HN user
Thanks! What marketing tools are you currently using?
The most common workflow we see is people bouncing between 5-10 different dashboards daily. Would love to hear what pain points you're running into.
Also happy to give you early access if you want to test it out.
We were using Percy but our bills were racking up.
So we've built Scooby and added some missing feature like code comparison.
We focused on simplicity and cost optimization.
Feedback and contributions are welcome!
So basically Yo :)
Missing our tool for high-fidelity prototypes in Sketch: https://www.animaapp.com
There is at least one company at each YC batch that aims to lower the barrier of entry for coding, us included. We (Anima YC S18 https://www.animaapp.com) take Sketch designs and convert them into code.
Amongst other things designers also use our generated code to learn how designs can be viewed in browsers as HTML/CSS.
When Sketch introduced Symbols, they started making designers think like developers, in the sense of reusable self-contained components. This makes our and companies like us live easier. And for that we thank them :)
Yes, there are tools that output plain HTML/CSS.
For example, we (Anima - YC S18) are doing it (https://www.animaapp.com)
Everything you need to know about how Silicon Valley funding works in a little over a minute https://youtu.be/BzAdXyPYKQo
Based on the founding of Compaq
That employee is the CEO :)
You forgot to add “confiding for a friend”
"There were only 36M users online, roughly the same order as the number of Bitcoin users in the U.S."
When you say "users", what do these users "use" Bitcoin for besides speculating on its price?
Do you know of any real usage?
Congrats guys.
If this works as advertised, this is huge.
When I'm making API calls from my app to different services, I know for a fact that there is no extra latency that might be caused by a third-party. How do you deal with maintaining low-latency while still having to re-route my original API call?
Again, as someone who dealt with many APIs over the years, I think this kind of service is game-changing.
Thank you.
Today the tools we provide force designers to think in a more structured way. A great example of this is Stacks, which forces a layout to be consistent. Unstructured design, or in other words, floating layers corresponds to CSS's absolute position. Stacks, however, corresponds to CSS's Flexbox.
By enforcing designs to adhere to concepts which are borrowed from the development world, we can actually convert design to code.
In the long-term, we see that not only layout will be structured and translated, but all aspects of a user interface.
Yes. We're definitely planning to expand to more platforms. Stay tuned :)
We get this a lot and I do understand where you're coming from. Replacing human engineers will not happen any day now, but we project our vision years ahead.
For the time being, even if developers don't use the generated code, but rather just inspect it is better then guessing how a component should work by staring at a static image or a GIF.
If you take for example this elaborate interactive component: https://handoff.animaapp.com/#/timeline/XKHmOQP5Hcuipv/anima...
It was made completely by Michal, our co-founder/designer in Sketch with Anima. No code was manually written. Trying to convey this today usually involves hand-waving or for advanced teams, a GIF. By handing off functional code, a developer can interact and see the values that make this work. Even if not using the actual generated code.
Does that make sense? What do you think?
The way our Auto-Layout plugin works is by hooking into the internals of Sketch and enforcing layout rules in real-time (i.e when the mouse moves). If someone doesn't have the plugin installed, the Sketch file can still be opened but they won't have the code that enforces the layout rules, so yes it will look and behave differently.
So while using Auto-Layout can save an enormous amount of time creating UI, it definitely needs to be used by all designers that work on the file.
In terms of exporting to other parties such as Zeplin, we have a feature that turns off all the layout rules just before exporting. If you have tried it out here it is: https://animaapp.github.io/docs/v1/launchpad/faq.html#Export...
And thank you for the kind words!
That's a good idea. Thanks!
You definitely have a point.
This type of solution has obvious upside. The truth is that it has been tried many times before (Flash, Frontpage, Adobe Muse). The hard thing here is to being adopted both by the designers who start the process and at the same time generate code that developers will agree to work with.
The way we tackle this is by giving designers tools to express what they want in ways that were not available before, and then use the output to generate code. For example, one popular feature is Stacks[1] which is basically CSS Flexbox for Sketch. When designers use Stacks, we can then use that data and generate an actual CSS Flexbox from it.
Designers are adopting this approach but in terms of code generation, we still have a lot of room for improvement. The code works great, but it's not always optimal in the way that a good human developer would write it.
We have an internal goal, which is to pass the "Turing Test", where a developer will not be able to recognize whether our algorithms or by a fellow human developer.
[1] https://medium.com/sketch-app-sources/auto-layout-introducin...
Barred only from being a CEO of public companies :|
ARR is revenue. The company could be losing money.
Great to hear! Thank you!
Anima App: https://www.animaapp.com - We empower UI/UX designers.
Why is it important to empower designers?
We believe that user experience creates revolutions. There were smartphones before the iPhone, yet the mobile revolution started by the innovative user experience that Apple invented.
In our mind, more power to designers will lead to better and better digital products, which will result in more revolutionary products.
Our tools empower designers to express their vision in their language, rather than communicate their vision via mock-ups.
Today we provide tools for Sketch like Auto-Layout, Launchpad, and Timeline. Each of these gives designers more power to own their creations, we automate the front-end work.
Our toolkit is used by more than 70,000 designers and in well-known teams in Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix and more.
If you use Sketch and haven't heard about us, try us out :)
Meetup is one of the spamiest products ever
Isn't that just the definition of Accredited Investor?
Wasn't he talking about PayPal? (Also money service)
Timeline for Sketch: https://timeline.animaapp.com
EC2 offers scaling up and down the number of instances as you grow or shrink.
If you built a website 20 years ago and it exploded in traffic, shared hosting without easy scaling would not be a solution. You would have to plan your growth and pre-order shared instances. Thus making your business cash dependent again without proven growth.
"Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh"
Google? Facebook?
Not everything in software development can be broken into independent components and in reasonable cost of effort.
As for React components, I suggest it does.
People do that today : https://devarchy.com/react
What if they were incentivized to create a library for your project?