Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
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Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#2This looks great! Does it allow access to the native APIs?
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#3This looks great! Does it allow access to the native APIs?
Devs here. We use JavaScriptCore to expose native Objective-C APIs. This gives you access to any API we expose right in PencilCase: Studio. To go beyond that we allow exporting to Xcode.
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#4This looks great! Does it allow access to the native APIs?
Devs here. We use JavaScriptCore to expose native Objective-C APIs. This gives you access to any API we expose right in PencilCase: Studio. To go beyond that we allow exporting to Xcode.
Can you justify the subscription model? To me this is a major turnoff.
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Devs here. We use JavaScriptCore to expose native Objective-C APIs. This gives you access to any API we expose right in PencilCase: Studio. To go beyond that we allow exporting to Xcode.
Can you justify the subscription model? To me this is a major turnoff.
The advantage of subscription is that everyone is always running the latest and greatest. Typically software will instead charge for major version releases in the future which segregates your users and increases support costs. This is not good for anyone. Interested why this is a turnoff for you though. What would you like to see instead?
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#6Another tool for designing native iOS apps is Neonto Studio. It supports Android too:
Neonto's generated code is "runtime-free" -- there's no framework or other intermediate runtime layer, so everything in the design is translated to the platform's native concepts. There's also an elaborate plugin API for adding new tools and capabilities.
(Full disclosure: I wrote most of the code in Neonto Studio.)
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you justify the subscription model? To me this is a major turnoff.
The advantage of subscription is that everyone is always running the latest and greatest. Typically software will instead charge for major version releases in the future which segregates your users and increases support costs. This is not good for anyone. Interested why this is a turnoff for you though. What would you like to see instead?
I'd like to buy it once for a fixed price, use the heck out of it, and purchase an upgrade offered to me as a loyal customer, when it happens, if I want to.
Milking money out of me on a regular basis, adding to a line-item in my budget, feels predatory - as a developer, this turns me off because it doesn't actually benefit me in any way - I'm paying for your inability to fund yourself through multiple iterations of software development cycles. Put a fixed price on the product, charge for upgrades when - and most importantly: if - they happen, and it would be a done deal in my case. But right now, I don't want to have to deal with your regular charge against my credit card. Too much hassle, and you haven't been in business/released enough software, long enough for me to believe its going to be worth a year of charges.
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#8This is an interesting concept. But I can't help but think it looks like it's focused on UI design interaction, and not necessarily full app design. What provisions are in place for persistent storage, push notifications, or access to an external API?
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#9like flash studio right?
Re: Show HN: PencilCase – an iOS app studio that transforms designs into apps
#10This is an interesting concept. But I can't help but think it looks like it's focused on UI design interaction, and not necessarily full app design. What provisions are in place for persistent storage, push notifications, or access to an external API?
Our goal is definitely to allow full app design. Currently we unlock most of these more powerful features by allowing you to write JavaScript. For example we expose a key value store and web request API. Our goal is to liberate these things so that they can be used by anyone though. Our unique Behaviours feature gives good insight of how we are starting to unlock things that would normally be very difficult for non developers. Hope you give it a chance and see the potential!