Written on August 7, 2008 – 12:03 pm
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Balsamiq Mockups is a new product launched on the Adobe AIR platform which allows developers to make mockups of their designs in no time. Think MSWord for hackers. Since its launch a few short months ago Balsamiq mockups has taken the hacker community by storm. Why? This is one of those rags to riches stories that inspire us all.
Developed by Peldi Guilizzoni (a one man band) working out of Bologna (Italy) who was inspired by 37signals mantras and Paul Graham (HN) to ‘create something people want’. Balsamiq Mockups is now following in the footsteps of past masters and amazingly has gone into profitability from almost the get go. And what’s more this self funded project is now turning over thousands of dollars each month.
The beauty of this product is its elegance, it solves the pain of hackers who have long since forgotten where the pen and paper is located (bottom draw guys), it allows quick and editable drafts to be created of potential design ideas. The user interface is completely intuitive (no instructions needed) and results are quickly achieved.
When so many large companies with millions of dollars in VC backing are chasing the elusive Web2.0 biz model, hunting down huge numbers of users who they intend spamming later, this makes a very refreshing change. The execution of this plan is perfect. Peldi has managed to capture the attention of his target market (hackers and developers) with stories of his progress, which in turn have initiated interesting debates on Hacker News.
So far Balsamiq Mockups has been covered by over 100 blogs (this is the 101th blog post!) yet still absent from this entourage is any mention from TechCrunch. This is one of those products that will make it onto the stage of the foremost Tech startup blog, it’s a good human story and more inspiring than the news bites that so and so has just been granted another round of X. Come on TC, show this man some luv.
Way to go Peldi, have a bottle of Chianti for me.
A quick demonstration of Balsamiq Mockups: building an iTunes-like UI in two minutes:
I hope you like that post!
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Written on June 21, 2008 – 5:50 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Boris has recently published a post in which he stated that we sometimes should “kill our darlings”. Although you’ve put hours of time in something, whenever it isn’t good you shouldn’t use it. So when Boris struggled with the design of Fleck, he threw it all away and started all over again.
Let’s do the same with Flickr. It’s a great service, yet web-based - thus forcing you to push the browser back button way too many times. So Jonnie Hallman destroyed the front end of Flickr, developed an Adobe AIR app, and now offers a rather smashing way of working with our Flickr photos - called DestroyFlickr. See the differences between the photostreams for example:
Dwight Silverman from the Houston Chronicle wrote an extensive review about the Flickr application. He noted:
There are similar displays — each called a canvas — for different tasks and in Flickr. Each time you visit one, it’s saved as a workspace, making it easy to return to any earlier tasks. It’s much faster than using the back button in a Web browser. However, it only saves one photo-view page at a time, and only saves four workspaces at a time.
DestroyFlickr makes it also easy to up- and download, as it’s just a matter of dragging ‘n dropping. Apart from the positive remarks, Silverman also said that the Adobe AIR wasn’t yet a complete alternative to the online working space, since it isn’t possible to add photos to groups nor can you tag them. The latter is a major disadvantage, as tagging is one of the important features at Flickr.
Why? Read this post I wrote about director of product management of Flickr Kakul Srivastava’s presentation at Web 2.0 Expo about the importance of tagging your pics - not just because “sly Russian mathematical magic” will take place. As soon as Hallman introduces this feature, I will destroy my former Flickr experience and start floating on AIR.
Written on May 27, 2008 – 9:47 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Today is Kings of Code day. Hundreds of coders have traveled to Amsterdam to see speakers like Peter-Paul Koch (Quirksmode.org), Mark Birbeck (W3C), Nate Abele (CakePHP), John Resig (Mozilla) and Nate Koechley (Yahoo). Yesterday night, co-editor Boris organized one of his infamous pre-conference Speakers Dinners. While I was enjoying the excellent food, I got to chance to talk with Mark Birbeck about the focus of web companies.
I complained about the focus on minor details, and start-ups who just try fix a really small problem. To me, it seems like these people overestimate their own business and have developed a tunnel vision. Therefore, they don’t see the big picture anymore. Mark agreed, but also warned me it can work the other way around.
“When developing a service, don’t go too far ahead”, Birbeck said, “People still have to understand what you’re working on”. As the Managing Director of webBackPlane he has been developing a framework to allow desktop applications to be created with web technologies - such as XForms - for four years now, and promoted it too early. “People just didn’t understand what it was about yet”. About two years ago, Birbeck - with the help of Michael Arrington - almost sold the company to Adobe. Yes.., Adobe, the same company that now has AIR as their claim to fame. “It’s basically the same thing as our product and now people are speaking about the end of the browser. We had it four years ago.”
Not that Birbeck minds though: “Software like AIR helps people understand the general idea”. He and his team are already improving the framework for the next big thing: a desktop framework that uses data from the semantic web. For example, when you save a location in a personal library, Birbeck’s tool will pinpoints this location on every Google map you’ll open. Birbeck: “So next time when I book a hotel in Amsterdam, I can tell when it’s close to a previous location I’ve visited, like this house”.
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