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Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

jmockups.com

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Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#11

Post by matt1 »

euroclydon wrote: post #10

I agree that this market simply doesn't exist, and never will. The site and technology looks nice however. You should use what you've wrote, plus your skills, and quickly transition this application into a drop in designer replacement for some existing, popular application who's designer sucks. Believe me, there are plenty of candidates; they may be buried behind firewalls, or in niche industries, but they exist. I k…

What market do you think I'm going after?

If you design web apps, for example, you can (or will) benefit from jMockups because it makes it easy to design and get feedback on your app before you write a single line of code. And once you can link the mockups together (todo list), you could essentially prototype an entire app and get feedback on it with only a few hours of work. How's that for a minimum viable product?

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#12

Post by mgkimsal »

I gotta say, I'm impressed. Couple of things that I see missing that might make me want to pay...

1. Team sharing 2. Feedback - allowing someone with a password to come in and lay comments around on the screen.

I think there is a market here, but as someone else pointed out, it might be a shorter term market to make something like this but customized for, perhaps, joomla. If this tool had knowledge of a particular system, and would allow me to create a 'joomla' layout specifically, I think you'd have a big winner here. Then expand to things like mojoportal, etc.

Go for platforms where there's not a huge community already (basically - not wordpress) and offer something useful to those communities that may not get a lot of attention from designers.

All in all, a lot of potential - great work :)

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#13

Post by euroclydon »

matt1 wrote: post #11
euroclydon wrote: post #10

I agree that this market simply doesn't exist, and never will. The site and technology looks nice however. You should use what you've wrote, plus your skills, and quickly transition this application into a drop in designer replacement for some existing, popular application who's designer sucks. Believe me, there are plenty of candidates; they may be buried behind firewalls, or in niche industries, but they exist. I k…

What market do you think I'm going after? If you design web apps, for example, you can (or will) benefit from jMockups because it makes it easy to design and get feedback on your app before you write a single line of code. And once you can link the mockups together (todo list), you could essentially prototype an entire app and get feedback on it with only a few hours of work. How's that for a minimum viable product?

I design web applications using so many different third-party toolkits, like jQuery UI, little drop-in animation scripts, dynamic CSS, and often run them in existing platforms. I think most other people do as well. I simply would never achieve a "pixel perfect" representation of what I would deliver, or even close to it, using your tool.

That's why strict Photoshop templates exist, and why mockup tools are cartoony on purpose, because the customer has to know it's only a spiritual representation of the deliverable, or else the real thing. I can do neither with your tool.

[Edit] I've completely replaced design tools that were a component of lucrative applications in the pharmaceutical and electrical industries. If someone were to have a made a presentation to the right people, showing what you have, they probably could have walked away with a contract worth $300K. I'm just trying to give you some advice here. If this product doesn't take off, consider trying to re-purpose it for some staid industry.

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#14

Post by daleharvey »

I completely disagree with everyone else, I believe there is a large market for tools like this. Adobe make a lot of money from photoshop and I personally along with most web designers I know are dissatisfied with photoshop and its alternatives, they are are terrible tools for designing websites and applications.

I think it needs a lot of polish, your application is designed like a website itself, dont have a footer, reduce the size of the header etc, make the "canvas" more obvious etc. I dont have time to do a proper critique right now, but the next time I need to design something I will make sure to write it all down and send it along

(I think you should rethink the name as well, jAnything just makes me things its some jquery plugin)

Awesome work so far, dont be disheartened if all the feedback isnt sunshine and roses right now.

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#15

Post by matt1 »

mgkimsal wrote: post #12

I gotta say, I'm impressed. Couple of things that I see missing that might make me want to pay... 1. Team sharing 2. Feedback - allowing someone with a password to come in and lay comments around on the screen. I think there is a market here, but as someone else pointed out, it might be a shorter term market to make something like this but customized for, perhaps, joomla. If this tool had knowledge of a particular sy…

Thanks.

Team sharing and overlayed comments are great ideas and definitely something I want to implement in the coming weeks.

Exporting the mockup to HTML or to a template is possible but very difficult to get right. I'm going to wait and a few months and see how the core mockup product works before venturing into that arena. We'll see where the feedback drives it.

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#16

Post by matt1 »

daleharvey wrote: post #14

I completely disagree with everyone else, I believe there is a large market for tools like this. Adobe make a lot of money from photoshop and I personally along with most web designers I know are dissatisfied with photoshop and its alternatives, they are are terrible tools for designing websites and applications. I think it needs a lot of polish, your application is designed like a website itself, dont have a footer,…

Thanks. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can email me at either matt@jmockups or matthew.h.mazur@gmail.com. That's the kind of feedback I want and need.

... And if this was an easy task, someone else would have already done it :)

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#17

Post by bmelton »

I played around with this, and I'll tell you where I have problems. It's similar to the thing in AI where if you model a character as cartoonish, people's subconsciouses will fill in the blanks, making the characters appealing -- but if you get 'too close' to actual, then the brain only sees the flaws, and it makes the characters seem creepy.

I feel that same thing here, where you're using actual HTML input elements, and actual page items, but without being able to repeat a background, and without being ACTUAL html. I only see the flaws.

Balsamiq works best for me because frankly, I'm not going to use the browser's default HTML elements anyway, unless I've styled them at least a little bit. So the 'cartoonish' rough markups you are striving to improve upon are really features to me.

That said, I don't think there's no market -- I'm sure the idea will appeal to some, but I don't know that the pixel-perfection is particularly a value add for me, it's just a different choice, and (for me) not paying any extra for.

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#18

Post by gurraman »

petervandijck wrote: post #5

Very nice technology. But I think you've chosen the wrong domain. I don't think there's a big (or even small) market in doing "pixel-perfect mockups". We have Photoshop for that, which (frankly) provides better tools than yours. I would take the technology (which looks great) and search for a better field to apply it to.

PS will not be a better tool until their font rendering is identical to that of the browsers.

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#19

Post by matt1 »

bmelton wrote: post #17

I played around with this, and I'll tell you where I have problems. It's similar to the thing in AI where if you model a character as cartoonish, people's subconsciouses will fill in the blanks, making the characters appealing -- but if you get 'too close' to actual, then the brain only sees the flaws, and it makes the characters seem creepy. I feel that same thing here, where you're using actual HTML input elements,…

Imagine there being a toggle button on the toolbar that switches your mockup between low and high fidelity. Would that be something you're interested in?

Re: Review my Startup: jMockups - A Better Way to Web Design

#20

Post by daleharvey »

daleharvey wrote: post #14

I completely disagree with everyone else, I believe there is a large market for tools like this. Adobe make a lot of money from photoshop and I personally along with most web designers I know are dissatisfied with photoshop and its alternatives, they are are terrible tools for designing websites and applications. I think it needs a lot of polish, your application is designed like a website itself, dont have a footer,…

some very quick details * the canvas size is fixed, cant seem to be able to expand it * the resize handlers are annoying, selections dont "feel" nice, "feeling nice" is important imo * I didnt see how to define gradients

* Put a much nicer looking website for a demo than hacker news, maybe the 37 signals front page

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