Show HN: Propeller - Create native mobile apps, just drag and drop | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Propeller - Create native mobile apps, just drag and drop

usepropeller.com

126 points10char37 comments

Hey HN, we're really excited to announce Propeller. It's the absolute best tool for non-technical folks to build mobile apps for themselves or their businesses.

All of the other "app builder" tools are limited to prototyping UI or generate really subpar webview-based experiences. We're going to change that by letting you build fast, native apps and will store the data you care about.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

I wish the overreaching claims were more honest. In reality tools like this are focussed on a particular subset of application types. For example you couldn't make space invaders using this, and probably not dropbox either.

I far prefer claims saying explicitly what it is good at, rather than implying it would good at any application type.

Tons of questions:

1) How far along are you?

2) Pricing Ideas?

3) Target Market?

4) Funded at all?

5) Any available apps built with it yet?

6) "Store the data you care about". Can you elaborate on this?

Well done! I signed up for your beta.

I am on the verge of paying $99 for Appsify.me. They have a web based builder tool and claim to generate code for XCode to compile while allowing apps to be extended in ObjC a needed.

Any thoughts on Appsify.me? Are you taking a similar approach?

This looks very cool, I'm not seeing any TabBar support though.

Just got a tweet from Appsify following this comment: they DO support tabs.

There's definitely a need for this. Right now I'm around 50% the way through building a web app version of what I need, which will either be "good enough" or just serve as a prototype.

If my v1 isn't native my v2 will be, but I'd rather just go for it with a tool like this.

The email sign-up doesn't work on IE 8 :-(

It didn't work for me on Firefox as well kept saying: Something went wrong :( Refresh and try again

Refreshed, tried again, same thing.

Nothing seems to work in FF these days. =/

This is probably the best landing landing page for any product I've seen in a while, if not ever. I immediately had a good idea of what the product does, how it works and how easy it is to use. All without having to read too much text or watch a video.

Agreed, but like bmelton it took me longer than usual to figure out it was interactive. The little "try it" could definitely have been more obvious.

The signup page is indeed Very Good, and I didn't even realize that I could actually drag and drop things until I read this comment and went back. So, for that, thanks!

If any of the propellor guys are lurking, I signed up and have need to use this very soon. Please launch quickly! If it's worth anything, I'm barry.melton@gmail, and am happy to help however I can.

You have only a couple elements to drag on your landing page (killer landing page demo BTW) -- but how many more elements will you have? Transitions/new pages/ maps? etc...

The check-list demo is really cool, but I would suggest adding another app type.

What is the business model? I would love to see womething where I can create a native app through your platform - but if I want to extend it with more complex features and functions I can work with your team and get those quoted and pay you to add thingsthat would require more coding.

This will allow many people to incrementally pay to get the app they are trying to build.

Let me in!

Yup, we have more elements in the full builder right now, but we kept the demo limited for aesthetics. More data entry types, more types of media, other goodies :) You won't be able to make anything under the sun, but what you can make will look and feel top notch.

There's lots of monetization models we could use, and part of the reason we're doing the current beta is to find out what makes sense for us. Doing specific tweaks to individual apps is on the table, but it's not as appealing because it's hard to scale and keep the quality high.

You might want to consider making it clear that there is more than the demo shows. The demo is great but I was under the impression that I was looking at the full version and quickly discounted it thinking I need more tools than that. I think just a line of copy explaining that would be helpful.

Awesome demo btw.

Yeah - I would keep the demo, maybe add another one - or show an app that was built by the platform that has a unique look and feel.

I love the short effective intro copy and animation. To nitpick a bit though, the font-size animation on your h2 heading is a bit clunky in Chrome, since Webkit rounds font-size values to the nearest integer. I would suggest animating on -webkit-transform: scale(...) instead, starting with scale(1) and animating down to scale(0.66ish). Then the animation will be nice and smooth, and the text will still render nicely (since you're not going above scale(1)).

Also, a minor correction in your demo: "parking break" should be "parking brake".

EDIT: I'm realizing that jQuery's animate() method doesn't work natively on CSS3 transform properties[1][2], so this would probably require some additional tweaking that may or may not be worth it. Anyway, something to think about at least!

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5029035/how-do-we-add-css...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5462275/animate-element-t...

Ah yeah, using CSS3 would be a lot smoother, We'll definitely tweak it. Thanks for the info, really appreciate it!

I signed up and will be eager to try. However, you have a lot of competition, so I'll really be looking for some big differentiators. Good luck!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtROtg3duDfzdFp...

Very neat! Congrats on launching!

One thing you might try: in the demo, dragging items is missing a bit of "pop"; this is slightly intangible, but it doesn't quite feel like you are picking up something and putting it down.

Not sure if it's this way in the actual app, but you might check out the way that Trello slightly tilts cards when you pick them up, and drops a bit more shadow.

Obviously that's minor: the product as a whole seems solid.

I definitely know what you mean, Trello has a really nice effect. Right now we're using vanilla HTML5 drag-and-drop, so that experience is basically controlled by the browser, but we're working on customizing it.

The landing page IMO is missing a few important pieces of information:

- this will not be free post-beta but there's no mention of pricing at all

- the text says 'native' but not which OSes and if the apps can be deployed through the various App Stores

- the rationale for limiting the on-page demo is fine but shouldn't prevent you from linking to a full-feature demo on a secondary page.

Good luck!

Thanks for the feedback! We want (and plan) to have some type of free tier, but we don't have enough data to announce anything concrete yet. It's probably better to wait on that than to redact later =\

iOS + App Store for now, more later after we nail that workflow.

I would use a free version with ads for yourselves after a certain amount of elements are used. Also, is there any way these apps will compile on a Windows machine? I don't need to be deployed to the App Store, i could install via Cydia (.deb) or iFunBox (.ipa) depending on how it works.

How it is native, yet instantly shows any changes you make to all of your users?

I'm betting everyone gets basically the same vanilla app and then the interface you're using generates a property list (similar to XML) that provides the configuration that the app uses to figure out how to lay out elements. The app simply copies this property list on launch. They mention that you can run your app within one that they will have on the store so I'm assuming that's how they're doing that as well.

This is one of the ways that the iTunes Music Store/app store work to keep content dynamic. Notice that when you're on a poor connection and you open the app store that the icons and names at the bottom of the screen take a while to show up. This is because the app is just a shell and it's loading its configuration over the network.

Good luck but beware - there are quite a few of these products, and so far none are successful. I think this is because they are trying to solve the "lowering the barrier to entry on the app store" problem.

I think this is the wrong problem, the real problem is how to get your app noticed, and this is down to being high quality and individually themed. These two problems are somewhat at odds with each other.

ShoutEm [1], a Croatian startup, is doing pretty well in this area. And it's actually quite powerful when you dig into it.

[1] http://www.shoutem.com/

I think I know the answer to this already but, just to be sure, can this be used to create Android apps, or is this IOS-only?

I found it pretty strange that there was no mention at all of the OS this targeted.

This looks VERY cool, might be exactly what I'm looking for. Just signed up for beta access!

When I read Propeller my first thought was http://www.parallax.com/propeller/ which is a 8 core micro controller.

Awesome landing page. I immediately dragged and dropped just from seeing the control wiggle.

Small detail, is the logo spinning backwards? I'm not an expert on propellers, it just feels wrong.

Small Biz is screaming for this type of thing. A lot of diy'ers that will learn how to use a tool, but not how to code.

nice one, signed up for the beta, can't wait to try it.

I rarely sign up for betas but this is pretty intriguing. Great job, I look forward to giving this a more in-depth tire-kicking.

Really cool, can't wait to see this evolve.

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