11–20 of 67 posts
Interesting acquisition considering they also bought Form[0]. Would love to see some designer-centric prototyping tools built by Google specifically for Android devices. The OSX/iOS ecosystem is particularly well equipped in this area, and finding good design prototyping tools built for Android is a pain point for many people in UX/UI imo. _ 0. http://www.relativewave.com/form/google/
Here's why I (and jawngee) never used Pixate's products for my apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062868 Given that I only make iOS apps, and that Google acquired them, I feel vindicated 916 days later.
Except that Pixate is purely for prototyping in the design phase.. not for actually shipping a binary to the app store.
When I tried pencilcase I found it fairly easy to use, and liked that apps can theoretically be exported and submitted to the app store.
What are the strengths of Pixate?
Pixate has a middle term potential to fix the difficulties with designing and deploying UI's which require basic physics or animations. It has the long term potential to change native front end engineering as its currently done. Potentially it could compress design, prototyping, and front-end dev into a single seat -- who is more design-forward rather than coding-forward.
Immediate-mode UI could be part of the solution, but I still can't see a complete solution that wouldn't piss me off as a developer.
Interesting acquisition considering they also bought Form[0]. Would love to see some designer-centric prototyping tools built by Google specifically for Android devices. The OSX/iOS ecosystem is particularly well equipped in this area, and finding good design prototyping tools built for Android is a pain point for many people in UX/UI imo. _ 0. http://www.relativewave.com/form/google/
I'm involved in Neonto, a startup that makes a design tool that targets both iOS and Android: http://neonto.com The unique twist is that Neonto Studio generates real native code (Obj-C for iOS, Java for Android), so it's possible to use it even for complete apps, not just prototypes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that Pixate is purely for prototyping in the design phase.. not for actually shipping a binary to the app store.
That wasn't their initial product that I even paid for. Not that I minded, I actually liked their initial product until it got open sourced (but abandoned)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm involved in Neonto, a startup that makes a design tool that targets both iOS and Android: http://neonto.com The unique twist is that Neonto Studio generates real native code (Obj-C for iOS, Java for Android), so it's possible to use it even for complete apps, not just prototypes.
Is it using React Native?
It's "dependency-free" -- there's no intermediate runtime or framework involved. This keeps app sizes down, and also makes the generated UI code easier to integrate with programmers' workflows.
We started on this a long time before React Native was announced, so it wasn't even an option... However recently we've been entertaining the thought of generating React Native instead of the native UI frameworks. That would be a major pivot for the product, but if React Native takes off, it might make sense. What do you think?
It's refreshing to see a company getting acquired and instead of shutting down they double down on their product/service. Congratulations to the Pixate team!
Usually this kind of announcement is followed by another one, 9 months-2 years later, of the service being shut down.
This is just the first step of that pattern again.