Tumult Hype 1.5 is out with major improvements to the HTML5 builder for Mac OS X | Hacker News Reader

Tumult Hype 1.5 is out with major improvements to the HTML5 builder for Mac OS X

tumultco.com

73 pointstumultco29 comments

I just don't get that here on hacker news, on an announcement of a new version of software that someone probably put a lot of work into, the main conversation is the icon change?

I am sure most people here have the ability to change it to anything they want - but that is not even the point. I am a UI/UX guy and nothing erks me more than complaining about such a subjective non-important issue during product development.

Great work on this release tumultco. If icon complaints are your only issue, you are doing well.

For a software product sold on an app store, the icon is probably the most significant individual piece of branding and marketing work there is. Hence I assume that nobody changes the icon just for kicks, and I was curious to know why they decided on this change.

Isn't discussing a product's marketing strategy completely ordinary on HN? Why complain about it?

Comparing the icon to an outhouse is not a discussion on marketing strategy - it is a slight at those that put a lot of thought into the new icon. The new icon is obviously of a much higher quality, and is a good representation of the apps purpose (markers, html5, design feel). I just thought HN would be a place to discuss things over and above personal taste.

"Obviously of a much higher quality" is also nothing more than an expression of your personal taste.

My first reaction after installing the upgrade was "Darn, my Dock just got uglier" -- of course there's an element of resistance to change involved, but first impressions are important.

I'd be curious if after some time you still hold that opinion, feel free to ping me in a couple weeks.

The good thing is Mac OS has always been great about allowing icon changes by copying/pasting in the get info window. I probably spent too much time as a kid redoing all the system 7 app icons :).

Thanks, I appreciate your thoughts. Discussion of the icon isn't unexpected given:

- it is the first change users will notice

- the style is quite distinct from the old icon; even large software changes like the redesigned animation interface aren't as visually different

- software is a personal experience

Here's the thing, though - I clicked through, and started to watch the video about "25 features in 10 minutes". The icon change is listed as feature #1. I stopped watching around feature #3-4, because the product wasn't interesting to me. But as a rule, I think videos like this should be structured like the canonical newspaper article - put the biggest news up front. That way, at any point someone stops reading/watching, they have gotten the information that you thought was most important for them to get.

In other words, if you don't want people to focus on the icon change, don't highlight it as feature #1 in your time-limited chance to educate people about the product.

That's a good point. I put it at number one because I knew it was the first thing that would be noticed anyways and would only take a couple seconds to show. While I believe it is an improvement I wanted call it out to help manage the change (as any change can represent friction). Probably the end would have been a more appropriate place.

Many other places showing what has changed in 1.5 have the "top ten" feature list in more of a priority order in which I put the icon change in the last position. The video I made as more of a comprehensive guide to the changes for our existing users than a highlights video. Ordering in many cases was somewhat set by the features themselves; for example it is hard to show of smaller feature of the new animations timing functions without first discussing the more significant redesigned animation interface, etc.

Browsing through the demo gallery, I become terrified that tools like this will become popular and poorly done animations will begin saturating the web. It looks like a fine tool when used appropriately and tastefully, but that's entirely up to the user. And a long series of Flash-based sites have shown us that there are many people in the world with poor taste.

For the last number of years, many of us have been able to shield ourselves from blinking and moving things on the web using some kind of FlashBlock browser plugin or by not installing flash altogether. This leads me to wonder: if this kind of content becomes pervasive on the web, can it be blocked?

It may be possible to heuristically identify such content. In the case of Hype, easy enough. (see http://static.tumultco.com/hype/gallery/HolidayCard2/Holiday... for example) Adobe's product appears to use a div with an easily identifiable naming convention as well. (see http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/resources/movement/m...) So this is probably a good approach.

But part of me thinks this can be addressed at a lower level. Fundamentally what I want to get rid of is things that move of their own volition, rendering useless the adjacent content. Perhaps scripts that perform continuous DOM updates could be stopped?

Here you go: http://lynx.browser.org/. Enjoy.

Many, many years ago I felt the same about GUI driven IDEs (Visual Basic/Studio, Eclipse, etc). I remember learning woodwork at school and the teacher saying we wouldn't even be allowed in the same room as a power tool until we had shown competence with handheld tools. In the hands of the clueless IDEs allow aimless fiddling to eventually converge on a result and thus shorten development time by sacrificing code quality. IDEs caught on anyway, I think I was right to be concerned. I think you are right to be concerned about Hype but there is nothing you can do about it.

iBooks Author widget export is huge. Well done!

I feel like this is one of the best deals in software. $50 is an absolute steal.

I am in love with Hype and I've used it on several projects with startups and web agencies to make animated demos of mobile apps, HTML5 presentations, etc. Excited to explore these new features!

In a recent talk, Bret Victor gave a demo of an animation program where you could just click on an object (a leaf in his demo) and drag it around, and the software would record the object's position as a function of time. (His demo actually had the software on an iPad.) It was beautiful, direct, intuitive, and now I want it in all animation software!

Video of his talk: http://vimeo.com/36579366

Bret and I actually overlapped at Apple a little bit, his work has always been insightful and amazing.

His first demo also is very similar to our own HyperEdit (http://tumultco.com/HyperEdit/) though he takes the concept to the next level.

This is a minor quibble, but I'm curious: why did you change the icon?

I quite liked the green hummingbird you had previously. The color was maybe a bit too dark and uniform so it didn't stand out as much as it could, but the shape was beautiful and recognizable.

I'm not a fan of this wooden thing on your new icon. To be honest, my first association was something in an outhouse :)

I was not a fan of the old icon[1], but the new one isn't better. Way too much detail on the new icon at smaller sizes.

[1]:http://static.tumultco.com/press/media/HypeIconShadow.png

We do have separate variants for 32x32 and 16x16 sizes, which are visible when scaling in the Finder.

Bullshit. http://i.imgur.com/Nw5gv.png

That’s how much detail OS X icons are supposed to have. (Have you looked at the apps that come with the OS?!) Smaller versions with less detail are used for smaller sizes.

I wish more app developers would actually have such awesome icons. But HN has to complain. Of course.

Thanks for illustrating how we scale with the screenshot! :)

While the Hummingbird icon was well balanced and indicated motion, there were a few reasons that made us change:

- We didn't feel it was Mac OS X-y enough; it didn't seem to fit in with other icons in my Dock.

- The concept itself was too abstract. Given our product name is also abstract, we wanted something a little more concrete. The new concept is an animator's lightbox, which we felt is closer to its purpose. Admittedly not a lot of people have seen this in their lives...

- We wanted some way to convey the HTML5 given its importance in our app.

- Everyone is doing birds nowadays!

Thanks for the reply. For what it's worth, my feeling is that if the old icon didn't fit in, the new one blends in too much -- in my Applications folder, it looks like some generic shareware utility at first glance.

What if you dropped the wooden lightbox entirely, and just had the sheet of paper with metallic rulers and the two markers? That might make the "it's for design" notion more obvious.

The old icon didn’t fit OS X at all. That’s not how OS X icons are supposed to look.

The new one fits perfectly. It’s awesome. And: not blue.

I preferred the hummingbird :( Maybe we need to sign a petition to bring it back.

Great software though, I purchased it back when it was $29.99 and I'm glad I did it makes making HTML5 animations extremely easy.

Lovely update.

I hope you tackle the orientation/responsive problem soon. At the moment we show and hide a landscape and portrait version with media queries. Not the most ideal solution.

Agreed we need to tackle this -- I would definitely like to beef up how we support mobile devices better.

This app looks pretty awesome. It will be interesting to see what competition springs up in the next year or so.

Meant to point out that we're YC W11.

What's the main different between Tumult and Adobe Edge?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com