Show HN: Montage – Photo book maker built in Dart | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Montage – Photo book maker built in Dart

montagebook.com

32 pointsquisquous23 comments

I love it. I go on trips with my family and I always take tons of photos, but I never know what to do with them. I have zero artistic talent when it comes to laying out books or whatever. This is pretty much great for that.

A couple of other things I really like about this:

* The demo is really well done * When I finish the demo, it gives me an option to get started: "Create Your Own", which is nice, because it acknowledges that I just finished a demo and is asking me to get started, as opposed to a generic "Create a Book" which implies that you don't have any idea whether I'm a real customer or not. Nice little detail there. * I like the themes. * The UI/UX is great and intuitive. There is zero question about what the next step is.

Couple of critiques:

* More themes * Let me re-arrange individual photos * More versatility with the cover * Captions!

All around good job. Very impressed. I may use this soon!

Very slick looking site!

On the code side, how was your Dart experience? How does it compare to other things you've build with different tech?

Hi, I'm an engineer on Montage. We decided to use Dart to help manage the complexity of a large HTML5 application. From this standpoint, Dart has been amazing. We value having a structured language that supports optional typing, libraries and namespaces. So being able to have language features like this has been very productive for web development.

If you do choose Dart for your next web project, you'll probably decide between using Angular.dart or Polymer.dart for building your UI. Polymer is Google's implementation of the emerging Web Components spec. The project is still early, and they're still hammering out the implementation. It seems like things are stabilizing though, but don't be surprised if you face some gnarly bugs or breaking changes. Angular is probably more mature, but I don't follow the project closely enough.

We started working on Montage before the Dart versions of Polymer and Angular. Because of this, we're using WebUI, which is the predecessor to Polymer. We plan on migrating to Polymer soon.

Hopefully this is helpful. I plan on writing up a post that goes into more detail of our experience with Dart.

I was really excited about seeting this as I am a big purchaser of photo books as gifts. A number of things confuse me in creating the book:

1. Is there no ability to reposition a photo placed on the page. Even in the demo some of the pictures are cropped badly, and I could not figure out how to adjust them.

2. It states "It will be same price no matter how many pages or photos you have." -- is that "as long as you don't go over 120? So..The "Large" book is $1 per photo? How do you differentiate from other book makers that are much less expensive?

3. Is there no crop, rotate, rearrange or ANY kind of adjustment to the photos in the book? There is no way on earth I would pay $119 for a book that I couldn't tune. Your "automagic layout" didn't get it right for me at all.

4. How are the books bound? I don't know what lay-flat binding means. Are they glued, sewn? How do I know that in a year the pages aren't going to fall out?

I was lucky enough to be in the beta program and actually ordered the 8x8 version. $1 per photo is the wrong way to look at it. My 8x8 book is one hefty beast. If you are not familiar with layflat binding, it's the best possible bound you could get, usually reserved for premium wedding albums. The pages are stiff, almost like cardboard, and it's seamless across the spread. I can upload some shots of my book when I get home.

How is the actual print / ink quality?

I recently took advantage of the Flickr 10 year (feels old man) anniversary to print a bunch of books and was disappointed with the quality of the pictures.

1, 3 - you can crop and zoom the photos by clicking on them right on the page. You can also swap the photos by dragging them, and change layouts by clicking to the "Change Layout" button.

Hi, I work at the company, so I'll do my best to answer your questions:

> 1. Is there no ability to reposition a photo placed on the page. Even in the demo some of the pictures are cropped badly, and I could not figure out how to adjust them.

Yes, there are a few ways to reposition photos. If you click on a photo, you can pan and zoom it in the photo slot. If you don't like where the photo is, you can swap its position with another on the page by dragging it. If you don't like the layout, you can hit "Change Layout" and get a different layout.

As a side note, you can also add and remove a photo from a page. To remove, click on a photo on the page, there should be a red button in the top right of the photo slot. To add a photo, simply drag it from the photo tray to the "Add to Page" drop target.

> 2. It states "It will be same price no matter how many pages or photos you have." -- is that "as long as you don't go over 120? So..The "Large" book is $1 per photo? How do you differentiate from other book makers that are much less expensive?

Yes, Montage currently supports a maximum of 120 photos. This will yield a book that is roughly 50 pages. The closest products in the market may have layflat pages, but don't mirror Montage's unique design and quality materials, which was a massive R&D effort in and of itself. And even then, these competitors base prices start at 20 pages, only to increase once you get to checkout.

In short, when you compare apples to apples, Montage gives you a higher quality product in half the time for a similar price.

> 3. Is there no crop, rotate, rearrange or ANY kind of adjustment to the photos in the book? There is no way on earth I would pay $119 for a book that I couldn't tune. Your "automagic layout" didn't get it right for me at all.

See #1. Give the editor a shot in test drive mode and you'll see that you can actually control the magic. :)

> 4. How are the books bound? I don't know what lay-flat binding means. Are they glued, sewn? How do I know that in a year the pages aren't going to fall out?

All Montages are layflat which means there is no crease in the middle. This really allows your photos to shine. We use industrial strength glue to ensure the book will last for generations. We stand behind our product with a 90 day no question asked return policy.

> Yes, there are a few ways to reposition photos.

AH! I see it now. Thanks for the feedback. I was trying to do the repositioning from the view that showed all the pages, I completely missed the little left-right arrows on the last step, I thought I could ONLY edit the cover there. Much clearer now that I see how it works.

I still really want to drag to arrange the page order on the "Change your theme page", and to click the page thumbnails to edit the page.

Good to know about the lay-flat. I used to use Blurb, but after a few years the pages fall out / come unglued.

Your welcome. You can actually arrange the page order. It's in the menu on the left. See here:

http://cl.ly/image/3B231q072E41

I'm sorry to hear about your experience with Blurb. Give Montage a try. I think you'll like the result. :)

Wow very impressed with the UX. Bravo!

It's cool you built it with dart but to me this is like saying "Check out this cool app I made, it created using php" Well it could be built with anything because when I look at the app all I see is the frontend. All your Dart is now minified JS, so it's no consequence to me if it was built with Dart or JS. Maybe you have a link to a Github repo where your Dart lives so I can admire the "dart" part of this title? Other then that, how was Dart? I almost worked on the Dart team and I have friends on the Dart team at Google so I am always curious to see what your experience with it was like.

Again Bravo! Lovely app!

Thank you! Sorry, but we can't share the uncompiled source publicly.

Our experience with Dart has been very positive. I've written a brief response to a similar question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8045226. I hope to write a more detailed post about our experience when I find some time.

Buttons are not working for me. My browser is Google Chrome Version 37.0.2062.20 dev-m

Do have a Javascript or a cookie blocker installed? You need to (at least temporarily) allow Javascript from montagebook.com and google-analytics.com plus session cookies from montagebook.com.

I have the same issues. I do have Disconnect running, which blocks about 30-40 third-party requests made from your site. It looks like errors from mixpanel are breaking the rest of your app.

I do allow same-party interaction and cookies. (i.e., anything from montagebook will work.)

You may want to set your third-party analytics services to be asynchronous, so they aren't a single point of failure for your entire application.

Agreed--we're looking into how we can have the site degrade a bit more gracefully for visitors that disable 3rd party services that aren't critical to the main experience.

Also not working for me in Chrome.

I see 3 errors in the Javascript console: GET http://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT (index):507 GET http://cdn.mxpnl.com/libs/mixpanel-2.2.min.js net::ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT (index):546 GET http://static.olark.com/jsclient/loader0.js 403 (Forbidden) (index):1

It seems like something in your browser may block these calls. Usually these errors can be seen with adBlock. Do you have it?

I found the same behavior, but was able to enjoy the demo by browsing directly to this link - http://www.montagebook.com/editor?open-demo=1