
Show HN: Enterface, a UI design app concept I'm designing - webwielder
http://bendansby.com/enterface/
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kristofferR
Haha, I love the use of the North Korean flag for "Isolation Mode".

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webwielder
For anyone interested in a real, shipping app that offers many of the niceties
of Enterface, check out Antetype: <http://www.antetype.com>

I decided to use it for doing the high fidelity mockups of Enterface, and it
turned out to have a lot of the stuff I was looking for. I still want my app,
though :-)

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timc3
That looks even better. Thanks.

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pmichaud
A call to action like an e-mail update form would've been a good move, don't
you think?

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leprofessorr
Third that.

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enginous
An upvote would do :-)

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kristofferR
No, it wouldn't. Since upvotes aren't public it's useless to upvote something
to show support of a subthread that is already on top in its thread.

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enginous
That's true, but if more people did this, threads would be unbearable to read
so I think it's better that we agree not to. Highly voted posts will appear
closer to the top, so upvotes are not entirely wasted.

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potatolicious
This is awesome.

If I can suggest something - it'd be amazing to export some kind of layer-
based file format (PSD, really, though that tends to be hard). Your concept
looks great for wireframing at a very refined level, but inevitably UI
designers will want to go deeper with all the fanciness Photoshop provides.

It'd be incredibly powerful for them to pull in a PSD where all the layers are
already in place and ready to be chopped.

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firefoxman1
I agree, this is really sweet. Is there some sort of CSS2 option that is
heavier on the images for things like shadows and gradients, and a CSS3 mode
which exports as much in the stylesheet as possible?

Also, an "export sprites" option would be amazing. It would spit out the image
file and corresponding stylesheet?

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webwielder
Hey guys, thanks for all the feedback. Right now Enterface is just a concept,
hence no call to action. I would love to have it developed, if only for my own
use! I'll need my own icon, too...

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lrock
well, give <http://Salon.io> a spin .. here´s an invite for you
<http://salon.io/users/sign_up?token=H7DqXNBcUFAnXtRQYExr>

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fwr
I may or may have not hijacked that invite, sorry/thanks!

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Stratego
"Lightbulb image by Svengraph. No affiliation with me or this project."

Surprising at least, why are you using branding that doesn't belong to you?

Is this a concept? A series of interesting mockups of a mockup app, or are
these shots of a working prototype?

I get out of this presentation with more questions than answers about this
app, and no way to find out more, or be notified.

~~~
Stratego
I guess the title of this HN post does mention that it's a concept, so that
part is in fact clear here. Not on the site.

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munaf
As a UX Designer, I'd say I've needed something like this: a true UI design
app that only had the features I needed. None of Photoshop or Illustrator's
extraneous features (with respect to a UI Designer's needs, anyway).

One thing that would definitely make me try it is a bundled/stock icon set
that is well-integrated into the app. Finding open-license icons for my
mockups (or drawing my own) is actually the most laborious part of my design
process. If that was somehow shortened, or if I at least had inspiration built
into my design tool, I'd be a happy camper.

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marklindhout
Then until this app is ready, I would like to reccommend to you:
<http://thenounproject.com/>

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martin-adams
The things that I have been missing greatly in my UI mockup workflow are:

• Pixel perfect using Photoshop (usually after I have walkthrough concepts
using Balsamiq) • Creating reusable assets with various style states (such as
menu items selected/not selected) • Taking a design element, such as a table
of data, and adapting it effortlessly to other data types (such as different
columns) • I'm using Photoshop CS2 and it's layer management can get out of
control with some complex designs • A closer relationship to CSS styling
(borders, rounded corners, gradients, shadows, etc - in particular doing it on
just some edges) - I tried the demo of CS6 to see if there were changes in
this area (layer effects) - and nope, nothing. Very disappointing.

I think there is a lot of innovation to be had in this area of UI design.
However there may be a lot of basics that needs to be covered first before
getting to the UI specific feature set.

First impressions with the site...

1\. The carousel animation is confusion on the screenshots. I keep pressing
right but it toggles from left and right animations.

2\. You need a CTA to register interest. You have attention now but no way for
capture those who are interested. A wasted opportunity.

3\. The screenshot could show a more complex design to make viewers know it
can do what they are used to working with.

4\. The name Enterface makes me think of entering people's faces.

Would love to see this concept developed further.

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railsjedi
I would pay (prepay) for this. OmniGraffle has been painfully slow to improve,
and just doesn't seem to cater to web or app ui design. Unfortunately it's the
best thing out there so far. Need something better.

Build this as a native app and charge $monthly. That way people can get
started with it for cheap and if you keep making a good product, they'll keep
paying you for it.

I really feel like the 1 time app charge model is severely broken for
consumers. Omnigraffle gets my $200 bucks and all of a sudden there's nothing
I can do to influence them anymore as a customer. The product stays pretty
much the same for 4 years, as they move on to find the next pot of gold app to
build.

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zephjc
Heh, Isolation Mode, indicated by a North Korean flag

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salimmadjd
This looks very promising. What a shame to get on hacker news and not have a
way to capture users. Just embed an email capture right now on that page.
Maybe add a discount promotion for early adopters or beta users. Overall looks
great, just hope it's not some vaporwear at the end of the day

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jstreebin
Agreed, definitely need to capture emails.

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pooriaazimi
Sorry to break the party, but apparently it's just a concept. As in "no lines
of code written yet, and no immediate plan to do so":
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4467432>

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slantyyz
The Flyout Tool is pretty novel. It's one UI quirk that bugs me in a lot of
apps that support layering.

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wittjeff
I was thinking the same thing re the coolness of it, but I don't have enough
experience to say anything about novelty. If it is novel, OP's one-year patent
clock starts today for the U.S., and the opportunity to patent in the rest of
the world is now lost. It wouldn't surprise me if selling that feature to
Adobe, Microsoft, or others could pay off more than the proposed (quite cool)
app.

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slantyyz
I suspect that this feature's "pre-announcement" will probably result in
"copies" of this feature showing up in other apps, possibly before Enterface
itself even reaches general release (assuming it's even in dev).

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wittjeff
Yes I would expect this too. OP should file a provisional U.S. patent
application listing every clever derivation they can think of, tomorrow.

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voltagex_
Why?

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mrschwabe
As someone who uses Fireworks everyday, I can say that a tool like this is
much needed. In fact, I have been cooking up a similar concept. Would love to
connect to pursue a potential collaboration.

By the way, put a form on your page ASAP to let people opt-in for updates.

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getoffmylawn
Personally, I find it frustrating that this is nearly the topmost link on HN.
It's been established that there's an interest in applications of this nature.
The web is littered with concept art, mockups, and promises of 'silver bullet'
applications of every conceivable type. Daydreaming about merging the best
features from a menagerie of rockstar apps is a pastime older than many of us
here. So, what separates this mockup from other similar vagaries & pipe
dreams? Has crowdsourced curation reached a tipping point towards the worse on
HN? My opinion on the matter would seem to be that of the minority...

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oomkiller
This looks cool and very well put together. It's obvious you've paid lots of
attention to detail. At our company, and I suspect many others, there is lots
of collaboration between the design side and the implementation of the design
(these roles are exclusive). For our purposes, we don't really need pixel-
perfect designs, as we just like to get a rough idea implemented, then iterate
on it. How do you use this tool in your workflow? Also, how do you use the CSS
feature? I would never copy/paste generated CSS into code, but I guess it
gives you something to start with?

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rmathai
> Enterface is an app for creating polished, production ready, pixel-perfect,
> multi-page, multi-state mockups of user interfaces.

I like what you've done.

But I wonder if mockups really need to be polished, production ready, pixel-
perfect etc.

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calvinlough
I would worry about this too. It seems like you could get bogged down using a
tool like this, spending days creating pixel perfect mockups, just to throw
out your work later. That might be why Balsamiq is such a popular tool; the
mockups look like ass, but they let you iterate quickly without caring about
the tiny details.

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petervandijck
If it creates pixel-perfect designs that can be used for implementation, then
don't call them mockups, that part was confusing to me.

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SoftwareMaven
I know a guy who is working on a similar type of project, but his goal is to
take the resultant, vector-based output and be able to feed it into devices
with differing sizes and resolutions. This looks like it could be a great
matchup. If you are interested in hearing more, my contact is in my profile.

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shagbag
Small semi-relevant tip:

The slideshow after "Here's what it looks like" shouldn't alternate directions
for the transition animation. You should make the screenshot come in from one
direction if you press next and the other direction if you press back. This
improves visual feedback for the user.

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hellweaver666
I'm really interested in this... just a shame you don't have a way for me to
subscribe to an email list so I can see when you release it. Now I'll probably
forget about it unless I happen to be online at the right time to see your
actual launch post on HN.

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zaroth
The one thing I really want to see is HD demos of the product in use to create
truly amazing websites.

I think if you dial down the marketing drivel, and dial up the actual
functionality, if it is impressive, people will start to notice and share it
all by themselves.

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micheljansen
Excellent. I've been thinking of building something like this ever since I
have been a bit disappointed by <http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/>. Shame
this is just a concept!

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lsemel
It'd be great if this could work with libraries of UI elements, so we could
load in Twitter Bootstrap elements if our site uses that, or have the ability
to create UI libraries of our own.

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89a
Isn't the idea of Bootstrap that you can just get a basic site up without
actually a design step.

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yesimahuman
This looks great, very well done. I build these kinds of tools for my own
company, and while we take a different approach, this is really impressive. I
will check it out!

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flexxaeon
Hell of a let down to find out it's just a concept. A good concept, yes. But
the wording on the page like "...what can Enterface do for you?" you mean
_could_

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eyevariety
Gimme gimme! So tired of flipping between programs during my process because
none of them do it well. Omnigraffle just hasn't evolved enough.

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ilaksh
Wow.. this has just about everything.

Why not take just the most important layout and design features and create a
tool that can output actual web pages?

I'll tell you why. Because web developers code in CSS and HTML. If you can
just export a web page, then it takes away their "programming" work.

If we took 1/100th of the effort used to create mockup tools, we could have 10
really great graphical interactive web page and even web application editors.

That stuff about "semantic" markup for SEO is bullshit.

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eyevariety
Have you ever built a webpage? There are many optimizations that simple
software just isn't going to come through on.

Have you ever SEO'd a site? That is something that certainly takes semantics
into account and does so in a way that affects every page and their
relationships.

Interface design is a separate process entirely, and its focus should not
always be constrained by the engineering it would take to actually code the
interface.

If it would take so little effort to make such a software, it would certainly
exist. The mockup tools out there are pretty primitive and also fairly limited
in number. What you describe is certainly in the future, but to be truly good
it will require some very sophisticated technology.

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ilaksh
I've been building web pages and web applications for many years.

What optimizations do you think that software can't do that justifies hand
coding CSS and HTML? Probably the first one is related to autosizing layouts..
but guess what, graphical editors CAN do that. Regardless, the majority of web
pages today STILL are fixed width.

There are plenty of tools and platforms that demonstrate the concept of
graphical UI and application editors. Less so in the web space but there are
still several out there. Most are not very popular and are missing some
important features like open extensibility.

I have studied SEO and done some of that. Let's get specific. What exactly do
you think needs to be in the markup or relations between pages in order for
Google to give you a fair representation?

Are you really trying to say that if the div class isn't "whysuperspam.com" or
something that it won't get a good Google ranking?

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eyevariety
Not saying that it goes back to semantic classes or anything like that, but if
aligning alt tags, creating hierarchy with headings, being smart about the
order of the code vs the order it appears- all those things are going to
require 'coding'in a UI that is just as work intensive as coding them in the
traditional sense.

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ilaksh
You really think the hierarchy of the headings matters to Google?

I doubt that the order of the text matters either, but if it did you could
create a tool that would order the output.

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eyevariety
I know from years of optimization and measurement. Everything matters. Google/
Matt Cutts like to state otherwise, but SERPs prove otherwise.

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cheap
You really should have put a mailing list on this page. I'm sure a lot of
people are interested in keeping updated.

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digitalengineer
This looks really good! So now I'm wundering what this service might cost and
when Enterface might be online?

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leprofessorr
From the image, I'm guessing it won't be an online service, but a native app.

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leprofessorr
This is freakin awesome. How much will it cost? When will it be available?

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itsbits
Will help a lot for UX designers..is it cloud based or a desktop app???

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Brajeshwar
How do I sign-up for updates? Can I beta test it? When Can I buy it?

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enginous
Two big things I would love from a tool that intends to solve this problem
well:

    
    
      - Do it on the web, making it free of platform ties.
      - Make collaboration (versioning, sharing, maybe discussion) much easier.

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alexchamberlain
There's too much focus on web-based software. This type of product is ideal
native, even with all the collaboration features.

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enginous
Why do you consider it "ideal native?"

What was a good case for a desktop app even two years ago works fine on the
web today (e.g., WebGL stuff, canvas-based apps.) Chances are this will be
even more true 1-2 years from now (when a product like this would have become
quite polished.)

A web app can offer cheap distribution, a more iterative development cycle,
split testing, more monetization flexibility, piracy protection, a larger
market, immunity from platform trends, and virality (share interactive designs
even with stakeholders who haven't downloaded or bought a large creative
application).

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jeremyarussell
For me, the first half of that list is just as easy natively. Larger market
from day one, platform, virulence - I can see that. But what of robustness?
Access to lower level features in order to create something huge, fast and
efficient. without being held back by the browser. Not to mention do I hate
not being able to work without an internet connection.

Thinking on it more, you can leverage so much of both worlds and make the best
thing ever.

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gearoidoc
Doesn't Fluid JS do this already?

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89a
This looks awesome. I've been a Fireworks user for UI design for a few years
now (switched from Photoshop). I'm utterly shocked anyone gets anything done
in PS, it's so fiddly and doesn't serve even the most basic of requirements
for a UI design app (align to canvas? pages? hello?).

Seen as Adobe is looking to kill Fireworks, it's not getting a retina update I
was thinking of jumping ship to Sketch.

Weird that you didn't build the logo using it though, like Sketch did.

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tomp
I think the UI component details look a lot like Photoshop's... Watch for any
patent suits from Adobe!

