Ask HN: Please review my webapp: Da Button Factory - create shiny buttons

(Web) design is hard. For us programmers, it's a pain in the ass, and when it comes to create UI elements for a (web) app, we are stuck with two choices:

1. create something very basic, or

2. spend countless hours searching the web for Photoshop tutorials on how to create a bubble or depth effect, then spend even-more-countless hours fighting with Photoshop to implement it, and finally, maybe adapt the image with some external tools to make it be a CSS sprite or whatever)

Yes, 1. is not necessary a bad thing (HN is a good example :-)), but we all know that for most softwares, some attractive eye-candies are useful. Even GMail uses more than a simple to display their buttons.

So here comes Da Button Factory. It aims at making it easier to create pretty buttons, which are one of the key elements of an user interface (especially on the web), in an quick and human-friendly way (not tons of options/menus/concepts like in an image processing program). And because using plain image files on the web often sucks, it (will) provide solutions that makes good use of CSS.

Currently it's just a beta. There is only a very simple CSS solution implemented. It may looks ugly in some browsers. Things are not polished.

But I would be very glad to hear any comments of yours on this "draft". Do you find it interesting? Do you have any critics/ideas about it? Did you notice any bugs or problems?

Oh, and I am french, so please excuse me for any grammar/spelling mistake in this post, and don't hesitate to correct me, of course :-)

This is really kind of cool.

Curious to know what method you're using to generate the actual buttons?

Nice! Creating image buttons really isn't that difficult, but the gradients are very pretty. I can see how this could be massively convenient for some people.

P.S. I added your site to SU: http://www.stumbleupon.com/url/www.dabuttonfactory.com/

Good idea and seems to work well too. I'm not sure I'll be giving up Photoshop anytime soon, but this can definitely be useful for quick webapps and prototypes.

It would be great if there was a "randomize" button so that one could quickly try out different styles with the same text.

Two minor nitpicks:

- Hovering over "Da Button Factory" makes the text yellow but isn't clickable

- Your menu buttons at the top could use some adjusting so that the text is more vertically centered (in Mac FF).

Great work!

Yeah, looks pretty useful. Any thoughts about charging anything for it?

I'm a huge fan of Joe Krause's advice to beta test a business model while you beta test your product: How you make your money is equally relevant in how people perceive your product. http://www.brendonwilson.com/blog/2006/04/30/joe-kraus-confe...