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Here are some of the other common one's I've heard: - A social-networking site that totally respects my privacy and lets me own my data! - An app store that l

Here are some of the other common one's I've heard: - A social-networking site that totally respects my privacy and lets me own my data! - An app store that lets anybody sell their digital stuff to anyone, not in some walled garden! - A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! I could go on and on...

dgallagher 16y ago
- A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! Xcode and Interface Builder, using Core Data and Bindings. Don't expect to make a full-blown 3D video game doing that though. ;)
- chc 16y ago
  That will let you make any program you want, as long as it is a simple CRUD app with nothing but text and no processing of the data entered. It will get you about as far as Rails' scaffold generator.
jon914 16y ago
As a founder of a startup doing #3 (Stencyl), I can attest to that idea being an enormous time sink and risk. I can name at least 10 startups or larger companies that went after that idea and either died or pivoted. What we have is working, and it's working well, but as we press forward, we find that our strongest value proposition is no longer the code-free aspect, which turns out to be just one small part of a larger puzzle. Once you remove that roadblock, other pain points come to light that are far more difficult to solve.
- dwiel 16y ago
  any chance we might be able to read about what some of those points are?
  - jon914 16y ago
    Sure, I'll list out some of the pain points we're aware of and have tried to address. - Not able to think logically. There's only so much you can accomplish if you take logical thinking out of the equation, and when you do, the creations are underwhelming. Many startups set out to make creation easy, and that works to some extent, but the real solution to the problem may be to try to educate users and bring them up to a minimum bar (learn how to fish), rather than trying to lower the bar to the floor (give them the fish). This would be suicide for most startups, but the users of creative apps are more patient and more willing to learn and grow with the app. Sure, we'll shut out some people this way, but we want to lift up the right, motivated people, rather than trying to lift the entire world up. - Can't draw/other artistic skill. Shockingly, this ends up being a big problem, and people absolutely hate using placeholder art if they can't draw. We've addressed this by integrating a marketplace for pulling in all kinds of resources. - Can't work with other people. Many game projects fail due to bad communication (if you're not working solo). They start out strong when brainstorming and then die somewhere in the middle, usually when the members fall out of regular contact or don't know what's going on. We've integrated some features into our app to directly address this after observing how our users interacted with each other on several group projects. - Set their sights too high. No, you're not going to create an MMORPG or RTS as your first project. ;) This one isn't directly addressed by our app right now and falls more under the umbrella of general user education and progression. One idea we have is to incorporate game elements (turning game creation into a game?) to nudge the user towards making baby steps towards completing something through a quest structure, rather than trying to let them go free from day 1. The take home point is that like any startup, what you set out to do ends up evolving as you move along and that the problem you're solving turns out to be different and sometimes larger than what you originally expected.
Timothee 16y ago
The drag-and-drop interface reminds me of 280 North's Atlas. (and Cappuccino to some extent) I guess it falls under pg's "could be pulled off if done right", since they were acquired by Motorola for $20M :)
kin 16y ago
Yeah, there are tons of social networking sites that protect privacy. My question is, I know people aren't satisfied with Facebook's news feed, but with the introduction of Facebook Groups are people still complaining? Isn't it easier to make a few groups and manage some privacy settings than set up an account on Frid.ge or Diaspora and convince your friends to join?
smackay 16y ago
> A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! This is an idea that was hot way back the 80's and early 90's in the era of CASE tools. There was some limited success but only in very limited domains such as signal processing and to a lesser extent building data-driven, object-oriented systems.
- jules 16y ago
  You mean labview? Labview succeeded despite its drag and drop interface. It succeeded because its extensive domain specific libraries. Labview code is horrible to write and even worse to read. /physics student hating labview point and click interface
ziutek 16y ago
#1 is Diaspora
prewett 16y ago
#3: National Instruments' LabVIEW is the best example of graphical programming I have run across. But after I used it for a while, it became clear that text-based programming is denser; I can see a lot more C++ code than LabVIEW code in one screen, and that makes me more productive in C++. LabVIEW is awesome for a quick app, but for something more successful, I don't think any form of graphical programming is going to be the best tool. Computers don't think in icons.
- jules 16y ago
  I agree that text is probably going to conquer programming for quite some time to come. It is no accident that mathematics is done with text, even though connecting boxes and lines of paper is a lot easier than on a computer. However, like in mathematics, the occasional diagram or graphical notation is helpful.
  - prewett 16y ago
    I would argue that text will always be more effective that dragging icons around for similar reasons why C++/Java/etc are more effective than COBOL: C++/etc is closer to how computers think. But don't get me wrong, LabVIEW really shines for its original purpose (Laboratory Visualization and Engineering Workbench, hence LabVIEW): quick data acquisition and visualization. But large programs just get tedious to read and debug. And I'm OCD about getting my wires looking nice :) which slows me down, obviously.
JonnieCache 16y ago
> - A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free Many electronic music artists create enormously complex applications with visual drag and drop languages, doing everything from sound synthesis to video processing to interfacing with microelectronics, with complex user interfaces recently moving to multitouch. The main two languages are Reaktor and Max/MSP

dgallagher 16y ago

- A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! Xcode and Interface Builder, using Core Data and Bindings. Don't expect to make a full-blown 3D video game doing that though. ;)

chc 16y ago
That will let you make any program you want, as long as it is a simple CRUD app with nothing but text and no processing of the data entered. It will get you about as far as Rails' scaffold generator.

jon914 16y ago

As a founder of a startup doing #3 (Stencyl), I can attest to that idea being an enormous time sink and risk. I can name at least 10 startups or larger companies that went after that idea and either died or pivoted. What we have is working, and it's working well, but as we press forward, we find that our strongest value proposition is no longer the code-free aspect, which turns out to be just one small part of a larger puzzle. Once you remove that roadblock, other pain points come to light that are far more difficult to solve.

dwiel 16y ago
any chance we might be able to read about what some of those points are?
- jon914 16y ago
  Sure, I'll list out some of the pain points we're aware of and have tried to address. - Not able to think logically. There's only so much you can accomplish if you take logical thinking out of the equation, and when you do, the creations are underwhelming. Many startups set out to make creation easy, and that works to some extent, but the real solution to the problem may be to try to educate users and bring them up to a minimum bar (learn how to fish), rather than trying to lower the bar to the floor (give them the fish). This would be suicide for most startups, but the users of creative apps are more patient and more willing to learn and grow with the app. Sure, we'll shut out some people this way, but we want to lift up the right, motivated people, rather than trying to lift the entire world up. - Can't draw/other artistic skill. Shockingly, this ends up being a big problem, and people absolutely hate using placeholder art if they can't draw. We've addressed this by integrating a marketplace for pulling in all kinds of resources. - Can't work with other people. Many game projects fail due to bad communication (if you're not working solo). They start out strong when brainstorming and then die somewhere in the middle, usually when the members fall out of regular contact or don't know what's going on. We've integrated some features into our app to directly address this after observing how our users interacted with each other on several group projects. - Set their sights too high. No, you're not going to create an MMORPG or RTS as your first project. ;) This one isn't directly addressed by our app right now and falls more under the umbrella of general user education and progression. One idea we have is to incorporate game elements (turning game creation into a game?) to nudge the user towards making baby steps towards completing something through a quest structure, rather than trying to let them go free from day 1. The take home point is that like any startup, what you set out to do ends up evolving as you move along and that the problem you're solving turns out to be different and sometimes larger than what you originally expected.

Timothee 16y ago

The drag-and-drop interface reminds me of 280 North's Atlas. (and Cappuccino to some extent) I guess it falls under pg's "could be pulled off if done right", since they were acquired by Motorola for $20M :)

kin 16y ago

Yeah, there are tons of social networking sites that protect privacy. My question is, I know people aren't satisfied with Facebook's news feed, but with the introduction of Facebook Groups are people still complaining? Isn't it easier to make a few groups and manage some privacy settings than set up an account on Frid.ge or Diaspora and convince your friends to join?

smackay 16y ago

> A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free! This is an idea that was hot way back the 80's and early 90's in the era of CASE tools. There was some limited success but only in very limited domains such as signal processing and to a lesser extent building data-driven, object-oriented systems.

jules 16y ago
You mean labview? Labview succeeded despite its drag and drop interface. It succeeded because its extensive domain specific libraries. Labview code is horrible to write and even worse to read. /physics student hating labview point and click interface

ziutek 16y ago

#1 is Diaspora

prewett 16y ago

#3: National Instruments' LabVIEW is the best example of graphical programming I have run across. But after I used it for a while, it became clear that text-based programming is denser; I can see a lot more C++ code than LabVIEW code in one screen, and that makes me more productive in C++. LabVIEW is awesome for a quick app, but for something more successful, I don't think any form of graphical programming is going to be the best tool. Computers don't think in icons.

jules 16y ago
I agree that text is probably going to conquer programming for quite some time to come. It is no accident that mathematics is done with text, even though connecting boxes and lines of paper is a lot easier than on a computer. However, like in mathematics, the occasional diagram or graphical notation is helpful.
- prewett 16y ago
  I would argue that text will always be more effective that dragging icons around for similar reasons why C++/Java/etc are more effective than COBOL: C++/etc is closer to how computers think. But don't get me wrong, LabVIEW really shines for its original purpose (Laboratory Visualization and Engineering Workbench, hence LabVIEW): quick data acquisition and visualization. But large programs just get tedious to read and debug. And I'm OCD about getting my wires looking nice :) which slows me down, obviously.

JonnieCache 16y ago

> - A drag and drop interface that lets you make any program you want...totally code-free Many electronic music artists create enormously complex applications with visual drag and drop languages, doing everything from sound synthesis to video processing to interfacing with microelectronics, with complex user interfaces recently moving to multitouch. The main two languages are Reaktor and Max/MSP