

Pixate - beautiful native mobile apps with CSS - pcolton
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2015210423/pixate-beautiful-native-mobile-apps-with-css

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weego
I'm not sure I absorbed the message as it was supposed to be put across. The
video showed a (seemingly) quite advanced prototype, and they expect to be
able to ship before the end of the year. So what is the $200k for? Seemingly
to "make it happen" but it appears to be happening already, so it's
kickstarting a hefty salary?

If I did somehow miss the point and this seems like a cynical response then
obviously I apologise in advance, but that's how it came across.

Edit, cancel the nicety... I just saw that it's retailing for $299. It all
feels rather cynical. Perhaps I have too much of a rose-tinted view of the
attraction of Kickstarter?

~~~
Animus7
I'm getting the same vibe. And I'm beginning to think that allowing this kind
of thing will be the downfall of Kickstarter. Yes, I will explain.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely _love_ the Kickstarter concept. But in
practice, their scaling seems to quickly be turning hem into a sales platform
that has no controls or accountability.

And I have nothing bad to say about this project in particular, but they are a
YC company, and the state of the prototype shows that they already have all
they need to make it happen. This project doesn't need money. The campaign
seems to me to be nothing more than a simple "I'm making something cool, so
give me cash". And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that -- by all
means, people should be free to do what they wish with their money, and the
Kickstarter campaign will probably work out beautifully for them. That's
great.

But this whole perception of Kickstarter being a place for bootstrapping
interesting projects is turning into a dangerous myth. Like many things before
it, Kickstarter is becoming a place for people with money (and/or obvious
ability to make money), to make even more money, though marketing under a
vague guise of "bootstrapping", with no checks or balances to keep people
honest.

This isn't an accusation leveled at Pixate -- I don't believe they're doing
anything wrong and I have huge faith in YC's filtering. But once enough clever
people figure out that you can earn a killing or huge bonus on top of
_anything_ , just by tacking on a nice Kickstarter campaign, it will become
impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. And then people will move on
to the next thing, and the cycle will repeat.

</bubble-y doomsaying>

~~~
rotw
> And I have nothing bad to say about this project in particular, but they are
> a YC company, and the state of the prototype shows that they already have
> all they need to make it happen. This project doesn't need money. The
> campaign seems to me to be nothing more than a simple "I'm making something
> cool, so give me cash".

I fully agree. Honestly, I hope both that this campaign fails and that the
guys at Pixate are able to develop and launch their product successfully. The
point of Kickstarter is to enable creative endeavours that would have trouble
succeeding in a market environment -- a talented friend of mine financed his
first short film via a similar site, which will hopefully get him a foot in
the door of filmmaking. In his case, the Kickstarter idea is a great thing: It
guarantees artistic independence and audience involvement.

This app, however, already _has_ backing and will easily make plenty of money
on the market. It's not a catastrophe in the long haul, but I sincerely hope
this doesn't catch on: That's not audience involvement, that's a commercial
transaction. You give me money, I give you product. On a larger scale, it's
abusing opportunities for people who have few, which is particularly nefarious
if it comes from people who have no need to beg.

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jff
Feedback on the Listr (ugh, that name) re-imagining: the little icons weren't
particularly informative in the original, but at least there was some text to
try and explain. Now I get to guess what each icon means, plus instead of
everything fitting on one screen, you apparently must scroll down to select
e.g. "Projects".

By the way, what is up with every project talking about "beautiful"?
"Beautiful Javascript", "Beautiful native apps", "Beautiful text icons", etc.
Is this just the Steve Jobs school of selling?

~~~
mmuro
Apparently they've been taking tips from Google. "Sometimes obscure icons with
no names? We love that shit.' -- Google UI team

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brittohalloran
So does it __compile __to Objective-C? It sounds more like an 'engine' that is
a part of your actual app and interprets the CSS realtime. Sounds more
processor intensive than just loading up flat graphics. (not an expert, please
chime in)

~~~
objclxt
They are somewhat vague on the technical details - however, it sounds like
they are indeed basically rendering out their own graphics context and not
using Apple's native UI components ("[a] 2D graphics engine facilitates the
rendering of scalable, resolution-independent vector graphics).

As to performance, it depends how they do it. I wouldn't want to comment until
they revealed some more technical details about this 'graphics engine'. They
say 'style native apps and components', but it's unclear to me whether this
means they are interpreting CSS and applying these styles to UIKit elements or
rolling their own UIKit-like elements (I suspect the latter, but I might be
wrong).

~~~
pcolton
The Pixate Engine styles native controls using the standard iOS bitmap
approach. Bitmaps allow your controls to take advantage of the speed offered
by the GPU. However, in contrast to today's workflows, the Pixate Engine
renders and caches content to bitmaps dynamically as needed at runtime, giving
you the ultimate in flexibility in your designs.

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jacek
200k is a lot. I can't see how you need so much money (unless you want to add
another supercar to the video)?

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jblock
Looks good and all, but I really don't think it's worth $200K. And $150K more
for Android support? Where's all this money going to go?

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foz
This feels like a marketing fail. Kickstarter is supposed to be about helping
people create things who would normally not have the resources to do so.
Impressing the audience by showing off expensive luxury items (player piano,
supercars, etc) does not help this cause.

They also failed to really communicate how the app changes your normal
development workflow. Does it replace interface builder processes? Besides
styling with CSS, how does it help in creating complex vector elements that
would normally be made in Photoshop? Is it a standalone dev environment or a
lot of pieces? Can you mix assets (pixel and vector)?

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EricButler
This looks similar to Qt Quick / QML, which is actually very cool.
<http://doc.qt.nokia.com/4.7/qdeclarativeintroduction.html>

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ruswick
The CSS part is particularly interesting, and has a ton of potential. But
frankly, I don't like nor would I use a proprietary library like this.

Also, I don't see why they need Kickstarting at all. If they are going to sell
the product, then sell the product. They appear to already have a product that
is finished or near completion, and are in Y Combinator and thus have funding.
It doesn't make sense.

My real hope is that one day we get an open source tool like this for writing
native UIs in CSS.

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jlongster
I doubt they will reach $200k, but this is sorely needed for iOS apps. If they
had launched this without kickstarter, and at a reasonable price, I bet
developers would be flocking to it.

~~~
podperson
Needed? It looks to me like a terrible idea not very well implemented. It's
easier (and more WYSIWYG) to style controls in Interface Builder using the
properties. It's probably just as easy to write NIBs by hand.

~~~
mstepanov
Ha, I doubt you are an iOS developer at all :)

~~~
podperson
Doubt away.

It's not like this eliminates any of the complexity of ios development. Stuff
like animating properties of controls is one of the things iOS handles
beautifully. Any graphic workflow that doesn't eliminate rework and isn't
WYSIWYG is a step backwards.

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crazygringo
To me, this kind of product needs crowdsourced equity financing (that's
becoming legal soon, right?), not Kickstarter-style.

I have a hard time imagining there are, say, 2000 people willing to pay $100
in advance for this with no guarantees. This isn't a sexy video game which can
build up lots of viral demand...

Despite that, I wish them the best of luck! From what I understand, CSS-style
formatting of native iOS components is sorely needed...

~~~
jchung
Yes, it's becoming legal sometime later this year or very early next year. SEC
is currently working on the regulations that we'll all have to follow in
making use of it.

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jefflinwood
I know I'm missing something here, but if they get enough money, they'll add
Android support - but doesn't Android already do this (not with CSS, but with
XML, like everything else in Android)

<http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/themes.html>

~~~
dotmanish
I think it's more to do with making it "cross-platform", the code-once-build-
multiple-platforms aspect of PhoneGap, etc.

~~~
jefflinwood
You can't use this tool with PhoneGap - it's for styling native code.

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brianfryer
While I'm totally stoked for seeing this concept come to fruition, these are
the _worst_ reward tiers I've ever seen on a Kickstarter campaign.

The $5 minimum should be $10 or $15, and there needs to be a tier between this
one at the $50 tier.

And the rewards themselves? For $2k, I get "Access to a private forum to
influence product direction." For two grand, I can't get a phone call to the
CEO? I get access to some forum?

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debreuil
Currently there are very few styling options for iOS and Android app dev. That
results in an incredible amount of grunt work that really shouldn't be
necessary. At least if you make apps commercially, a quality app that solves
this would be huge. It looks like they are adding a lot of features beyond
styling, and even moving beyond mobile... so hey, no question, sign me up : ).

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orta
I agree with all the current opinions, but I still donated, an iOS dev friend
of mine really misses the three20 libraries ability to apply CSS.

I like the idea of doing it properly but to be honest I'd expect that someone
would release an open source version that does something similar that I can
contribute back to.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Nimbus Stylesheets: <http://blog.jeffverkoeyen.com/nimbus-chameleon>

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aaronbrethorst
here's a message I sent on Kickstarter:

I'm very impressed by your demo, but I'm also skeptical about performance, how
well this integrates into existing apps, and what happens to my apps built on
your framework if you go out of business or get acquired.

Along the same lines, I'd love to be able to pitch this to my clients, but I
can't in good conscience without knowing that they're never going to get
screwed in the process.

Can you address these concerns? I'd love to back your project, but I need to
know I'm not going to be left holding the bag in 12-18 months.

Thanks! Aaron

~~~
caller9
Agree wholeheartedly. The tradeoff for cross platform is tying your fate to
these guys.

Also code once run anywhere doesn't work for native apps. You usually get an
Android app that looks like iOS. Barf. Or your have to use some new UI
paradigm foreign to both. Chance of being featured in either market without
conforming to UI guidelines: 0%.

This only really works for games and Unity has that covered.

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PufferBuffer
Why in the world would you put a ferrari into a _Kickstarter_ video?

~~~
pcolton
There are no Ferraris in the video.

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js4all
When committing to CSS, isn't the natural way to go the HTML5 + CSS3 way?
Currently it is all about performance. I would like to see better solutions
than phonegap and titanium.

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coolnow
I'm interested in how animations work with Pixate. Would they also have to be
in CSS, if not, then how smooth/seamless would transitions be? Looks good so
far though, but 200k?

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oxwrist
is this not backwards in any ways?

~~~
gbraad
same feeling; you either develop native apps and deal with the provided
options or you move to html5 and css3. why create a frankenstein solution by
botching native apps together with a css engine; feels like an intermediate
and futile attempt.

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sunnynagra
Does this affect performance in any way when the app is running?

Also, does it provide any benefit over Quartz2d other than familiarity that
comes with CSS?

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Yaggo
CSS is the new native. (Initialized by Apple, the walled garden company, can
you believe it!)

