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Show HN: Rapid prototyping and development tool for web and mobile apps

steveapp.com

25 pointssorich8715 comments

"Stop looking for a developer." -- this is an interesting trend that is slowly, but surely, gaining traction. It's really taking hold in the indie game world, a lot of people now make games with GameMaker, Stencyl, and the like and often don't need a developer.

It makes a lot of sense that this will take place in the website and mobile app world too. I wonder what developers will be doing in 5 years, when most/all CRUD apps can be built with drag and drop.

A lot of those games aren't actually quality work. Especially because they tend to settle with out of the box settings instead of having the ability to customise it. Though a good artist can hide it through good artwork and sound.

Gamemaker (and probably the rest) do have the ability to optimize it. If people use it or not is their choice. To make an interesting (or even ok) game with those tools, you will be writing tons of code. As people do (read the forums). Even in 'educational' game makers like Gamesalad, you can see that people are taxing the system by 'writing' (drag & drop in this case) quite complex routines which do things (like raycasting) which Gamesalad is definitely never made for.

Spelunky, Hotline Miami and Super Crate Box were all made with Game Maker. All very successful, critically acclaimed titles. Granted, it's hard to know how much GML (Game Maker's programming language) was used. But just the fact that they were made in Game Maker alone is a pretty strong testament that these tools are really coming into their own.

But why? Serious question. It's a programming language and a library for (mainly) 2d stuff. It's cross platform and has some graphical tools. But I believe good games have tons of GML in them. So what makes them different from the many other 2D game frameworks & programming languages besides that Gamemaker looks easier. I do welcome it's success though; more tools is better for game makers.

This is nothing new and has been around since people started to make usable software for computer systems. The idea has been tried to death with countless software writing tools. MS DOS Dbase tools on top of dbase, written in clipper or what not to make CRUD applications by non programmers. There are generating tools from before that generating compile CRUD from just 'a business person definitions'. I have seen presentations from countless products like Filemaker, MS Access, Foxpro etc claiming that boring CRUD is gone and no programmers are needed anymore for application building.

When I was younger, one of the product managers for the Dutch product SDW told me that programming business software was something of the past as business people could just input 'how the app should work' and the app would be automatically built.

Outsystems have claimed this, as do Longjump and web based systems.

They all have something in common; they work for some cases, if you want more you have a problem. You CAN do it, but it's hard and the resulting 'code' (usually visual programming or 4GL) will usually be bad. Ohyeah, and you're still programming. Worse than you would have with actual developers from the start.

Note that most of them start out as simple systems, like this SteveApp. That's nice; it serves a purpose. But when you get users, people will request features and these feature will, in the end, require a full fledged programming language. So now you have non programmers creating an app up to a point which they still get and for more they'll hire you. They did a bit of 'programming' though in the built in language, which was made easy (which usually translates to visual and/or 'very much like English), so not very terse and often not very well written. Now you have 'code' like this http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6134596/Screenshots/uo079... and you only have to fix some extra features :)

I agree that the code generated by most software writing tools is horrible. That's why SteveApp doesn't even try to generate code in any programming language (unless you consider HTML a programming language of course).

The trick used by SteveApp is to generate dynamic HTML views which have the ability to save the data over a standard server API. Dynamically generating a markup language is easier, and I think it can be done successfully with a software writing tool.

I like that you are trying this anyway. I know and have worked with the tools I mentioned because I have a more than passing interest in them. Like you I do believe there must be some better way for a programmer to spend her or his time than implementing trivial but time consuming software (which, usually, has been repeated over the past 40 years 1000s of times without even referring to past endeavors).

I think that Ms lightswitch is designed to make it easy for developers to add features and extend the software later on.

There are so much problems in the World that software can help solve, and there are not enough developers to solve them. The time developers spend writing code for CRUD apps would be better spent on other, more important things (more complex apps, user experience, etc). By automating the coding of trivial CRUD apps, time and money will be saved and reallocated to more challenging problems. Also, from a developer point of view, writing CRUD apps is boring. :)

Nice work. It looks good (on desktop browsers anyway). Please read my other comment in this thread and keep it simple as to something which is easy to use but doesn't 'want' too much. Looking forward to my invite!

Thanks! I replied to your comment. It was very insightful. You will get the invite soon. :)

I submitted this link a month ago but I learned the hard way that you shouldn't submit your startup on HN when it's not ready (it was downvoted). Hopefully this time I can get some reviews. :)

Unfortunately the site looks a bit of a mess on iOS. I suggest a basic browser detect so you can display a nicer looking splash page to mobile users.

You named your product Steve. If you want to go the Jenkins/Ask.com route of having a product with a human name then come up with a memorable and attractive avatar for Steve ASAP. Personally I would be weirded out using a product with a bland and generic name like "Steve". I understand this is subjective, but you may want to iterate on the name until you find something interesting and memorable. This may sound trite, but in a crowded marketplace where every conversion matters you'll want every edge you can get.

Thanks for testing. I will fix on iOS. The goal is to make it work on tablets also at least, but I'm not there yet. :)

About the name, the original idea for the app was "Steve, your technical cofounder" (an allusion to Woz obviously). I will definitely think more about the name.

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