Show HN: Moqups - Vectorial mockups with HTML5 and SVG

Looks very similar to https://gomockingbird.com/ which has been around for a while.

This is fantastic. Blows Balsamiq out of the water.

To be fait, Comic Sans is mainly hated because it's used inappropriately so much. In this particular case, it seems like a pretty appropriate use (although I still find it ugly).

As a huge Balsamiq user, I'm definitely pulling for you guys because I'm not completely happy with them.

The basic functionality is great, but having the ability to make clickable online demos where I could send links to people would be a killer feature that would make me switch very quickly.

Having said that, a few UX notes:

-You have incompletely applied the tab metaphor on the left-hand panel. For a while, I was trying to figure out why a label was a stencil but a paragraph was an image. At the very minimum, your "shaded" tab should extend under the other one to show that it applies to both columns.

-Categorizing your stencils, even a little bit, would help. Balsamiq screwed this up, and now they have a bunch of nonsensical categories (quick, what would you expect to find under media?)

-I would recommend grouping your stencils by things that tend to be used together. For example, form elements should be all together, mobile stuff too.

-I know you're not native, but the right-click context menu on Balsamiq is much better than putting the align/arrange/lock at the top of the screen. I use this stuff a lot, and the extra distance is a pain

-Also, I don't see the capability to have some sort of templates. That's definitely a must for any decent size project

/edit I just discovered the context menu (double delayed click is a good solution). Still think at least the lock button belongs on the menu and not at the top

Pheeeew! Indeed. It was quite a challenge. After spending two months into building a custom text layout engine, we ended up throwing all the code out the window, mostly because the performance was terrible with more than a few hundred characters. Beside this, there were a gazillion other scenarios that we could not simply cover (kerning, spacing, i18n, ligatures, cross browser differences & so on).

We ended up using foreignObject for rendering text, with the compromise that we need to look for solutions to enable pure svg export. This is still a technical debt on our plate. A roundtrip solution that converts hybrid SVG into PostScript and then back into SVG may work... we'll see.

Either way, we'll start writing some technical articles on our blog, so others can take advantage of our findings (we really owe a LOT to the community)