Pixate Engine Now Free | Hacker News Reader

Pixate Engine Now Free

pixate.com

98 pointsrobin_reala30 comments

For those who have no idea what Pixate is, " Pixate was founded in May 2012 by Paul Colton and Kevin Lindsey with the goal of enabling designers and developers alike to quickly and easily create beautiful, native mobile interfaces. Pixate was a Y-Combinator Summer 2012 participant, and also raised funding through a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2012. " (soure: their site)

Hope that adds some context.

I've been following Pixate for a while (plan to use it on my current project) but I'm really confused by this.

If a product is generating revenue then why switch it to a free model? To encourage buy-in for the upcoming product or something similar?

Just seems like a really odd business decision as I would have gladly paid for the app...

I am equally confused by this. Reminded me very much of:

> we had a business that DHH would be proud of. Bootstrapped, lean and already providing (in a small way at least) for the needs of my family and that of my co-founder. Over the next 3 months, our initial desire to not raise a seed round was dismissed and we were thoroughly convinced that we had to continue on the VC rocket-ship in order to matter to anyone. [...] This is where we made the first in a series of many mistakes

from http://mystartuphas30daystolive.tumblr.com/post/53839497912/...

But we'll see. I wish Pixate good luck anyway! More innovation is needed in this space...

They probably have ideas for additional (paid) services. For these services to make sense they need a very popular plugin. Hence the free model.

The investors are taking that risk to create a much larger scale company.

I personally believe they're better off keeping it as a paid service (however small the market may be) and offering the additional services at an additional price.

Now that they've made Pixate free they can't (really) go back to the paid model. Seems like a big punt for me.

This changes things quite a bit. I recently started a new project and decided on NUI (https://github.com/tombenner/nui) over Pixate. I have been very impressed by it so far. Does anyone have experience with both? How do they compare?

Since this is free, can you please put an download link up that's not hidden behind the license key registration form?

Thanks.

>> Since this is free.

Free does not mean it should not be licenced if the author chooses to do so.

I don't know if you've used the framework or not, but based on your response I'm assuming you haven't. You can't run the library without instantiating and instance of the Pixate engine with the license key and your email.

    [PXEngine licenseKey:@"KEY-GO-HERE" forUser:@"EMAIL-GO-HERE"];

If you already have a license key (which I do and it was paid for) and a new version comes out, you shouldn't have to go though a new "Fill out a license form" just to get the lastest update. All I'm asking for is a download page that actually has a download link.

I helped fund the project (only $100), but I don't mind it being given away. I hope this is being continued though. I have seen a couple other similar APIs out there that are free(dom) and available on GitHub but I really liked this API.

Anyone know if there are plans on providing source in the future? Not that I really want to look at it, I've enough code to write. But, It's nice to have it so I can make sure I'm safe for the future.

Also, does anyone know if this decision was brought by the design changes in iOS 7?

Not sure if the decision was made due to iOS7, but mine (Paid version) doesn't run on iOS7.

IMHO, this is needed even more in iOS7. Some of the UI design choices on iOS7 are terrible like the removal of button backgrounds/borders. I upgraded an iOS6 app to iOS7 and gave it to a friend and he just stared at it because he didn't realize that there were buttons on the screen for him to click on.

Yeah, I've written some nasty bug reports to Apple about some of those horrible UI changes and have had many unproductive discussions on the developer forums (as that isn't the place anyway).

I hadn't tested Pixate under iOS yet. So, it does't work eh? What's happening?

The Simulator wont start but I didn't really look into it. Ever since the first β iOS that Apple developed, they usually do massive changes so I'll wait until β 6+ to re-test it out.

Pixate 1.1 Beta was issued on Jun 13th to run on iOS7

Thanks!

It would be awesome if they also support Android (and other platforms), which I think they will eventually do. You would design once and get the same look across all the platforms.

Another news published on their site:

We've raised $3.8M from Accel Partners to expand Pixate's products and services Today we're announcing our Series A round, and we're super excited about it!

http://www.pixate.com/blog/article/2013-07-02-investment-ann...

The timing of this release just couldn't have been better! We're working on an iPhone app currently and this solves a HUGE problem! Thank you so much for making this free. Also, like others have mentioned, had I known this earlier, I would have definitely paid for it!

It would be really helpful to see a wide sample of applications that use it..

Looks pretty cool, but iOS only from what I can tell. Not sure I can seriously look at a technology that doesn't support Android at this point.

According to their other news (which I've just posted here) the funding they've received will be used (also) for developing Android and Mac versions of their engine

Ah the ole' get users THEN make money strategy. I paid for Pixate and I think it had value at the $99 price point. This decision to make it free makes me think that their new strategy taking the acqui-hire route.

Android already has a great, flexible, style and theme engine. Anything in particular Pixate supports that Android doesn't already do natively you'd like to see?

From their website, "And coming soon, use Pixate with your native Android apps in addition to your native iOS apps—even share CSS between your apps."

Thank you! That splash screen slowed down development time so much. Add 3 to 5 seconds to every single build and run.

I wonder if anyone here actually used it. How much does it increase the size of executable?

I'm using it right now, the ./PXEngine.framework directory which is what you import into your project is 5.2M.

Honestly, the framework is pretty awesome. It makes styling your application as easy as Apple should have made it.

I use it in every app I build.

It's buggy though, crashes on occasion, and is a bit of a black hole; but for what it does, it's pretty awesome.

I thought apple prohibits apps built by frameworks like this.

So, can you use Pixate to do layout, or only styling?

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