

We're making visual feedback simpler. - brendanib
http://blog.awesomebox.co/post/73349850674/were-making-visual-feedback-simpler

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coherentpony
Here's some visual feedback:

    
    
        Application Error
        
        An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. Please try again in a few moments.
        
        If you are the application owner, check your logs for details.

~~~
brendanib
Sorry! We hit some momentary downtime on Heroku. Back online now.

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coherentpony
Thanks :)

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taitems
After using [http://bugherd.com](http://bugherd.com) for a while, I find this
uncomfortably close. The icon-based side nav, the drag selection, the overall
colours and theming. I'm not making any accusations, but I think it needs to
be said that it's the first thing I thought of.

~~~
toast76
I appreciate the sentiment, but I do think it's quite a bit different to what
we at BugHerd do. BugHerd is designed to run ON your site, rather than your
site running IN BugHerd.

We originally went down the awesomebox path, but as soon as we started dealing
with server side code it caused issues. We run on your production/staging
environment meaning you get your app running in the wild.

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toddmorey
I don't think I quite understand what Awesomebox is. Is it packaged staging
server with built in commenting functionality? What type of code can be pushed
to it? Why is it that you push code your way rather than install a widget of
some kind in existing staging environments?

~~~
brendanib
Think of Awesomebox like a versioned CDN - you can push any HTML, CSS or JS,
and then invite anyone to view, comment and annotate it.

It's different from a widget in that Awesomebox gives you infinite staging
environments - if you push 10 different ideas, and then invite a few people,
they can easily switch between different versions without you having to manage
multiple servers. In our experience, this is really important when working
through new ideas or designs with clients or managers.

Does that help answer your question? Happy to explain more if not.

~~~
toddmorey
Got you. That does help a bit. I do think there is something interesting here.
Today I spent time reviewing and commenting on the interface screens of an
OpenID implementation currently in development. I wonder if there is some sort
of proxy or browser extension you could employ to capture the HTML state of
dynamically generated content. For us, this portion of the site never went
through a static mockup phase.

~~~
brendanib
That's a great example - we're certainly thinking about how to balance the
power of static assets, which let us display a few different versions, versus
supporting generated content from web servers like Rails or Django, where we
can only display what's on your server.

Really, really appreciate the feedback!

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ithayer
It took me awhile to get, but my aha moment was understanding its relationship
to regular PaaS's (eg: heroku).

What more could you do if you didn't need to deploy your entire stack with
each little change you make? If you could only deploy your frontend (in
different versions simultaneously) pointing to a backend that's always up, it
enables much faster iteration: testing, bugfixing, demoing things that
otherwise you might not deploy different versions for because it's too
painful.

For example, you could A/B test meaningful portions of frontend code in a more
scalable way than, say, Optimizely. Or you might point a user that's having
problems to a specific build (which you can deploy instantly) and see if it
fixes their problem _on their live account_. Or you can hack together a new
feature that works _on a live account_ for a presentation, and push it without
worrying about mucking up or interrupting production traffic. Or turn off
minification instantly and deploy that.

Plus, you don't have to worry about refining internal frontend build scripts,
it's plug and play.

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primigenus
Very cool! This is very very similar to the feedback and annotation feature
I'm working on for our product. There's a clear need for this capability to
comment (and draw) directly on the design. It just makes it so much easier to
talk about something when you literally talk around it.

My inspiration for the feature was that feeling I always got that I needed to
walk over to someone's desk and show them what I'm working on on my Macbook or
paper and talk through it. Sometimes you can't do that if the team is remote
or a client needs to check something out, so you need an approximation of that
experience. Making a product around the feature is a great idea.

~~~
brendanib
That's awesome! Totally agree about remote work - our inspiration came working
with people across multiple timezones, and not always being able to walk over
and show them.

I'm curious - what's the name of the product you're building?

~~~
primigenus
It's Handcraft, a HTML prototyping app. Link is in my profile.

~~~
brendanib
Cool! I'll check it out.

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rschmitty
What kind of pricing structure are you looking at?

Also Windows/FF gets an invalid font character for the "v" arrow on the grey
tab. Works ok in Chrome/IE

More once inside the app:
[http://i.imgur.com/WFaLbjw.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/WFaLbjw.jpg)

~~~
brendanib
Sorry about that! Offhand I think that's a unicode issue that I need to fix.
Thank you for the heads up. Will work on a fix tonight.

As far as pricing, we're not sure yet, but we want to make it as free and
accessible to developers and designers as we can, and charge companies, not
people - kind of like how Github is free for open-source projects.

~~~
mmmooo
firefox doesn't allow cross domain fonts w/o allow-origin

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ultimatedelman
Tried to install, got an error, looked at the stack trace and saw this:

    
    
        at module.exports (C:\[snip]\npm\node_modules\awesomebox\node_modules\awesomebox-core\__trojan__\horse.js:15:10)
    

What. The. Fuck.

Could not possibly uninstall fast enough. Running antivirus ASAP

~~~
mattinsler
I promise this isn't a trojan horse! Trojan is actually an npm module that
allows you to compile down nodejs code so that you can package it all as a
single downloadable.

Check out trojan here:
[https://github.com/mattinsler/trojan](https://github.com/mattinsler/trojan)

This helps with managing download times for all the transpiling code that we
use for things like coffeescript and less and ejs.

At the time I wrote this module I thought it'd be funny to name one of the
files horse to continue the joke. Definitely time to change that filename. =-)

I'd be happy to walk you through how all the code works if you're interested.

~~~
teh_klev
Matt, you have two problems here I think you need to fix:

1\. Your "trojan horse" name for that packager - has two connotations for me,
neither of them good. Why not just call it what it is.

2\. Your product name. I really couldn't recommend your product to anyone
doing serious work for my company or my clients. The whole "awesome" and
"ninja" vocabulary thing is grating, is done to death, I am sick of hearing
it. My advice is to pick a better name if you want to attract anything more
than tyre kickers.

Pretty sure you put a lot of time an effort into this, don't blow it with
stuff like this.

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destraynor
Nice work guys, looks very useful

~~~
brendanib
Thanks Des! It's come a long way since we showed you guys last month. Matt and
I are very happy intercom users over here too :)

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cwisecarver
Your video is falling out of the laptop screen, to the right side, on an iPad
air.

~~~
brendanib
Thanks for the heads up! Working on a fix right now.

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mikelbring
Looks like it does the exact same thing
[http://notableapp.com/](http://notableapp.com/) does.

~~~
brendanib
Similar, but not quite - notable is focused on design prototyping and
wireframing, but our goal with Awesomebox is to follow a website throughout
its lifecycle, not just during the initial design phase. I'm a big fan of ZURB
though - their products are great and I've enjoyed working with the Foundation
CSS framework.

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rafifyalda
Why are you guys working past 1am? Get some sleep, feedback can wait in the
morning!

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mbrzuzy
Looks like it's similar to, if not the same as www.designdrop.io.

~~~
brendanib
Not quite - Awesomebox works with your real production code, whereas
DesignDrop is only for design files like PNGs, JPEGS and PSDs.

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__shurik__
Bro! I tried to sign up with Google and it looks like maybe just maybe your
OAuth is broken! Dogfooding.

~~~
mattinsler
You're absolutely right! We're so sorry about that! It's fixed now. Thanks for
finding that!

