Mockingbird: New tool for building mockups, written in Cappuccino | Hacker News Reader

Mockingbird: New tool for building mockups, written in Cappuccino

gomockingbird.com

166 pointsboucher52 comments

Nice effort, and great to see someone building a Cappuccino app; I like that I don't need any plugins to run it. Clearly it's still beta, but something to keep an eye on.

I like that I don't need any plugins to run it.

I second that. Requiring a plugin is the only reason I don't use that other really cool mockup tool. Good luck to the team.

http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=ebdb...

Oh hey! Another dvorak user!

Heh, nice notice of nonsense name :-).

Might want to consider a different screenshot on the main page. The big centered arrow made me think it was a clickable demo video.

If you really want to build a valuable web prototyping app, please make it spit out HTML/CSS. That would be the killer feature! Give me a limited, but functional web site/app that I can then modify/refine, instead of a "picture" of it in whatever else format.

THAT would make me use your product in a hearbeat...

For future... host the prototypes on your site, making them instantly accessible to others... maybe also some sort of prototype exchange/marketplace... ideas for expansion are endless, however, first you have to concentrate on the ability to create clean, tight HTML/CSS prototypes

Any HTML or CSS spit out by that app would be unusable without a tremendous engineering effort. Anything can be dragged anywhere. Even if export was only available if you limited yourself to certain functionality and layouts, I'd still be extremely impressed if exported HTML and CSS were worth using.

HTML output would be valuable even if it were as simple as possible and completely unstyled. That's still a tedious step I don't have to do.

Neat. I spent a few weeks working on something similar in jQuery, but gave up on it, because I wasn't really confident it could be done well enough to beat Balsamiq.

I met the founders (saikat and ??) at HeyZap's (post SUS) party. They described it as (Peldi's) Mockups but for the Web. Interesting underserved niche.

?? == sheena

Yup, that's her :)

I like how the volume slider intelligently resizes. Nice attention to detail.

Bug Report:

1) Put a button on the screen.

2) But a box on the screen

3) But the box on top of the button

4) Select the button (oh wait you can't)

Otherwise seems like a great product. I love that you used cappuccino, I can't wait until they give us Atlas.

Yeah that's a good point, I can see how this is fairly confusing. This happens because the box is added on top of the button - you can, however, hit the "Back" button on the toolbar (after selecting the box) to move the box back.

doesn't seem to work

Might have to hit back more than a few times if you have more than two widgets on the screen. But I'll be sure to make this work better.

I just tried it. I created a box over the line/arrow. Hitting the back for the box, you can't select the arrow. Selecting the arrow and bringing it front, it works ok.

UX suggestion: allow me to use the mouse scroll to change the size of the hovered/selected element, maintaining the scale.

cannot change grids to anything but 3X3

Here's a picture my friend made that I like: http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=73c3...

      index.html
      Mockingbird

      Created by You on May 22, 2009.
      Copyright 2009, Your Company All rights reserved.

accurate?

Hah! Nice catch, that is not in fact accurate.

Very happy about seeing a Cappuccino app. I can see myself using this. I'm concerned about the lack of an "export" mechanism. Being able to export to html would be ideal. At the very least, having a PDF or other universal format file that I can email around is probably a must.

I wonder what "Try it now" implies? It would be nice to know if this is planned to become a paid service once out of beta.

Side note: Looks like 280 Atlas is finally rolling out. I don't know what the $20 fee is all about. It feels disrespectful. I thought it was hard enough to find developers to test out a new beta platform/service in the first place.

We are planning to charge once we iron out all the bugs and we add a few more features, though there will probably be a free version. We'll have more details on that later. Export is definitely a feature we plan to implement, but for now, E-mailing the share link is the way to get others to see your mockups.

Just the value in getting div positions / sizes would sell the product.

I'd like to see some completed mockups as examples, to lead me gently into the try-it-out phase.

Very nice. I like the simplicity of the syntax you've created for editing elements. Seems to work quite smoothly for me in Safari, OS 10.6

Looks cool, but it is painfully slow (Linux + firefox). Maybe other systems run it better, but for me it is too slow to do much good.

Yeah, we just launched this today and are in very early stages of beta. We realize speed is an issue right now (we've mostly been testing on Windows and OS X, on which it runs better), and it's definitely something we're working to improve.

Yet:

"Powered by Cappuccino: no Flash slowing down your browser."

Point taken. We changed it.

Use Chrome man.

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=unstab...

Are you using an old firefox version by any chance (<3.5.x)?

Hihi,

Obviously a great product. One thing though - I wouldn't use this because of the nature of my business, I was hoping and praying that it was a downloadable tool....!!!!!

(My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly).

If you can download, or are going to make available for download. Please let me know : )

Thanks,

Geoff

> My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly

How does that work? I mean, how do you make money from it?

I believe there are plans to create desktop versions of Cappuccino apps using Atlas. Once that comes out, we will probably release a desktop version of the app.

Cool idea but it's very buggy. With 2 minutes of use I discovered that upon double clicking text to edit hitting enter makes the widget disappear, now I can no longer drag widgets onto the work space and the scroll bar on the widget "library" is frozen (although it still works).

Looks like it could be very cool with the issues ironed out.

Interesting, I haven't been able to replicate that problem. What browser/OS are you using?

Here when I hit enter after changing the text/value of a control, it suddenly disappears. os x tiger, firefox 3.5.4

same here, I got used to just typing and then clicking outside of the control for the changes to take effect.

I managed to reproduce the bug last night and pushed a fix. Hope that helps, and thanks for the catch!

My browser tab (Google Chrome) froze up when trying to do a Copy and Paste of a Rectangle element. Other than that, it's a nice tool. Keep up the good work!

Yeah we just found out about that bug. I just pushed a fix for it about 30 minutes ago.

Well, you sure respond to feedback fast. Great service, thanks!

BTW, I've been designing a few screens for an up-coming project over the past week and haven't had any problems. It is a joy to use. Keep up the good work.

Nice! A bit sluggish here (linux/firefox) but usable.

If you had some iPhone UI templates, I'd use it.

seems very similar to sketchflow http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/1eea789b-c69c-4... but for the web

Awesome, nice job!

Nice effort (great to see a real Capp app), but a bit ugly.

Perhaps unleash a really good designer on the UI?

What I can't understand is why you'd model a language after Objective-C. It's verbose to the point of ridiculousness.

It's not the language that's verbose, it's the Cocoa libraries.

Instead of this:

  NSString *s2 = [s1 stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8Encoding];

You could easily have:

  NSString *s2 = [s1 percentEscapes:UTF8];

(I like the first way better, though. It reads like an English sentence, and you know exactly what the arguments are.)

EDIT: formatting.

Good point, but Objective J seems to have borrowed that as well.

i.e.

  [CPApp sendEvent:[CPEvent mouseEventWithType:CPLeftMouseDown location:[theWindow convertBridgeToBase:CGPointMake(x, y)]

  [CPApp setTarget:self selector:@selector(disposeOfEvent:) forNextEventMatchingMask:CPLeftMouseUpMask untilDate:nil inMode:nil dequeue:YES];

It's not that I don't applaud the creation of Objective-J, because I do. I think it's a big step towards the next generation of in-browser applications.

To the 280 guys: I'm not trying to insult you or your hard work, and I'm sorry if it came off like that. All I'm saying is that you're going to have a harder time making this a new web standard because of this design fact. It certainly won't deter me, but it will definitely deter others.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com