Pixate (YC S12) and Google | Hacker News Reader

Pixate (YC S12) and Google

blog.pixate.com

139 pointsuptown64 comments

It's refreshing to see a company getting acquired and instead of shutting down they double down on their product/service.

Congratulations to the Pixate team!

You might want to read ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com.

Usually this kind of announcement is followed by another one, 9 months-2 years later, of the service being shut down.

This is just the first step of that pattern again.

There is also the announcement that the people who started this company quit Google because they couldn't get anything done there and now they have a new startup...

http://www.attendly.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/crowley-g...

Funny how everybody is "excited", "delighted" and "ecstatic" about being acquired by a mega corporate.

It is probably true though. It must be incredibly stressful trying to make your product successful and to try and keep both your investors and loved ones happy. If a struggling company is acqui-hired it presumably offers some long-term financial stability and a return to a more sane lifestyle for the founders and employees.

We really need to stop portraying aquihires as something bad or some kind of terrible failure. Congrats to the Pixate team.

Aqui-hire is usually a failure, because it means the company's product has so little value the the whole value of the company is reduced to its team.

It's often a "let's recoup our losses" move for the investors.

It's not that funny (weird).

People want to be successful. One of the clearest ways that success is measured in the startup space is by a larger company buying you out.

Of course they're excited.

Usually that means you get a fat paycheck. And far more resources than you had before.

When with enough PR-speak a big layoff or a complete exit from a market can be made to sound 'exciting', something like this really isn't so bad.

Getting acquired doesn't have to feel so bad for a startup. The optimist can see it as a way to continue working on their project without worrying about profitability or investors, and the pessimist still got paid.

Your comment made me realize i can't remember seeing promising medium or small size companies merge and make this kind of announcement.

I mean, you could very well see this kind of company merge with people doing an advanced IDE, or even corporate frameworks.

Maybe they usually prefer to create commercial partnerships rather than merge shares.

Buying a smaller company gives the owners control over a resource.

Merging with a similar sized company means relinquishing control for no immediate return.

A company that is well-capitalized and having trouble growing might buy a similarly-sized company just for the next couple quarters of revenue. Of course that isn't a good reason but it is an "immediate return".

> Your comment made me realize i can't remember seeing promising medium or small size companies merge and make this kind of announcement.

Small and medium sized companies merge all the time (but its rarely big news, because small companies), but "promising" ones in the Silicon Valley swing-for-the-fences startup sense probably don't as much, probably because that kind of merger doesn't provide the kind of exit startup investors are looking for or increase the perceived likely size of the eventual exit enough to warrant the dilution.

People in industry seem to be "excited" about everything nowadays. The word is completely overused

I'm genuinely excited about a lot of things, and I don't know that pulling out a thesaurus for the sake of avoiding that particular word would help anybody.

Especially by Google, who has done a lot more damage to purchased companies instead of growing them.

To be fair, even if this were a brand new product from Google people would still be speculating on how long before they decide to shut it down.

true.. the problem i suspect is people tend to idolize brands and products when they are young, precisely because they are young and are seen as the underdog. As they age, its incredibly difficult (I dare say impossible only for the sheer lack of evidence to the contrary) to maintain that reputation. As the movie saying goes: "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

How dare companies shut down things that aren't profitable. Ever since Reader shutdown Google seems to be the "go to" reference, but the reality is that it happens a lot. Just look at all of the things Microsoft has either shutdown or discontinued. The list is longer than Google's.

Oh, I'm in complete agreement, though I was rather disappointed at Reader's shutdown.

I only meant to cite it as a "running gag" of the tech community.

I'm really curious how the acqui-hire model is sustainable given the disconnect between expectation and reality. Surely there would be internal models to see the attrition rate of acqui-hires and questions asked whether the money paid was accrued in the form of services to the company. I read somewhere that the acquisition team works on a model similar to an investment bank which kind of explains this disconnect between what's pitched and what eventually transpires.

There is a lot of "good will" in acqui-hires.

Interesting acquisition considering they also bought Form[0]. Would love to see some designer-centric prototyping tools built by Google specifically for Android devices. The OSX/iOS ecosystem is particularly well equipped in this area, and finding good design prototyping tools built for Android is a pain point for many people in UX/UI imo.

0. http://www.relativewave.com/form/google/

I'm involved in Neonto, a startup that makes a design tool that targets both iOS and Android:

http://neonto.com

The unique twist is that Neonto Studio generates real native code (Obj-C for iOS, Java for Android), so it's possible to use it even for complete apps, not just prototypes.

Looks promising. Can't find any reviews/blog posts of using it.

Do you have any example apps that were made using neonto?

We're still pretty thin on that front. The public beta was released earlier this year and the feature set has been in flux. Most of the pilot customers have been building just prototypes.

Below are some iOS apps that were released on the App Store. These were 100% exported from Neonto Studio (that is, the entire app was created visually, and no manual modifications were made to the exported Xcode projects).

MyMotto -- https://itunes.apple.com/ai/app/mymotto/id1015892461?mt=8

CupidCam -- https://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/cupidcam/id964443710?mt=8

Luolasto -- https://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/luolasto/id863953563?mt=8 (Sorry, this one is in Finnish, but you can pretty much just scroll around and click on buttons to see what's in there.)

Kallio Kukkii -- https://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/kallio-kukkii/id990581243?mt... (Another one in Finnish... This one was made by a graphics design student on her own, so it's a worthwhile example in that sense.)

Cool. Well these are very basic samples. Would love to see how it handles bigger apps.

And as someone else asked, only OS X? is a windows or linux port on the roadmap sometimes soon?

Is this Mac-only for the foreseeable future?

Is it using React Native?

No, the generated code uses the native frameworks on each platform. (We basically have separate back-ends for each supported platform: iOS, Android, Apple Watch.)

It's "dependency-free" -- there's no intermediate runtime or framework involved. This keeps app sizes down, and also makes the generated UI code easier to integrate with programmers' workflows.

We started on this a long time before React Native was announced, so it wasn't even an option... However recently we've been entertaining the thought of generating React Native instead of the native UI frameworks. That would be a major pivot for the product, but if React Native takes off, it might make sense. What do you think?

I'd far prefer a generator that creates pure native code over one that creates a dependency.

As we have discussed before ;) I would think it smarter to allow developers to hook into the code generation process so it can be integrated in their own toolchain and processes.

Please support React Native output! RN is taking off pretty rapidly...

He said it targets Android so its obviously not using React Native.

Is there a need? Pixate already performs Android prototyping.

Pixate has a middle term potential to fix the difficulties with designing and deploying UI's which require basic physics or animations. It has the long term potential to change native front end engineering as its currently done.

Potentially it could compress design, prototyping, and front-end dev into a single seat -- who is more design-forward rather than coding-forward.

I think the missing piece is still how app logic interfaces with the UI code outputted by these design tools. How do you do it so the UI can be updated without breaking interface with app logic?

Immediate-mode UI could be part of the solution, but I still can't see a complete solution that wouldn't piss me off as a developer.

Strong candidate for

http://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

Starting a company and being acquired is an incredible journey so I don't understand the humour in this.

The humour is that they always announce that thanks to the big corp the product is going to sky-rocket, but after 6 months or so they shut it down.

It's probably great for the founders, not so much for the customers who trusted them and allowed them to grow to the point of being noticed by Big Corp.

I wonder if this was one of those "if you don't join us we're going to copy you" acquisitions.

That's not really a threat, if copying requires taste and wisdom.

Prescient comment in the old TC article[1]:

Given the corporate interest, it sounds like Pixate has an easy exit ahead of it, if they so desired, but Colton says that’s not the route they’re taking right now. “We want to see how broad this can be,” Colton says. “It’s really a big change in how you can build apps,” he adds.

1. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/15/pixate-debuts-a-framework-f...

It's been on my to-do list for the last few months to start playing with Pixate. Can someone knowledgeable on this share their thoughts on what this means for the Pixate tools going forward?

According to Pixates own FAQ related to this:

* Pixate Studio is now free to everyone

* Pixate Cloud is $5 per seat per month, or $50 per year

* Pixate Studio licenses will be refunded as a credit toward Pixate Cloud

Otherwise, no changes for now it seems. It's a very nice tool for simple prototyping for UX flows, animated transitions, and visual layout. A fantastic tool for designers.

So I'm wondering if they'll limit local storage accessibility for the Applications devices as a way of enforcing prototypes.

Can anyone compare Pixate to PencilCase.io?

When I tried pencilcase I found it fairly easy to use, and liked that apps can theoretically be exported and submitted to the app store.

What are the strengths of Pixate?

Was on the "Check it out" list for IOS. Guess I can cross it off as Im sure IOS support will go first then the entire product later to the great google product graveyard.

http://www.wordstream.com/articles/retired-google-projects

Congrats guys! Nice to see hard work pays off.

First Form (RelativeWave), now Pixate. Two prototyping apps in less than a year.

Congrats to Paul and the team!

Here's why I (and jawngee) never used Pixate's products for my apps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062868

Given that I only make iOS apps, and that Google acquired them, I feel vindicated 916 days later.

Except that Pixate is purely for prototyping in the design phase.. not for actually shipping a binary to the app store.

That wasn't their initial product that I even paid for. Not that I minded, I actually liked their initial product until it got open sourced (but abandoned)

What was the initial product?

CSS for iOS / Android elements Renamed to Pixate Freestyle http://www.freestyle.org/

Then you are discussing the wrong product here.

I wonder if they would have been acquired by Google if they had open sourced their software. Don't get me wrong - I completely understand your decision.

> I wonder if they would have been acquired by Google if they had open sourced their software.

The software [0] he complained about not having source in the old post he points to was open sourced before Google bought them. So, evidently, it wouldn't have stopped Google.

[0] http://www.freestyle.org/

Wait, but the thing that you wouldn't use 916 days ago was released as open source a while ago. How is your "I won't use your products because they are just binary blobs and I demand source" vindicated by Google acquiring Pixate after that?

I never noticed it was open sourced a while ago. I guess they never emailed their KS backers, or something. I raised my objections to the founders after backing their Kickstarter, and then never bothered using their software after that because I wasn't confident in the long-term survival of it.

Today is literally the first time I've ever heard that this project was open sourced.

How much is Google paying the KickStarter backers? Oh.

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