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Mockingbird: New tool for building mockups, written in Cappuccino
- mattiss 17y agoLooks cool, but it is painfully slow (Linux + firefox). Maybe other systems run it better, but for me it is too slow to do much good.
- saikat 17y agoYeah, we just launched this today and are in very early stages of beta. We realize speed is an issue right now (we've mostly been testing on Windows and OS X, on which it runs better), and it's definitely something we're working to improve.
- absconditus 17y agoYet: "Powered by Cappuccino: no Flash slowing down your browser."
- saikat 17y agoPoint taken. We changed it.
- schoudha 17y agoUse Chrome man. http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=unstable_amd64_deb http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=unstab...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- ido 17y agoAre you using an old firefox version by any chance (<3.5.x)?
- divia 17y agoHere's a picture my friend made that I like: http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=73c3156b49b1f3b2137eb3abacfa5f0777399edf http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=73c3...
- Meatshoes 17y agoCool idea but it's very buggy. With 2 minutes of use I discovered that upon double clicking text to edit hitting enter makes the widget disappear, now I can no longer drag widgets onto the work space and the scroll bar on the widget "library" is frozen (although it still works). Looks like it could be very cool with the issues ironed out.
- saikat 17y agoInteresting, I haven't been able to replicate that problem. What browser/OS are you using?
- slig 17y agoHere when I hit enter after changing the text/value of a control, it suddenly disappears. os x tiger, firefox 3.5.4
- shaunxcode 17y agosame here, I got used to just typing and then clicking outside of the control for the changes to take effect.
- saikat 17y agoI managed to reproduce the bug last night and pushed a fix. Hope that helps, and thanks for the catch!
- tlrobinson 17y agoI like how the volume slider intelligently resizes. Nice attention to detail.
- ams6110 17y agoNice effort, and great to see someone building a Cappuccino app; I like that I don't need any plugins to run it. Clearly it's still beta, but something to keep an eye on.
- shpxnvz 17y agoI like that I don't need any plugins to run it. I second that. Requiring a plugin is the only reason I don't use that other really cool mockup tool. Good luck to the team.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- izaidi 17y agoMight want to consider a different screenshot on the main page. The big centered arrow made me think it was a clickable demo video.
- divia 17y agohttp://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=ebdb192fce519a7ae32dff361a66b05d727ab082 http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=ebdb...
- justinweiss 17y agoOh hey! Another dvorak user!
- divia 17y agoHeh, nice notice of nonsense name :-).
- grinich 17y agoindex.html Mockingbird Created by You on May 22, 2009. Copyright 2009, Your Company All rights reserved. accurate?
- saikat 17y agoHah! Nice catch, that is not in fact accurate.
- sammcd 17y agoBug Report: 1) Put a button on the screen. 2) But a box on the screen 3) But the box on top of the button 4) Select the button (oh wait you can't) Otherwise seems like a great product. I love that you used cappuccino, I can't wait until they give us Atlas.
- saikat 17y agoYeah that's a good point, I can see how this is fairly confusing. This happens because the box is added on top of the button - you can, however, hit the "Back" button on the toolbar (after selecting the box) to move the box back.
- bbsabelli 17y agodoesn't seem to work
- saikat 17y agoMight have to hit back more than a few times if you have more than two widgets on the screen. But I'll be sure to make this work better.
- volida 17y agoI just tried it. I created a box over the line/arrow. Hitting the back for the box, you can't select the arrow. Selecting the arrow and bringing it front, it works ok. UX suggestion: allow me to use the mouse scroll to change the size of the hovered/selected element, maintaining the scale.
- netcan 17y agocannot change grids to anything but 3X3
- theli0nheart 17y agoWhat I can't understand is why you'd model a language after Objective-C. It's verbose to the point of ridiculousness.
- GeneralMaximus 17y agoIt's not the language that's verbose, it's the Cocoa libraries. Instead of this: NSString *s2 = [s1 stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8Encoding]; You could easily have: NSString *s2 = [s1 percentEscapes:UTF8]; (I like the first way better, though. It reads like an English sentence, and you know exactly what the arguments are.) EDIT: formatting.
- theli0nheart 17y agoGood point, but Objective J seems to have borrowed that as well. i.e. [CPApp sendEvent:[CPEvent mouseEventWithType:CPLeftMouseDown location:[theWindow convertBridgeToBase:CGPointMake(x, y)] or [CPApp setTarget:self selector:@selector(disposeOfEvent:) forNextEventMatchingMask:CPLeftMouseUpMask untilDate:nil inMode:nil dequeue:YES]; It's not that I don't applaud the creation of Objective-J, because I do. I think it's a big step towards the next generation of in-browser applications. To the 280 guys: I'm not trying to insult you or your hard work, and I'm sorry if it came off like that. All I'm saying is that you're going to have a harder time making this a new web standard because of this design fact. It certainly won't deter me, but it will definitely deter others.
- davidcann 17y agoAwesome, nice job!
- redact207 17y agoseems very similar to sketchflow http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/1eea789b-c69c-4b09-a13b-b7422c0ff104 http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/1eea789b-c69c-4... but for the web
- terpua 17y agoI met the founders (saikat and ??) at HeyZap's (post SUS) party. They described it as (Peldi's) Mockups but for the Web. Interesting underserved niche.
- Ennis 17y agoVery happy about seeing a Cappuccino app. I can see myself using this. I'm concerned about the lack of an "export" mechanism. Being able to export to html would be ideal. At the very least, having a PDF or other universal format file that I can email around is probably a must. I wonder what "Try it now" implies? It would be nice to know if this is planned to become a paid service once out of beta. Side note: Looks like 280 Atlas is finally rolling out. I don't know what the $20 fee is all about. It feels disrespectful. I thought it was hard enough to find developers to test out a new beta platform/service in the first place.
- saikat 17y agoWe are planning to charge once we iron out all the bugs and we add a few more features, though there will probably be a free version. We'll have more details on that later. Export is definitely a feature we plan to implement, but for now, E-mailing the share link is the way to get others to see your mockups.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- gord 17y agoJust the value in getting div positions / sizes would sell the product. I'd like to see some completed mockups as examples, to lead me gently into the try-it-out phase.
- inglorian 17y agoVery nice. I like the simplicity of the syntax you've created for editing elements. Seems to work quite smoothly for me in Safari, OS 10.6
- chaosmachine 17y agoNeat. I spent a few weeks working on something similar in jQuery, but gave up on it, because I wasn't really confident it could be done well enough to beat Balsamiq.
- geoffw8 17y agoHihi, Obviously a great product. One thing though - I wouldn't use this because of the nature of my business, I was hoping and praying that it was a downloadable tool....!!!!! (My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly). If you can download, or are going to make available for download. Please let me know : ) Thanks, Geoff
- davidw 17y ago> My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly How does that work? I mean, how do you make money from it?
- saikat 17y agoI believe there are plans to create desktop versions of Cappuccino apps using Atlas. Once that comes out, we will probably release a desktop version of the app.
- cridal 17y agoIf you really want to build a valuable web prototyping app, please make it spit out HTML/CSS. That would be the killer feature! Give me a limited, but functional web site/app that I can then modify/refine, instead of a "picture" of it in whatever else format. THAT would make me use your product in a hearbeat...
- cridal 17y agoFor future... host the prototypes on your site, making them instantly accessible to others... maybe also some sort of prototype exchange/marketplace... ideas for expansion are endless, however, first you have to concentrate on the ability to create clean, tight HTML/CSS prototypes
- natrius 17y agoAny HTML or CSS spit out by that app would be unusable without a tremendous engineering effort. Anything can be dragged anywhere. Even if export was only available if you limited yourself to certain functionality and layouts, I'd still be extremely impressed if exported HTML and CSS were worth using.
- misuba 17y agoHTML output would be valuable even if it were as simple as possible and completely unstyled. That's still a tedious step I don't have to do.
- cpr 17y agoNice effort (great to see a real Capp app), but a bit ugly. Perhaps unleash a really good designer on the UI?
- nathanwdavis 17y agoMy browser tab (Google Chrome) froze up when trying to do a Copy and Paste of a Rectangle element. Other than that, it's a nice tool. Keep up the good work!
- saikat 17y agoYeah we just found out about that bug. I just pushed a fix for it about 30 minutes ago.
- nathanwdavis 17y agoWell, you sure respond to feedback fast. Great service, thanks! BTW, I've been designing a few screens for an up-coming project over the past week and haven't had any problems. It is a joy to use. Keep up the good work.
- joeld42 17y agoNice! A bit sluggish here (linux/firefox) but usable. If you had some iPhone UI templates, I'd use it.