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Any chance you can share how you got to such polish? the workflow of modeling the animations and UX? How you concluded SVG would be best? tooling you used?
Amazing!
I think something that could really help this app succeed, is sharable UI elements. There are a lot of common things I don't want to redraw (date pickers, dropdowns, file uploads, etc, etc). However, I don't want these provided as a static set, because the web and my needs are always changing/growing. If I was able to browse the community's drawings and add them to my profile for quick insertion into a mockup that wo…
Curious what you think of our current approach to this. We're worried about people spending a lot of time searching for the perfect component instead of just sketching out their ideas. That's one of the big problems that we see with tools like Omnigraffle. But we recognize that people can work a lot faster if they don't have to keep sketching out the same components in every wireframe. Our approach is to use copy/pas…
I think share-ability is important (seo/community, think of github repos). I'd like to do something like google for "precursor datepicker" view/fork or 'save'/star/insert it or maybe search in app for "datepicker"s.
That just my two cents, I think it creates a community and then as a whole everyone benefits, while the tool still remains uncluttered (the workflow remains the same, but components could be incorporated). Consider this: I could have say 4 tabs open which I then copy & paste some components I found into a mockup I'm working on. No searching in app, no component drawers, just simple copy & pasting between tabs.
Also, tracking a clipboard doesn't really classify something as "important", I mean, won't that list just get cluttered, I don't necessarily want to look through 20 copies to find the one time I copied the whole component. And workflow to update it might be a bit weird, do I edit it, re-copy it and re-star it, delete the previous staring?
Really, just my two cents, food for thought, great work, I'm sure you know better!
No offense, but this tool seems pretty raw. Why announce it now? https://moqups.com is a great web based mockup app I have been using for a few years. It's very slick.
Perceived quality issues aside, Precursor appears to be free for public projects. The site you linked contains the following text: "The Free Plan includes 2 projects (limited to 300 objects) and 5MB of storage to get you started."
Who wants their wireframes to be public projects? Maybe if you're working on UI's for open source projects? I can't think of any other use cases.
Precursor's unique value propositions seem to be aimed at problems I would guess few people have...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Curious what you think of our current approach to this. We're worried about people spending a lot of time searching for the perfect component instead of just sketching out their ideas. That's one of the big problems that we see with tools like Omnigraffle. But we recognize that people can work a lot faster if they don't have to keep sketching out the same components in every wireframe. Our approach is to use copy/pas…
Right, that works to some extent. However there is still an upfront cost of drawing each component I want to use. I think share-ability is important (seo/community, think of github repos). I'd like to do something like google for "precursor datepicker" view/fork or 'save'/star/insert it or maybe search in app for "datepicker"s. That just my two cents, I think it creates a community and then as a whole everyone benefi…
You may be right about share-ability being important. It would be nice to see some validation of that. For example, users sharing Precursor docs full of their custom components, encouraging other users to copy the items. We might build a couple of those ourselves to see if it gets any traction.
> Also, tracking a clipboard doesn't really classify something as "important"
We anticipated that problem. You can delete the clips that you don't want to keep and star the important clips to keep them at the top of the list. They're also ordered by creation time, so the cruft will just fall to the bottom.
For updating clipboard items, you'd have to go through the steps you describe. But it wouldn't be especially difficult to allow people to edit the clipboard items from the menu.
Just wanted to chime in and say this beautiful application was built with a pretty cool technology stack: ClojureScript, Om (ClojureScript bindings to React), Clojure and Datomic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
hi - i checked the logs. I presume it's the corporate network I'm in blocking the websocket stuff WebSocket connection to 'wss://precursorapp.com/chsk?tab-id=883d69ff-1095-4eed-bf63-83d786d55db1&client-id=f71e3c9b-fd70-4710-8502-ada0c73f4760' failed: Error during WebSocket handshake: Unexpected response code: 200 Maybe you could add some better error handling into the GUI ?
Oh no! It's supposed to fall back to long-polling if it can't set up a WebSocket connection. Thanks for letting us know.
I have a black screen, a blue tooltip saying "Right-click" and nothing whatsoever happening when I right click. Firefox 31.5.0 edit: is it really necessary to downvote for reporting a valid bug !?
Sorry about that! We've only tested with Firefox 38. I'll see if I can install an older version and try to fix whatever bug you're hitting. In the meantime, I'd be interested if Chrome or Firefox 38 works for you.
Amazing! I think you just raised the bar for UX. The level of detail is OCD crazy. Any chance you can share how you got to such polish? the workflow of modeling the animations and UX? How you concluded SVG would be best? tooling you used? Amazing!
To get what polish we do have took a few things: 1) My cofounder and I have been working together for a while and our workflows compliment each other. The time we save with development usually gets spent on polish after shipping. 2) This started as a side project for us, so we made a strong effort to find a concept that was inherently simple. For example, the simpler we can make the UI, the more users can concentrate on your ideas. So our motivation towards the UI isn't to add more, it's to refine down when possible. 3) I use Precursor everyday now, so it's important for me make sure things behave well :)
We're not heavily-dependent on svg, it would be possible to render to canvas or just to straight html. But svg has some niceties, like transforms on groups and easy export to images. It definitely has its challenges (e.g., text formatting, Safari bugs, etc.) but we get a lot of things for free, and it helps keep sharing options pretty simple. Luckily our visual aesthetic is pretty minimal, so we don't have to push things very hard on it.
It's pretty sluggish on Firefox.
As a beginner web developer aiming to work remotely, they have me. I want simple, fast, colaborative, and they have it all plus "mindblowingness". ;)
Not only that, sites like this get me excited and make me want to develop something as good.
I can only congratulate the developers!