A Bit of SaaS Weekly: Rise of the UI Libraries
This is a weekly newsletter on the Software as a Service world. Learning, building, and shipping. Written by Ethan Mick.
Good design isn’t just beautiful and incredible and boundary-pushing, it also remembers what it means to be human.
The Best Bits
- Shadcn/ui released themes!
- Radix UI released themes (I'm not even kidding).
- Create a Generative Landing Page (I did this for Recast)
- Water (go on, I'll wait).
Which UI Library are you using now?
It feels like in the past few weeks, we've had a bunch of fantastic releases of UI libraries, with more to come. In case you haven't been hacking on the frontend much, I've seen the following:
These libraries are a new kind of UI library. At their core, they are powered by headless code; either components or hooks. These low-level primitives can be used to build a UI that looks like anything.
And then, on top of those primitives, the creators are now layering a full UI library that includes all the standard components you would want to use. Some of these libraries can be copied into your code; others are installed.
The benefit here, though, is because they are built on the primitives, if you want to make changes to the components, you have an easy way to "drop down" a level and get to a lower level API. This amounts to a lot of flexibility and power. You can get started quickly and then customize as you go.
The biggest question now is which one do you choose?
That's a personal choice. I like the Radix JSX component approach, but they don't have anything for handling some elements, such as buttons. So I often reach for React-Aria and then sprinkle in some Radix as I need to.
Probably not the best, but I do like the best of both worlds.
What are you using?
Learn to Build SaaS
This week I've run two live streams as I build out Recast. There are always a few people who show up, so it's a lot of fun!
Cloud Chronicles
- YouTube Subscribers: 2,099 (+226 🎉 in the last 7 days)
- Newsletter Members: 479 (+28 in the last 7 days)
Look at those YouTube subscribers! Holy cow! I'm not sure what exactly I did to make the algorithm like me, but I added over 200 subs in the past week. Looking at the analytics, I think posting the videos really helped – which means, of course, I should post more... but I need to jump on that and do them.
I'm going to try and make some more videos that are less tutorial focused and instead focused on other aspects of building out SaaS.
Last Byte
- Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer.
- Blocked by Cloudflare.
- Devtools for React Server Components.