

Mockingbird: New tool for building mockups, written in Cappuccino - boucher
http://gomockingbird.com/

======
ams6110
Nice effort, and great to see someone building a Cappuccino app; I like that I
don't need any plugins to run it. Clearly it's still beta, but something to
keep an eye on.

~~~
shpxnvz
_I like that I don't need any plugins to run it._

I second that. Requiring a plugin is the only reason I don't use that other
really cool mockup tool. Good luck to the team.

------
divia
[http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=ebdb...](http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=ebdb192fce519a7ae32dff361a66b05d727ab082)

~~~
justinweiss
Oh hey! Another dvorak user!

~~~
divia
Heh, nice notice of nonsense name :-).

------
izaidi
Might want to consider a different screenshot on the main page. The big
centered arrow made me think it was a clickable demo video.

------
cridal
If you really want to build a valuable web prototyping app, please make it
spit out HTML/CSS. That would be the killer feature! Give me a limited, but
functional web site/app that I can then modify/refine, instead of a "picture"
of it in whatever else format.

THAT would make me use your product in a hearbeat...

~~~
natrius
Any HTML or CSS spit out by that app would be unusable without a tremendous
engineering effort. Anything can be dragged anywhere. Even if export was only
available if you limited yourself to certain functionality and layouts, I'd
still be extremely impressed if exported HTML and CSS were worth using.

~~~
misuba
HTML output would be valuable even if it were as simple as possible and
completely unstyled. That's still a tedious step I don't have to do.

------
chaosmachine
Neat. I spent a few weeks working on something similar in jQuery, but gave up
on it, because I wasn't really confident it could be done well enough to beat
Balsamiq.

------
terpua
I met the founders (saikat and ??) at HeyZap's (post SUS) party. They
described it as (Peldi's) Mockups but for the Web. Interesting underserved
niche.

~~~
saikat
?? == sheena

~~~
terpua
Yup, that's her :)

------
tlrobinson
I like how the volume slider intelligently resizes. Nice attention to detail.

------
sammcd
Bug Report:

1) Put a button on the screen.

2) But a box on the screen

3) But the box on top of the button

4) Select the button (oh wait you can't)

Otherwise seems like a great product. I love that you used cappuccino, I can't
wait until they give us Atlas.

~~~
saikat
Yeah that's a good point, I can see how this is fairly confusing. This happens
because the box is added on top of the button - you can, however, hit the
"Back" button on the toolbar (after selecting the box) to move the box back.

~~~
bbsabelli
doesn't seem to work

~~~
saikat
Might have to hit back more than a few times if you have more than two widgets
on the screen. But I'll be sure to make this work better.

~~~
volida
I just tried it. I created a box over the line/arrow. Hitting the back for the
box, you can't select the arrow. Selecting the arrow and bringing it front, it
works ok.

UX suggestion: allow me to use the mouse scroll to change the size of the
hovered/selected element, maintaining the scale.

------
divia
Here's a picture my friend made that I like:
[http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=73c3...](http://gomockingbird.com/mockingbird/index.html?project=73c3156b49b1f3b2137eb3abacfa5f0777399edf)

------
grinich

          index.html
          Mockingbird
    
          Created by You on May 22, 2009.
          Copyright 2009, Your Company All rights reserved.
    

accurate?

~~~
saikat
Hah! Nice catch, that is not in fact accurate.

------
Ennis
Very happy about seeing a Cappuccino app. I can see myself using this. I'm
concerned about the lack of an "export" mechanism. Being able to export to
html would be ideal. At the very least, having a PDF or other universal format
file that I can email around is probably a must.

I wonder what "Try it now" implies? It would be nice to know if this is
planned to become a paid service once out of beta.

Side note: Looks like 280 Atlas is finally rolling out. I don't know what the
$20 fee is all about. It feels disrespectful. I thought it was hard enough to
find developers to test out a new beta platform/service in the first place.

~~~
saikat
We are planning to charge once we iron out all the bugs and we add a few more
features, though there will probably be a free version. We'll have more
details on that later. Export is definitely a feature we plan to implement,
but for now, E-mailing the share link is the way to get others to see your
mockups.

------
inglorian
Very nice. I like the simplicity of the syntax you've created for editing
elements. Seems to work quite smoothly for me in Safari, OS 10.6

------
mattiss
Looks cool, but it is painfully slow (Linux + firefox). Maybe other systems
run it better, but for me it is too slow to do much good.

~~~
saikat
Yeah, we just launched this today and are in very early stages of beta. We
realize speed is an issue right now (we've mostly been testing on Windows and
OS X, on which it runs better), and it's definitely something we're working to
improve.

~~~
absconditus
Yet:

"Powered by Cappuccino: no Flash slowing down your browser."

~~~
saikat
Point taken. We changed it.

------
geoffw8
Hihi,

Obviously a great product. One thing though - I wouldn't use this because of
the nature of my business, I was hoping and praying that it was a downloadable
tool....!!!!!

(My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly).

If you can download, or are going to make available for download. Please let
me know : )

Thanks,

Geoff

~~~
davidw
> My business: ideas generation, spitting things out quickly

How does that work? I mean, how do you make money from it?

------
Meatshoes
Cool idea but it's very buggy. With 2 minutes of use I discovered that upon
double clicking text to edit hitting enter makes the widget disappear, now I
can no longer drag widgets onto the work space and the scroll bar on the
widget "library" is frozen (although it still works).

Looks like it could be very cool with the issues ironed out.

~~~
saikat
Interesting, I haven't been able to replicate that problem. What browser/OS
are you using?

~~~
slig
Here when I hit enter after changing the text/value of a control, it suddenly
disappears. os x tiger, firefox 3.5.4

~~~
saikat
I managed to reproduce the bug last night and pushed a fix. Hope that helps,
and thanks for the catch!

------
nathanwdavis
My browser tab (Google Chrome) froze up when trying to do a Copy and Paste of
a Rectangle element. Other than that, it's a nice tool. Keep up the good work!

~~~
saikat
Yeah we just found out about that bug. I just pushed a fix for it about 30
minutes ago.

~~~
nathanwdavis
Well, you sure respond to feedback fast. Great service, thanks!

BTW, I've been designing a few screens for an up-coming project over the past
week and haven't had any problems. It is a joy to use. Keep up the good work.

------
joeld42
Nice! A bit sluggish here (linux/firefox) but usable.

If you had some iPhone UI templates, I'd use it.

------
redact207
seems very similar to sketchflow
[http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/1eea789b-c69c-4...](http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/1eea789b-c69c-4b09-a13b-b7422c0ff104)
but for the web

------
davidcann
Awesome, nice job!

------
cpr
Nice effort (great to see a real Capp app), but a bit ugly.

Perhaps unleash a really good designer on the UI?

------
theli0nheart
What I can't understand is why you'd model a language after Objective-C. It's
verbose to the point of ridiculousness.

~~~
GeneralMaximus
It's not the language that's verbose, it's the Cocoa libraries.

Instead of this:

    
    
      NSString *s2 = [s1 stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:NSUTF8Encoding];
    

You could easily have:

    
    
      NSString *s2 = [s1 percentEscapes:UTF8];
    

(I like the first way better, though. It reads like an English sentence, and
you know exactly what the arguments are.)

EDIT: formatting.

~~~
theli0nheart
Good point, but Objective J seems to have borrowed that as well.

i.e.

    
    
      [CPApp sendEvent:[CPEvent mouseEventWithType:CPLeftMouseDown location:[theWindow convertBridgeToBase:CGPointMake(x, y)]
    

or

    
    
      [CPApp setTarget:self selector:@selector(disposeOfEvent:) forNextEventMatchingMask:CPLeftMouseUpMask untilDate:nil inMode:nil dequeue:YES];
    

It's not that I don't applaud the creation of Objective-J, because I do. I
think it's a big step towards the next generation of in-browser applications.

To the 280 guys: I'm not trying to insult you or your hard work, and I'm sorry
if it came off like that. All I'm saying is that you're going to have a harder
time making this a new web standard because of this design fact. It certainly
won't deter me, but it will definitely deter others.

