people were saying like, "Oh, no.

You want a real uh it's not going to kill Photoshop because, you know, we won't be able to do this, this, and this, and this." It's like, wow. I mean, it's people are going to get excit like, sorry, bloody camera. People are going to discover the art of manipulating photography through simple tools like Nano Banana, right? And yes, they're not going to be great. Yet, it's not going to be great, but it's just allowing that gateway. It's that bar that's been lowered that yes, probably 80% of those people are just going to stay in that world and they're not going to care, but 20% are going to get hooked and they're going to be like, "Huh, I like this."

And then they're going to discover Photoshop. They're going to discover all these newer tools and grow and stuff like that. And I just don't get why people aren't excited about that democratization. They themselves probably found the art of photography through Photoshop, which which is a democratization of dark rooms and having to process photo photographs yourself. Like we're all a product of a level of democratization, which for some reason people get on their high horse about the fact that they don't they're not a real developer because they use Web Flow or, you know, they they're not true because they didn't start writing. what it's like just let people find their path in this and those that don't want to find their path in doing it like let them exist at that level be thankful that people are enjoying themselves and finding fulfillment and all that and yeah that's my rant yeah I agree and these companies should know this and um communicate this through their channel specifically talking about web flow they should be communicating to masses because right now it seems like they're niching down um in opposed to what I believe should be trying to go viral.

Uh and and just as you said 80% or even like 90% of people might sign up, try Web Flow and never touch it again or like never get deep in it. But there will be people who will get deep in it. they will build with it and there will be just more of it. Um like it will grow because right now it doesn't really feel like that. Uh anyway, we we talked about designers and I want to show this as a last thing. It's just a cute last thing. It's before I tweet it, I'm going to show it here. Okay, there you go. Exclusive. Exclusive. Uh how do you feel about the design of this?

Well, I mean, one block like that, it looks good. Just generally, it just looks nice. But to have to just have every every It's just overdone. Like there's no variation. Yeah. Doesn't it feel like um I don't know. It's like unicorn puke and pupil. Unicorn puke. Is that Is that a a term you've coined? Yeah. I mean, you know, again, using it once or twice is fine, but it's like it's kind of like unicorn puke and that like everything is calling out for attention. You're not you're not bringing it. It's just an amateur designer has come in and they're just like up the contrast on everything rather than using hierarchy and um basic design principles to say, well, let's bring this back because it highlights this feature.

Do you know what I mean? Yes. But that's one side of thing. But to be fair, that's not the point of this type of uh bento grids. The point of this type of bento grids which was uh popularized by Apple is to show everything in a view and yes some with you know more interesting like uh with bigger boxes but the point is here they're like using a lot of color and these colors are not driving any value. They are just overwhelming my visual sensory and they they don't tell me what is different between these like why is this okay this one we know gap is green but why component canvas is green and code component is blue while code gen code component is purple why kind of if if you give them benefit the doubt you can kind of derive some sort of meaning from it certainly with the AI stuff being mostly purple but then they've No.

No. No. Yeah. Look at that. But that could could that be marketing stuff? Yeah. The point remains, you know, I think we're both saying the same thing. Lacks any meaning. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't like communicate it. You have to kind of like pull it by, you know, it's like getting into it. So that's really bad. So look at this. Uh so these are the images from previous yeah years. So yes these are also busy but if you look at each one single one of these you know what it is. Okay it kind of like it it tells you what each one is or even better this one was even nicer. You could see like spline.

You could see like tiny mighty updates are like what what they are. There is like a sense of design and care care for design and care for details and I'm really sorry for whoever who made this. I know they might be under time pressure or they're I I don't want to you know attack that person whoever I don't know who did it personally but this this is not the same level. This is not the same universe. This is not the same company. This to me is a huge step backward. That's why That's why I mean Wait. Oh. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Wait, wait, wait. That's why I asked my teammate. I said, "Can we do something about this?"

So, we made this. It's a complete overkill, but we decided to make to take one of these windows and make something nice with it and say, "Hey, it could be done this way, and I want to tweet this, but show it to you first." So, it's made in Blender and in 3D, and it's just like adding some interest. And it was done in the mornings of course like we if we have a budget and if we have like you know um if we have the time for it and whatever we can do much more but even in a morning we could do I would say even like better than these um and certainly better than these and just make something interesting something beautiful and people will share this um people will care more because it looks nicer.

I mean, I'm all about visuals, right? You know that already. It should get people's imagination and interest and uh talk to them in that. Yeah. So, the only the the benefits I can take from it is at least they've committed to a design because this did seem cohesive with the rest of what was going on whether it's to your taste or not. Um so, at least it was somewhat cohesive. Yeah. And then the other and then the other thing is at least they're trying something different because if you if the only thing to criticize from the previous two years is that we're very sy. So at least they're trying something new and there's always next year.

So uh maybe they're going to hire your your guys next year to do the graphics. Yeah. Yeah. Um well they they have this style by the way of this is their new website and this style I believe has the potential to be expanded to something nicer than what we saw. This is to me not exactly the same style as this. Not there are both gradients but that's not you know how that works. Uh anyway, um it's small small thing. I want to tweet it uh and say, "Hey, we fixed that for you. We fixed checks in the mail." Yeah. Yeah. Web plug. You know, my I thought I I had a hunch that you were going to show me something.

I thought you were going to show me a re overhaul of the whole thing, but of course. Yeah. You would have done if you could. I I would have done it if I could. And I, you know, that's not what is paying my rent. So I have to be mindful of that. Yeah. Well, maybe it will web maybe maybe you want to help me uh do this type of thing and I love doing this like sitting with my sitting with my team and doing this type of things. This is like where I where I live and I feel like so creative when I'm when we are like I bring it bring an idea and my designer is like you know what I have a better one and he he he does something better and then like our he's like oh we could also add that camera thing and like a bunch of like things and you know five minutes later we have a really cool idea.

We're doing uh 3D UI for a client which I will get back to right after this live and I cannot wait to show you that you know linear and their assets. We're going that direction for this client and I always wanted to do this. I always wanted to build beautiful UI, interactive UI and also add a sparkle of 3D and right now we are exactly doing that. Very cool. I look forward to seeing it. Yeah. Nice. We're at 69 views. Very nice. Very good. Let's let's let's keep let's end on a high. Keep it like this. Yes. Uh cool. And yeah, wrap it up there. Yes. So, let's do it with all that tuning in everyone.

Yeah. Thank you for joining and um we'll talk to you next week and see you around.