So I spent a while on their page, https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan seems to have the best explanation how Adobe thinks you should use their product. However I still don't really see the use case:
> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say.
So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?).
However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.
The hard part in maintaining a website by a team of non-geeks is not a Markdown renderer, but the fact that people have their own preferred tools and workflows, and aren't keen on learning yet another one. All the extra export/import/sync steps are a pain for them, and cause chaos when collaborating. You update the Markdown version, someone else changes the Word version instead, a third person hates Word, and someone else puts notes on GitHub, and now you need to train half a dozen people how to clone a repo and how to fix a detached head.
> So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML.
Ages ago (probably more than 15 years or so) I generated HTML, even multi-page web sites from within Word itself, using VBA. It required some proficiency in VBA but Word already had a structure that you could translate with different classes of headings, font modifications, etc. - so it wasn't exactly "rocket science" either. I did the same in Excel, but here more focused on autogenerating pseudo "db-driven" sites than on prose.
Typically these would be "intranet" apps, but I believe some may have been exposed to the www. Being static sites, security was like any other pure HTML site.
> I still don't see who would use this for their site.
My customers were in marketing. They already used these Office tools and they found it a real advantage that they could just continue to use these tools.
This was before WP got to the dominant position (and level of user-friendlyness) it has today. It's still possible though.
I worked in a large tech Co that used AEM for building web pages. I think one landing page took months, at least not less than one. If a content team can launch some simpler pages using this on their own, we would have definitely bought and used this.
I've taken some time to try to comprehend what this tool is doing, but I still don't get it. Could someone kindly clarify? Similar websites include http://webflow.com, https://siter.io, and http://www.squarespace.com. ? What exactly is this?
I understand:
Speed - ok, the same can do other platforms
Migration - ok same can do othe rplatforms
Create content in Microsoft Word or Google Docs - realy Adobe?
Stop wasting developer time on framework churn - start wasting time on Helix.
That's because when you're Adobe, you sell to that person on the executive team who then mandates that everyone use it, whether they like it or not, because of how much money the company just paid Adobe for it.
Thanks Adobe, 3 minutes of my life wasted to figure out that you have converted the bounce rate, after 2 second page load hesitation, to epic ragequit after 3 minutes of having to go through developper documentation to figure out whats the actual, tangible and practical experience you are trying to sell.
I will never trust Adobe on their development platforms after they were lying to developers about bright Flash future while silently killing it and wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse.
Flash was a Macromedia product that Adobe acquired. I don't think the team that worked on it foresaw the rapid shift to touchscreen mobile devices. Even so, there's no way Adobe could have competed with Apple and Google's push towards Javascript and HTML5 during those two companies early WebKit collaboration.
I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.
To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?
> To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do?
Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful.
This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch).
All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so.
That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."
The major reason I don't use Adobe is lack of trust in Adobe. I want my files to work next year, and in 10 years. That's also why I don't use anything B2B from Google, and avoid Oracle (who doesn't break products the same way as Adobe and Google, but tends to milk cash cows in unpleasant ways).
The payback on open-sourcing something like Flash is maintaining trust. I trust open-source. I trust a few commercial companies who invest like crazy in maintaining trust (e.g. Microsoft or AWS). That leads to business on unrelated product lines down-the-line.
I don't know how easy it'd be, though it would certainly be possible for Adobe. And something not being easy is not really a reason for it to not happen, especially when the alternative is complete death of the product.
But that isn't the point though since the question was what was expected them to do, not how easy that would be.
And yet there exist open source Flash renderers [0] to this day which can render much of that old Flash content with little to no issues. Kinda sad that multiple other folks could each independently accomplish what Adobe themselves could not.
It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept.
Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
Is the market for flash devs really that different than similar software? I highly doubt those Flash devs ended up on the street.
Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.
If you're tea leaf reading skills were so underdeveloped to not see that Flash was doomed, then that's kind of on you to get better. Flash was being berated everywhere about its problems, yet it was still being pushed because it was the thing.
Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the maker was the main vector before even running code written by any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.
I will never give Adobe a penny again in my life after going through their abysmal cancellation process littered with dark patterns and manipulation for one of their subscriptions, on top of being charged a fee to cancel.
This is an interesting move by Adobe, which appears like the first step towards reasserting themselves in a hot WYSISWG CMS authoring market that’s currently dominated by folks like Webflow. What makes it even more interesting is that their enterprise CMS offering AEM (Adobe Experience Manager) will certainly get a leg up as it relates to ease/flexibility, further separating them from the market competition.
For the folks who are unaware, AEM is a tier 1 CMS powering many top-shelf enterprise websites[1], competing with products Contentful, Contentstack, Salesforce, etc.
I’m personally not a huge fan of their solution but they tick many of the boxes clients typically ask for.
You can look at the Forrester and Gartner of this world, but for a less subjective and more objective metric you can look at the statistics related to the CMS used by high traffic website [0]. I won't even say Wix, Squarespace, Joomla (is this still a thing?) or Shopify are in the same category of AEM, they missed a lot of the qualification criteria to be considered an enterprise level CMS.
Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are Tier 3 CMSs at best.
Drupal, (managed) WordPress, Joomla, Cake, Webflow etc. are Tier2.
AEM, Sitecore, BloomReach, Contentful, Contentstack, etc. are Tier 1
The CMS ecosystem is further segmented into products that are headless, decoupled, hybrid, and monolithic. To complicate things, there is a new type of product called DXP (Digital Experience Platform), which mixes in marketing systems into the stack.
It seems to be a no-code website builder for people who are already in the Adobe ecosystem. For one-off landing pages or websites an agency might build for projects this is probably a good fit if they are already all-in on Adobe.
The hate here in the comments seem to be around developers thinking they are the target group of this product when they are clearly not.
I agree that is clearly for non-developers that are in the Adobe ecosystem, however to me it's still unclear why they decided on this system. I thought about simple landing pages as well, but they state this in the faqs:
"You can use Helix for small sites because it is very easy to get started, but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic."
Which confuses me a bit about which kind of pages they intended to be created in Helix. They also talk about Stripe integration for e-commerce shops.
> but it works best for large sites with many authors, frequent updates, and lots of traffic.
I could see it being used for short-lived high traffic sites like festivals, concerts, movie landing pages and other typical agency-created sites. These might have multiple authors to public posts, FAQ items and some small e-commerce components.
When you see the words “by Adobe” and loose all interest instantly.
Let me guess, whatever it is requires a Creative Cloud subscription?
I do remember when I was excited about Adobe stuff. 20 years ago. Since then, their virus-like “install a million things just to run Photoshop” and awful licensing practises have put them next to Oracle in the “avoid at all cost” category.
Agreed, I have a machine for which it is impossible to uninstall CC completely. I'd have to bust out a full drive wipe and OS reinstall just to get rid of an application. It's silly that tools for artists would need to hook so deeply into the OS and have no reasonable way to get rid of them.
well that's rich, that's exactly what I noticed on my GF MacBook Pro, always was putting off until later, good to know that it does not makes sense to spend time on this. Would love to find responsible and install My programs
It's really easy to uninstall their stuff from a Mac. Done it a few times. Just use the CC cloud app to uninstall the main apps then use the CC uninstaller to do it. Then reboot the mac. There are some things left in ~/Library you can clean up manually afterwards and that's it.
It's not a full uninstall -- all kind of weird stuff sticks around that hooks into various places. Just Google all the things people do just to get the Adobe CC stuff out of their Launchpad. Many users just create a junk folder and throw it all in there because there is no way to get rid of it on some machines.
> there are some reasons that may make you want to uninstall it from your Mac. When you try to remove it, you may find that it is not easy to delete it thoroughly.
One of the procurement team members from a client said: "Adobe is the most unpleasant vendor we work with". I was surprised and then they added: "We prefer working with Oracle". Somehow they have managed to out-Oracle Oracle.
I mean I hate adobe too, but being hated by the procurement team (who are usually incentivised by reducing spend) doesn't always mean that much.
Most procurement teams just love suppliers who will give them big quotes and then provide a 50% 'discount' so they can get a great big bonus for all the savings they achieved. Maybe i'm being too pessimistic.
I worked for a large company (>£50bn revenue) that used to do this in the UK - I had to sign off the 'savings' my procurement stakeholders achieved on the projects (you had to 'agree' their savings and sign them off) because that would go into their performance reports which then triggered their bonus. So it happens.
What else do you think procurement teams get targeted on if not savings/price decreases?
So what do procurement teams hate? Things purchased from a single supplier, with no competition/accepted substitute, and no/little ability to negotiate the price or payment terms.
> So what do procurement teams hate? Things purchased from a single supplier, with no competition/accepted substitute, and no/little ability to negotiate the price or payment terms.
That is also my experience with procurement. That's their whole reason d´etre
I used to be like that but quite frankly nothing else comes near Photoshop and Lightroom Classic for me. The bottom end photo sub is cheap and you don't need to use any of the cloud stuff.
It's not you. Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator and InDesign are on a class of their own. Unfortunately, nothing comes close. If you don't like Premiere or After Effects, that are great choices. Not so much for the rest of the suite.
I'm rooting for Affinity, because of the buy vs rent business model and because Adobe need competition, but they still have a long ways to go
Yeah there really isn’t any replacement for After Effects (well I guess there is Motion, but even Apple seems to forget that exists).
I’m not super confident that Affinity will be able to do it. Feature development seems to have really, really slowed down. The gap between Adobe and Affinity has grown, rather than shrank. Yeah Affinity’s software has a lot of the same main features, but it’s like MS Word where there is a long tail of very useful features where hardly anyone uses all of them, but everyone uses a few. Affinity hasn’t even come close to integrating those kinds of features.
I'm hoping Figma leans a bit on the illustrator market, because their app is phenomenal. The vector editor is great, but is clearly biased towards UI development. If they could release a parallel product that is even close to feature parity with Illustrator, I'd be very happy.
What do you think of the ON1 suite? Their marketing department is quite full of themselves. It also heavily features content aware deletion, filters, and options to replace a sky with some fancy one.
There's really something wrong if you have to put a question to FAQ list to tell what your product is and that question is not the first one in the list.
Some sell technology, some sell vision. The latter involves trusting them/submitting to their vision which would put off a lot of developers, I feel, but still create intrigue in managerial circles for them to get traction.
I can’t remember which but there was a post about this, in the context of cloud service providers, a few weeks ago, on Hackernews Top. Will add if I can find it.
Great, Google docs and share point, does that mean we have an extra dependency on Microsoft and Google not to break any of their apis? Managing formatting straight from a document sounds like a recipe for disaster if you don’t own the whole stack. I really wonder how a company like adobe is managed.I’m sure they have some great selling products with great margins. But the creative industry is beginning to hate their products more and more. Yes they might have a a good unmatched creative suite as a whole, but if professionals can’t do their work anymore because of serious deteriorating of quality between versions. Was following a Twitter rant from Ashe thorp a while ago, he isn’t one to whine about anything quickly, but that guy is so well connected and in think his network pretty much operates is anything cutting edge design wise, avatar, Microsoft film etc. At this point I chose for an alternative to adobe products they might be a better deal, but I wouldn’t trust your paying my mortgage on anything in adobe creative suite. I’d rather invest upfront in something that I know will get better over time instead of worse.
Sure, i'll use this tool and then in a few months Adobe will want a monthly subscription fee or they break all my links or something.
Such a low effort site as well, ugly design and i found at least a couple dead links that redirect back to the homepage (e.g. https://www.hlx.live/business/project-plan)
"https://www.hlx.live/business/experience-effectiveness" looks to me like they didn't intend to publish this yet. I mean the formatting is off and they have 3 feature boxes without icons.. looks really unfinished to me.
It's very rare I get frustrated with landing pages, but holy guacamole... is it so hard to link to demo websites? Is it so hard to provide a quick demo of a landing page? What are those lousy screenshots on the "Built with Helix" section?
The only one I could make out was blog.adobe.com - and by the looks of it that was no small feat to make such a conversion happen.
Very unhappy, even more so seeing Adobe trying to get away with a barebones product explanation.
EDIT: Ok, after going through the comments in this thread - it looks like Adobe doesn't even intend to have this site published yet. That's my impression of it also.
“Helix has reinvigorated my passion for coding. The simplicity of building something great and seeing it used by our visitors the next day is a joy like no other.
Kenny”
Who's Kenny? Has no one reviewed this page? I hope that's not a signal of how important this project really is to Adobe.
Easy is hard. That is, to make something easy for users, you have to work hard to build great tools for them. Helix appears to be punting on that.
Examples:
> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents.
Markdown is a lossy format. Sometimes that's good (it'll strip unwanted Word formatting), but there are vital things that get lost too. (The easiest to grasp are the internationalisation issues, like mixing right-to-left and left-to-right scripts in the same paragraph, or multiple language spans.)
> To add metadata to your page, create a table like this at the end of the document
And how is this better than an actual tool, with actual field validation, helpful UX, etc? It's not: it's undiscoverable magic boxes with inexplicable (to the user) side-effects that oblige users to remember secret incantations (or sticky them to their screens) and hope everything works out all right.
This is the opposite of "intuitive and fast". Which anybody familiar with AEM won't be surprised by.
Friend of mine tells me a headhunter perked up when he mentioned he used this for his last project, and told him crazy salaries if he wanted a job as the Helix specialist at several corporations. Says he's investigating.
Sounds like people with Adobe Experience Manager experience as well. I think AEM salaries are high because there is no way to learn it on your own (from my experience). You can only learn it on the job because there is no “developer version” that I know of.
I understand your point, but I don't think is 100% accurate. There are tons of tutorials on adobe.com and you can at least study some open source projects (such as Adobe core component) to understand how it works. If you mean there is no downloadable free version of AEM you are definitely right, but still some of the most important stuff can be learned by using the open source stack on which AEM is built, like Apache Felix, Apache OAK and Apache Sling. And I guess even in the current market if you have java skills and you know something about Felix, OAK and Sling it could be pretty easy to get a good job contract (maybe not at the same salary, but just with one year experience you can get a substantial increase).
Brackets was actually my favourite code editor on Mac and it was discontinued by Adobe. It left a bad taste in my mouth. It seems that they are trying to replace it with "Phoenix" which is entirely web-based and kinda seems to defeat the purpose.
It looks like brackets may have some others keeping it alive.
The project helix page comes off quite hilarious on mobile for me. "these aren't the droids you're looking for" followed closely by an uncaptioned screenshot and then a long scroll of a blank orange canvas only to be greeted at the bottom with "You can go about your business."
Somebody else already mentioned it, but I want to highlight Adobe's other CMS product: Adobe Experience Manager.
It is a bizarre product in the sense that the typical web developer has never heard of it, whilst it's one of the most powerful (and complex) CMS systems out there. Given its license costs, you'll only find it in large companies.
It's a stunningly powerful but also complicated platform. Still, it's a CMS on steroids with some truly eye-opening ideas.
I believe Helix is launched for companies using AEM as their CMS, to speed up launch of simpler pages. It takes months to build a page in a big Corp using AEM.
I'm trying to understand the thought process that would lead someone to decide that this wierd and entirely proprietary solution is the best way to build a website for their organisation.
Helix is currently made available to select AEM Sites customers in the Helix VIP program. If you are interested in learning more about Helix, getting a personalized demo, and want to understand how Helix can make your site better, reach out to your Adobe account manager and mention the keyword #helix-chat.
If you are impatient, a developer, or both, take a look at the Helix Developer Tutorial in the meantime.
Nothing on the page linked even describes what ‘Helix’ is, much less why I would want it.
That whole site seems like excessive marketing fluff written by someone who’s been living and breathing whatever this project is for years.
Assume I have no idea what it does or why I’d want it. Use small words and no acronyms. Also, less words. Then, as simply as possible, tell me what it is and what it does for me from a technical standpoint. I’ll decide for myself if it’s useful.
What is Helix? (if you like tech jargon)
Helix let’s [sic] business users ingest and publish markdown documents and spreadsheets from Microsoft Office or Google Docs and Sheets into a scalable, distributed content repository and dynamically renders HTML (and JSON, webp, etc.) to produce fast websites and actively manages cache consistency with your existing CDN infrastructure.
Helix let’s [sic] frontend devs develop and deploy the design and functionality of their website with CSS and JavaScript directly in their GitHub repos.
> Nothing on the page linked even describes what ‘Helix’ is, much less why I would want it.
I think this is unfair criticism. Right at the top it says:
"Helix is the fastest way to launch new sites and deliver the fastest pages on the web, as a bonus it is also the most intuitive and fastest way to create and publish content."
That is what it is and that is why you would want to use it. It is a way to create new websites fast. And it promises that those websites will be fast, and you will be able to update them fast.
1. Small and simple words *for a technical audience*, not C-suite know-nothings. An example might be something like “Generates HTML statically from Markdown documents in a Git repository with a built-in caching server with load balancing to edge servers for an additional fee” — whatever it actually does. Nowhere that I can easily find does it describe how it does what it claims.
2. Claiming to be “fastest” is usually a good way to get your ass handed to you.
> Helix dynamically renders HTML via Markdown that is generated from the content source documents. Markdown provides an abstraction as well as filter for content created in the various different data sources and strips all the formatting that cannot easily be projected into HTML semantics. This means you don’t have to worry about authors picking the wrong font, size, or color, Helix will take care that your final site looks as the design specs say.
So it's just generating a markdown document from my Word document and dynamically renders that to HTML. It seems like a weird SSG that isn't static, relies on proprietary files stored in either Google Drive or SharePoint, and seems to be aimed at Content Creators that are not tech savy at all (why else would you prefer Word over md files?).
However all that is still very confusing and it looks a bit like the project changed direction during development (e.g. there's still mention of GitHub as file storage which has been discontinued in the faqs etc.) I still don't see who would use this for their site.