

Show HN: Montage – Photo book maker built in Dart - quisquous
http://www.montagebook.com/

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Jemaclus
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!

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bigethan
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?

~~~
danschultz
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.

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delgaudm
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?

~~~
arykg
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.

~~~
delgaudm
> 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.

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

[http://cl.ly/image/3B231q072E41](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. :)

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jastanton
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!

~~~
danschultz
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8045226).
I hope to write a more detailed post about our experience when I find some
time.

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

~~~
danesparza
Also not working for me in Chrome.

I see 3 errors in the Javascript console: GET [http://www.google-
analytics.com/analytics.js](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](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](http://static.olark.com/jsclient/loader0.js)
403 (Forbidden) (index):1

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

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tosh
Super slick, great to see more production Dart apps launching.

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darren884
This is awesome, great job! I love the flip animation.

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vsergiu
The UI is amazing I really love it. Congratz

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innonate
Very cool!

