Announcing Fuse Open | Hacker News Reader

Announcing Fuse Open

blog.fusetools.com

72 pointssomebee28 comments

Please don't let this badly introduced blog post scare you away, because Fuse is actually surprisingly great tech for something so little known. In short, it's a React Native competitor. You can write cross platform apps using reactive-style JavaScript code. It ships with its own UI toolkit which is all (compiled down to) native machine code (mostly GPU code, actually), which makes apps perform fast because nothing that takes serious CPU/battery is done in JavaScript.

The key selling points of Fuse over React Native are, I think:

    * Fully "write once, run everywhere" (both a plus and a minus)
    * Excellent support for all kinds of animated UX patterns
    * High level included components for many common use cases
    * Declarative XAML/JSX-like UI language easy for designers
    * Fast, highly GPU-optimized.

The dev tools are pretty amazing too, with instantaneous app reloads when you make changes in your favourite editor, both when using a simulator and on a connected device. It's like editing in the browser devtools and immediately seeing your changes, but then on mobile. I know that React Native does this well too, but many others don't and you might not expect stuff like this from something you've never heard of before.

They are a VC-funded startup from Norway that lost the hype race to React Native. I'm sad to read that they're going to mostly stop developing this because I doubt anybody's ready to suddenly take over the cost of doing so. Still, great that they're open sourcing it all instead of just effectively discontinuing it and keeping it closed and unmaintained, which is what many pivoting VC funded companies do.

I've never used Fuse in anger (only tinkered) and I'm sure it has its share of downsides but it's a world-class contender in the world of mobile app development toolkits, and deserves to be treated as such.

FuseTools is a great product, it is what InVision's Sketch should be. Hopefully Fuse goes the way of Lucene and Solr, supporting two different companies (LucidWorks and ElasticSearch) that effectively consult to larger organizations.

I've looked at it before but from what I could tell, there was no way to get the native platform UI components, like tab bars on iOS for instance. Is that still the case?

Ah, so not related to Filesystem in User SpacE[0] that has existed for much, much longer time?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_in_Userspace

I was actually expecting this to be some kind of commercial implementation of libfuse or something like a marketplace for fuse filesystems. Sounds far fetched but seemed more likely to me than what turned out to be a React alternative..

2nded. That's exactly what I expected as well.

3rded. And not sure how good the name choice is anyway for them: an open fuse is usually an indicator of something went wrong.

I had to read quite far into their announcement to realize this had nothing to do with the FUSE I was expecting.

Which was itself a name collision with this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuse_(emulator)

same here.... This will be Hackernews' own version of "rickrolling"

OK, so I've gotten a little way into this annoucement and still none-the-wiser as to what Fuse Open is. The most I can work out is it's nothing to do with filesystems (the incorrect assumption which drew me to their announcement).

That's when I gave up reading this too.

Fusetools (fusetools.com) is a cross-platform app development platform/toolkit with a GUI builder. They just announced that their Pro plan is getting free and open source, making it easier to make beautiful and functional mobile apps.

Your comment gave a better and much shorter explanation of what Fuse is than the blog post did, and confirmed for me that it's not related to the identically-named filesystem tool. Thanks for the explanation :)

And I was expecting something great about filesystems...

Or something about JBoss Fuse..

For everyone confused: https://fuse-open.github.io/

> What is Fuse?

> Fuse is a cross-platform mobile app development tool suite, supporting building Android and iOS applications.

> With Fuse you can build native mobile user interfaces using the easy to learn UX Markup language, and use JavaScript to add business logic.

> Let Fuse build and maintain the mobile app front-end of your service, at a fixed price, leaving you to focus on your core business.

A fixed monthly price, but you have to signup to learn more. Like what that fixed prices is...

Not mentioning what fuse is in first paragraph is epic PR fail.

All they had to write is "Fuse, the blahde blah blah blah is now ..."

Well. If I’m a regular reader of a blog I definitely don’t want to read such an explanation again and again and again...

On the top of the page i read „Create better native apps for iOS and Android with a new...“ (iphone se and accoring screen resolution, might look different elsewhere).

So i know the rough subject it’s about.

I agree that the first / every mention of the product name can be a hyperlink that shows me more details/full product Website. Thats unintrusive for regular readers and gives full info at a click for new readers.

As it is now i have to read multiple paragraphs until getting to such a link, that can be optimized.

Could be as simple as showing an on hover tooltip above the words that not everybody might know about (e.g. products they offer / projects).

How/why is a tooltip (that can only contain a few words / one or two sentences with the same info already written above as i describe it) better than a link to the full webpage?

That works too, it's early in the east coast :)

I am not sure if that matters anymore. Somehow that announcement reads as "we are dropping the product, therefore we are donating it to the open source community". I don't know if I am interpreting too much into that announcement.

Doubly so when they're apparently talking about a now-useless open fuse.

I think Fuse is a mobile application framework ... ?

yes and?

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