pcolton

Some fun facts:

- the raw video is 58 seconds

- at 24 frames per second, that’s 1,392 frames

- on a single, high-end GPU, it takes 168 minutes to render a single frame (we render on 8-GPU systems)

- that’s a total of about 3,900 hours of render/compute time

Pixate, Inc. (YC S12) - Palo Alto, CA

Interested in interaction or web design? Building complex 3D animation engines? Creating rich web interfaces with functional programming? Scaling realtime, distributed server infrastructures? Extending the internals of low-level iOS and Android frameworks? Let's talk.

Our team is breaking new ground in mobile design and solving real problems for an eager community. If you want to be part of this talented team of engineers and designers, send us an email to hello@pixate.com telling us why you’d be a good fit. We have immediate need for experienced iOS and JavaScript engineers. We'll consider remote if you are exceptional.

We hear you on the list performance. There are significant performance improvements we've made in version 2.0, over the previous version. We’ve also identified more ways to make Pixate faster, especially for CollectionView and TableView, and will roll them out as soon as we can. Performance is our #1 priority, so expect it to continue to improve.

In addition to that, how you use Pixate and what CSS selectors and properties you use can have a big impact on performance, just like with CSS on the web. We’ll be making those kinds of issues clearer for developers through "best practices" posts, as we continue to build our product.

More technical information and screenshots available here: https://github.com/Pixate/Freestyle

Saw Watsi's presentation at Demo Day. Watsi is pretty special.

Bootstrap is totally configurable, we're just showing the default styling. In terms of Apple allowing alternate designs, I think they encourage it, just look at Garage Band ;-).

Clarified on the site, thanks.

Fixed. ;-)

One real-life example (told to us by a customer): imagine you have a "spring sale" that you want to promote to your customers. You want to customize the look of the app, perhaps rearrange a few things, change the look, etc. You want to do this for a period of time, and perhaps even for a certain geographic or demographic area. With Pixate, you could push new CSS and assets as needed, then revert when the sale is over. You could even push different looks to different users, etc. Effectively, Pixate is the flexibility of web with the power of native.

Storyboards aren't dynamic. Our CSS implementation not only lets you style your app, including animation and transition, but it can be changed at run time, either locally or remotely -- just like the web. Think of storyboards/xibs as a layout mechanism, and ours as a dynamic styling mechanism.

This isn't an all-or-none situation. You lose none of the fidelity of native development, it's just an abstraction of code to markup. It's all natively executed using native APIs. Typography, absolute pixel postions, animation, and much more is all there.

It's free and open, and will work with our free engine. In its current beta form, we wanted our commercial customers to have a crack at it first.

Pixate Engine is a native framework for iOS (and Android soon) for styling your native controls using the CSS syntax. There's no web here other than the shared syntax of CSS. For example, to style a native UIButton:

button { border-radius: 5px; background-color: red; }

Think of it as declarative markup for styling native controls.

Pixate is not an all-or-nothing solution. You can just style what you want via CSS, and do the rest in code. Do it all in code and just inline some CSS if you like. This isn't a "use UIKit or us" type of decision, but more of a "how can I write a lot less code and more dynamically style my apps". Lastly, at the Enterprise level, we offer source code escrow.

You can install our free Pixate Playground app on your iPad and play with the CSS in real-time:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixate-playground/id57867638...

It's also open sourced: https://github.com/Pixate/Playground

Profitability.

Links

Ruby: http://tinyurl.com/d7xmsjx C#: http://tinyurl.com/9pdztz9 JS: http://tinyurl.com/9vuyc6x KS Proj: http://kck.st/Phq0lr

See http://www.thedominoproject.com/2012/07/voting-for-a-winner....

We believe that taking something complex and adding a familiar, declarative syntax, while keeping it all 100% native, will appeal to both developers and designers. We believe so because we've asked many of them.

...because if he hates CSS, wait 'till he gets a load of Core Graphics and Core Animation via Objective-C just to animate a custom shape. ;-)

The video shows an example of how Pixate will enable you to style your entire mobile app using CSS. The dynamic nature of Pixate will mean you'll be able to A/B test different looks for your app in real-time, even in the users' hands (i.e. server-side push), allowing you to determine the most effective design for your customers.

Have you made a pledge? ;-)

Photoshop is what the vast majority of all web and app designers use at some point in their process.

You can edit the CSS with Pixate in the exact same way. It doesn't get 'compiled away', the runtime optimizations happen behind the scenes. The CSS can remain in your project as a resource, much in the same way you reference your CSS in an HTML page.

Appcelerator (creators of Titanium) supports Pixate by becoming first corporate sponsor.

http://developer.appcelerator.com/blog/2012/08/join-us-in-su...

A 'CSS Hat for native mobile UI's" is basically what Pixate supports. That is, we can take CSS, and style native iOS (and Android) components just like you can web components. Pixate is the engine that enables all of this (whereas in a web page, the browser is doing all the rendering for you).

There are no Ferraris in the video.

The Pixate Engine styles native controls using the standard iOS bitmap approach. Bitmaps allow your controls to take advantage of the speed offered by the GPU. However, in contrast to today's workflows, the Pixate Engine renders and caches content to bitmaps dynamically as needed at runtime, giving you the ultimate in flexibility in your designs.

It should work just fine. I did a quick test settings constraints...

http://youtu.be/8AUA8KeDtc8?hd=1

We're just at the very beginning of building this, so specific styles aren't finalized yet. We are also talking with as many designers as possible to make sure it's themeable in the way they want. At the end of the day, we won't define how it looks, but rather enable you to be as creative as you want to be.