

Show HN: Rapid prototyping and development tool for web and mobile apps - sorich87
http://www.steveapp.com/demo

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city41
"Stop looking for a developer." -- this is an interesting trend that is
slowly, but surely, gaining traction. It's really taking hold in the indie
game world, a lot of people now make games with GameMaker, Stencyl, and the
like and often don't need a developer.

It makes a lot of sense that this will take place in the website and mobile
app world too. I wonder what developers will be doing in 5 years, when
most/all CRUD apps can be built with drag and drop.

~~~
tluyben2
This is nothing new and has been around since people started to make usable
software for computer systems. The idea has been tried to death with countless
software writing tools. MS DOS Dbase tools on top of dbase, written in clipper
or what not to make CRUD applications by non programmers. There are generating
tools from before that generating compile CRUD from just 'a business person
definitions'. I have seen presentations from countless products like
Filemaker, MS Access, Foxpro etc claiming that boring CRUD is gone and no
programmers are needed anymore for application building.

When I was younger, one of the product managers for the Dutch product SDW told
me that programming business software was something of the past as business
people could just input 'how the app should work' and the app would be
automatically built.

Outsystems have claimed this, as do Longjump and web based systems.

They all have something in common; they work for some cases, if you want more
you have a problem. You CAN do it, but it's hard and the resulting 'code'
(usually visual programming or 4GL) will usually be bad. Ohyeah, and you're
still programming. Worse than you would have with actual developers from the
start.

Note that most of them start out as simple systems, like this SteveApp. That's
nice; it serves a purpose. But when you get users, people will request
features and these feature will, in the end, require a full fledged
programming language. So now you have non programmers creating an app up to a
point which they still get and for more they'll hire you. They did a bit of
'programming' though in the built in language, which was made easy (which
usually translates to visual and/or 'very much like English), so not very
terse and often not very well written. Now you have 'code' like this
[http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6134596/Screenshots/uo079...](http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6134596/Screenshots/uo079r9j~q3b.png)
and you only have to fix some extra features :)

~~~
sorich87
I agree that the code generated by most software writing tools is horrible.
That's why SteveApp doesn't even try to generate code in any programming
language (unless you consider HTML a programming language of course).

The trick used by SteveApp is to generate dynamic HTML views which have the
ability to save the data over a standard server API. Dynamically generating a
markup language is easier, and I think it can be done successfully with a
software writing tool.

~~~
tluyben2
I like that you are trying this anyway. I know and have worked with the tools
I mentioned because I have a more than passing interest in them. Like you I do
believe there must be some better way for a programmer to spend her or his
time than implementing trivial but time consuming software (which, usually,
has been repeated over the past 40 years 1000s of times without even referring
to past endeavors).

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tluyben2
Nice work. It looks good (on desktop browsers anyway). Please read my other
comment in this thread and keep it simple as to something which is easy to use
but doesn't 'want' too much. Looking forward to my invite!

~~~
sorich87
Thanks! I replied to your comment. It was very insightful. You will get the
invite soon. :)

------
sorich87
I submitted this link a month ago but I learned the hard way that you
shouldn't submit your startup on HN when it's not ready (it was downvoted).
Hopefully this time I can get some reviews. :)

~~~
lobotryas
Unfortunately the site looks a bit of a mess on iOS. I suggest a basic browser
detect so you can display a nicer looking splash page to mobile users.

You named your product Steve. If you want to go the Jenkins/Ask.com route of
having a product with a human name then come up with a memorable and
attractive avatar for Steve ASAP. Personally I would be weirded out using a
product with a bland and generic name like "Steve". I understand this is
subjective, but you may want to iterate on the name until you find something
interesting and memorable. This may sound trite, but in a crowded marketplace
where every conversion matters you'll want every edge you can get.

~~~
sorich87
Thanks for testing. I will fix on iOS. The goal is to make it work on tablets
also at least, but I'm not there yet. :)

About the name, the original idea for the app was "Steve, your technical
cofounder" (an allusion to Woz obviously). I will definitely think more about
the name.

