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Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

precursorapp.com

91–100 of 109 posts

Re: Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

#91

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.

We've had a lot of success with moqups, it really is so simple that anyone can use it. The commenting is a little clunky but everything else works incredibly well.

Re: Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

#92
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Any news? I still can't use it.

Sorry, I have the ajax fallback mostly working. Sharing cursors doesn't work, but syncing chat and changes to the canvas does.

I'm still trying to find a reliable way to catch the error that prevents the connection upgrade. Right now, the library I'm using thinks that it should just keep retrying the websocket connection. We're already maintaining our own fork of the library, but it's a tedious process to make and test changes.

Re: Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

#94

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.

A good practice is to do it the other way around: start with long-polling and switch over to WebSockets only once it's confirmed to work. Don't know which library you're using but I know some do this.

Re: Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

#96
post #54

It's pretty sluggish on Firefox.

Definitely not on my Firefox. It feels smooth as organic grass-fed butter. 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!

I'm on Firefox 38.0 on Linux, my laptop is pretty cheap, but on Chromium everything's super smooth.

Beside that, the app is very slick.

Re: Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

#97
post #12

I'm trying to figure out the audience. I've never had to collaborate on a mockup. I make mockups. I review mockups. I mark mockups up. But I've never wanted to do one live with someone else. That's just me though so an example of when this is used would be great. Some feedback: I use Balsamiq and have for years. The whole reason I use a mockup tool in the first place is so I don't have to draw everything by hand or m…

"Mockups" isn't really the right term here as far as I'm concerned – it implies high fidelity, whereas this is a tool for rapid, low-fidelity idea sketching. It looks like an excellent wireframing tool, not a mockup tool.

FWIW Balsamiq uses the two terms interchangeably.

Re: Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

#99
post #12

I'm trying to figure out the audience. I've never had to collaborate on a mockup. I make mockups. I review mockups. I mark mockups up. But I've never wanted to do one live with someone else. That's just me though so an example of when this is used would be great. Some feedback: I use Balsamiq and have for years. The whole reason I use a mockup tool in the first place is so I don't have to draw everything by hand or m…

"Mockups" isn't really the right term here as far as I'm concerned – it implies high fidelity, whereas this is a tool for rapid, low-fidelity idea sketching. It looks like an excellent wireframing tool, not a mockup tool.

It's just as fast to draw a browser window, button, or text box in Balsalmiq as it is to draw a rectangle in Precursor, but the former makes it unambiguous what I'm talking about.

The point of low-fidelity mockups is to make the conversation about the the overall design without focusing on detail. If "low-fidelity" means moving from basic web elements to basic geometry, it seems to me like that hinders the conversation more than it helps.

Re: Show HN: Mockups fixed by making collaboration effortless, built with React

#100
post #16
post #12

I'm trying to figure out the audience. I've never had to collaborate on a mockup. I make mockups. I review mockups. I mark mockups up. But I've never wanted to do one live with someone else. That's just me though so an example of when this is used would be great. Some feedback: I use Balsamiq and have for years. The whole reason I use a mockup tool in the first place is so I don't have to draw everything by hand or m…

> I've never had to collaborate on a mockup. I make mockups. I review mockups. I mark mockups up. But I've never wanted to do one live with someone else. That's just me though so an example of when this is used would be great. Remote teams perhaps? I've never had the need, but I would imagine if you work with designers and engineers remotely live mockups could come handy in a brainstorming session.

As a member of a totally distributed UX team, yes.

We've been looking for just a simple whiteboarding tool that updates live, supports a pen tablet, and lets us collaborate around any rough UI language. We haven't found any that have stuck.

This has the potential (haven't used it much yet) to enable us to quickly sketch UX concepts at early stages collaboratively, which is huge.

We don't do real mockups that are persistent and used as a base for development anyway—it goes straight from paper sketches to HTML prototype. So this fills a real hole, just rough enough to work together on, just high fidelity enough to make sense to others.

Side note, "mockup" is such an ambiguous and relatively irrelevant term for whatever happens at this stage. A mockup here is just whatever you need to visually communicate the UI. The simpler and more malleable the better. If everyone understands the concept and how it translates to a UI in your application framework, then the process was successful.

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