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Comment by patrickaljord | Hacker News Reader

> What the hell? You lost my interest at ruby and the command line.

I install all my dev stuff with the command line (npm, gem, easy_python etc). What's wrong with that?

...the problem is that there is no reason that a demo for a web framework should require an install in the first place--I mean you're already on a web page to look at it aren't you?...sure it's easy enough to install (i did it)...but it seems lazy especially if the intent is to promote usage of the framework.

We have a link to our, albeit totally old and crappy, demos right on that page: http://demo.sproutcore.com/

We're working on new demos, and a new website. Demos feature much more heavily in the new design, and you definitely don't (and won't) need to install the build tools to run them!

I would encourage you to make that a priority. Every time I see something about SproutCore, I'm interested but end up not doing anything with it. I keep hearing about the demos being out of date.

Things like this: "we have a great new default theme called Ace 2.0"

Sounds great, how about a screenshot or two, if not a demo?

And this: "looks at home on ... mobile operating systems"

More info please? I'm interested but I see no examples, screenshots or other info about doing mobile dev. Device, browser and OS support?

agree with the above...went through some eval on SC a few months back. We didn't go with SC, not for the lack of the demo link (swear the demo link wasn't there then :)), but I recall being a bit off put about it as well

...seems there has been a lot of development since though, some updated demos would really be nice.

Fair points all around; I agree wholeheartedly. Here's what the problem has been thus far: do we focus on making the framework better, or do we focus on selling it? Personally, I'm much more comfortable with making sure we deliver the goods before we try to sell it. That's what SproutCore 1.5 is about. This is the first smoke signal of where we want to head with the framework, and people can take that for what it is. The core of the framework is amazing and fun to work with, but a lot of our demos are old and ugly. In many cases, our documentation has been or is still lacking and we're working on that too.

This obviously makes it a tougher sell. However, when people actually start building apps, their responses are overwhelmingly positive and they're very happy with their decision. I would much rather this problem than vise versa. We're going to work on the outward facing stuff, I promise.

Good to hear. The way I (and most people) decide which frontend libraries to use are by seeing them in action. Then I can decide after evaluating it technically if it's something I want to use or not.

Looking forward to doing that with SproutCore.

Couldn't agree more Colin, let us (the community of people building apps with it) continue to do the evangelizing, your team has been doing a great job and we appreciate it a lot.

I wanted to try the demo many months ago, and had to stop at the first line:

    gem install sproutcore

There's no way I'm polluting my desktop ruby install. Please document a way to set up a standalone folder.

(if had been python I could have hacked it myself. i dont know ruby)

This is a client side (100% JavaScript) library. I love the command line, but shouldn't invoke it to learn more about a JavaScript library.

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