This looks very nice. But please move the video to the top of the page. Always remember engage first, then offer people a chance to try it out in the browser.
Also I had to reach the bottom of the page to find out that it was a desktop app. Is it built in Electron? One last tip if this works as well as it looks in the demo you could easily double your price.
Ditto on the price, that seems ridiculously cheap. The 3 computer limit puts me off, I know I personally have paid more just to get an unlimited "all the computers you personally own" licence. (Alfred App call this their Mega Supporter tier, it's nearly twice the price of their Single User offering.)
Chrome-only demo is unfortunate in this particular case (I also use another webkit variant). If you ask me, scrollable page with screenshots is still better than video.
GoLive, Dreamweaver too. It's hard to convey semantic intent and create efficient structures in markup when your tool has to be generic enough to have a flexible GUI.
It still comes down to how skillful the creator is, to not end up with nested divs and classes like "rt-col1-flex-span-head".
I salute this initiative. A free 3-7 days trial would be so welcomed though, dispite the online demo which I assume it is not entirely the same as the desktop app.
Looks good otherwise, and love the comments from other people as well. Love the price too.
I gave it a 30 seconds test with Firefox and it seemed to work. Probably not a deep enough test to say that it works, but I guess it's not far from working. I tried the Bootstrap 4 version.
I have enjoyed layoutit.com for simple free wireframing.
You can define your layout pretty quickly if you have ever made a bootstrap layout before.
I know there are other alternatives as well but does anyone have any significant experience with this?Is this a lot better, is this the best one out there?
I tried using Pinegrow for my hobby stuff. It seems to work great but the price is a little steep for someone who is just playing around with side hobbies.
They hooked me on the $49 price when I started playing around and I was ready to buy until I saw that the price jumps to $99 if I want master page support and some other nice things.
I realize it is well worth it but I just can't justify a $100 editor for my hobby projects. I just purchased this tool for $25 as its pricing aligns with what I'm willing to spend much better.
IMO this is another example of unnecessary fragmentation of the dev tools ecosystem. Why do we need a whole IDE for Bootstrap? Can't we instead make a plugin for an existing IDE to accomplish the same thing?
I was imagining that that this was good tool for beginners to try. I don't think that is made to replace the myriad technologies that people use to develop a static site.
Looks super cool and very useful. If anyone thinks that $25 or $50 is expensive for 3 installs, they are just being disingenuous. That's less than most devs charge their clients per hour and tools like this easily save a few hours on each project.
$50 is nothing for such a tool for a one time payment! Even at that price it is very difficult for the tool to make a profitable full time business model. I want to also add that the 50% discount is not a helpful message either.
I always ask my team, how is that as developers we always want free software but yet want a salary hike every year as a software programmer!
>I always ask my team, how is that as developers we always want free software but yet want a salary hike every year as a software programmer!
A lot of people are short-sighted and self-centered. It's completely and totally rational to buy this product if you're billing at $75/hr and this tool saves you 10+ hours that you couldn't justify billing.
Some people just don't "get it" - that you must produce something of value before you can consume, and that every exchange must leave everyone better off. This is what used to upset me about the software pirates, torrenters, etc. It'll all catch up in the end though, so no need to over-analyze people like this.
I think a lot of people are not billing 75/hour or billing at all.
When you're at work, you typically just have to use the tools the rest of the team does. Then when you are at home, working on a side project... it's essentially a hobby and saving time in a hobby is just a 'nice to have'.
Well, the $50 is low for someone who’s going to use it professionally, but if you just want to make one or two sites (and never use it again afterwards), it’s probably a bit too expensive.
I agree. At $50 I wouldn't buy it as I just use javascript/make websites for myself. It's probably a steal if you do this professionally, or even more often than I do.
The 50% off on the other hand brings it down to where I'm willing to pay for it. So I did.
Well, to be honest, it might be. I myself would never pay so much for software because I have better things to pay, like electricity, water, internet, etc. I'm not saying you should not pay for software, but poor people, even more poor under-18 developers, don't really have the conditions to pay for such things.
Sure, I think the OP was talking about people who earn the price of this tool in an hour or two, not people who aren't even working.
Software pricing is a very strange beast. It seems to vary so widely, with not always a very obvious price/quality connection. And over time, it doesn't seem to follow any reasonable expectation; I paid £65 for a game 25 years ago, which would be over £90 in today's money.
They are cheap for a reason, steam is popular so lot of people will buy the game at that price point. The creator of this software will see a one time bump because of HN but I doubt he will get a steady stream of income at least initially.
It's $25. How much time would it take someone starting from scratch to gather those snippets, choose a text editor, get it installed and configured, and set it up to use the snippets, watch files, etc.? If their time is worth anything at all I can understand the attraction of paying $25 to skip straight to the part where they're doing the actual work people pay them to do.
$25 for a pretty superb WYSIWYG editor with CSS and JavaScript support, in-app responsive design tool, selectable themes, etc. I enjoy it. I'm not at all into coding front-end design, which is always a project-stopper for me. Something like this makes the GUI part easy, even though it's "just bootstrap".
I find the existence of this kind tool to be strange, but that may just be because of my preferred way of working. Despite the fact that i'm not hugely keen on Bootstrap, I recognise that people find it useful. But do people really love it so much that they build an ecosystem and actual paid apps around it? It just seems like such a weird thing to focus your energy on.
Are you kidding? There are plenty of devs that build bootstrap front ends - if this makes life easier for them and saves time / effort, it's an easy decision to purchase this. There are other front end frameworks that with IDE's that people pay for too such as vaadin. You're probably not in the target audience for this.
It's unfair of me, but I'm always turned off when I see a desktop app that works on multiple platforms. That irrationally soured my first impression, because I think it otherwise looks like a great tool.
If the developer were to have made a swift version for Mac, a C# version for Windows and a C++ version for Linux, that would be very bad. A startup simply cannot reliably keep all up to date, and the product would suffer.
If they wrote it in Java and in that way claim multiple platforms, I daresay it would be even worse, on all platforms.
If they used a tool that did the conversion for them, it would likely be a security and usability disaster, even though I need sources for that.
So a bias against a multi-platform tool is understandable.
The one exception is a Javascript tool, since things like Chromium have a LOT of effort put into them by companies with thousands of developers on payroll. However the number of tools that should run in such a environment is limitted.
Hmm... generally, I would say that is irrational. Unless you're assuming something like a 1990's Java Swing app, or a GTK app, that achieves cross-platform support at the expense of looking like crap on all platforms.
However, based on the fact that this app has an "in-Chrome browser" demo mode available... I'm assuming that it's REALLY a web application, packaged up for desktop use (like the Atom text editor).
Personally, I think that the Atom route of "HTML/JavaScript on the desktop" is a poor choice in most cases (a Bootstrap designer tool might be the rare exception). Regardless, there are multiple cross-platform frameworks out there today that look and work just great. Being turned off by cross-plat support is really an outdated bias, I think.
I know this is a Bootstrap tool, which means it has baggage.
But if something like this existed for email, I would buy it in a snap.
I have yet to find a desktop tool that can make decent responsive html emails, and that is one of the main strengths that Bootstrap should offer. Skip the JQ efects.
Perhaps you can make a email mode that is JS free, strips out the unused CSS, and inlines the remaining rules?
They have been getting ready to "go pro" for a really long time now.
In the interim, their online tool has serious limitations (it has been a few months since I last tried, but iirc it wouldn't let me save my templates, add images, make edits after exporting or even edit generated styles).
You should look into http://www.stampready.net - along with Campaign Monitor's email builder (https://www.campaignmonitor.com/features/create-custom-email...), it's one of the best drag-and-drop tools for creating really good, responsive emails. The problem with any of these tools is that they still spit out sometimes convoluted code, but that can't really be avoided since they need to cover their asses in literally dozens of different popular email clients.
If you're looking to code, you should check out Litmus Builder (http://litmus.com/email-builder), a code editor specifically built for email design. Has a bunch of templates available, instant previews in a bunch of different clients, email-specific CSS inlining, etc. Full disclosure: I work at Litmus, but even if I didn't, I'd still use Builder for the previews alone.
Thanks. Do these support responsive emails on the gmail android client? Unfortunately the gmail client does not support media queries, which makes building a responsive email for it very difficult.
That's a good question. I'm not sure about StampReady, but Campaign Monitor has a few of the best email designers in the biz working there (namely Nicole Merlin and Stig Morten Myre) who strive for really robust templates. Nicole in particular has written about her approach (typically called 'hybrid' or 'spongey' development), which works without media queries. It's basically using fluid tables, max-width, and MSO conditional tables to get things working and is the best approach around these days. You can read more about it here: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-a-future-pr...
I wouldn't be surprised if Campaign Monitor's email templates built in their builder follow the same approach. MailChimp's too, for that matter. The team there use similar techniques.
Been thinking about / working on the email design problem for a long time. Email is a great medium with a startling lack of good design tools. Here are the features I look for in an WYSIWYG email builder:
* Drag and drop with common content types. Text, HTML, image, button, divider, social icons.
* Controls for fonts, colors, borders, padding, etc. You don't want to adjust CSS after the CSS is inlined.
* Control over email structure. Most email layouts are a single column or pre-built with a multi-column area. A good editor allows you to add new sections that are single or multi-column.
* Responsive by default. For email this means that multi-column layouts can "collapse" to one column on mobile. So a 3x3 grid becomes 1x9 and the content of each cell isn't tiny on a phone.
* Cross email client compatible. It handle Outlook, GMail and Apple Mail out of the box. This means lots of <table>s, that's just life.
* One-click export to HTML with inlined CSS.
* Image hosting. You can host the images yourself, but most of the time that's an extra step you don't care about.
* Allows for saving and re-editing. It's not fun creating a variation of a template from scratch.
I'm not a web dev, but I had a plan for some time now for a small sideproject and this seems it has a potential to accelerate things for me. Does it generate fairly vanilla/idiomatic bootstrap? I would take the generated html to the backend, but if I later decided to edit html directly I wouldn't want to deal with weirdness left by your software.
What are your payment options? They seems to be hidden behind email form.
Any weird drm? I seem to format/reinstall OS more frequently and wouldn't want to deal with problems arising from the software refusing to run when I change my distro.
This looks really cool. It seems like you have a lot of granular control over the elements and layout. That being said, most of the websites I build these days don't need this level of customization. I've found that Blocs[1] is more my tempo. I just really want to organize structure at a high level, add content, polish, and export.
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[ 18.7 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadAlso I had to reach the bottom of the page to find out that it was a desktop app. Is it built in Electron? One last tip if this works as well as it looks in the demo you could easily double your price.
Sorry, if you don't bother supporting Firefox or Safari, then I don't bother looking your website either.
(No, I don't ask you to support IE 8)
Edit: Didn't know it was desktop application. Explanation below.
(written in Firefox)
First lines (1200px height) don't mention desktop app.
>Introducing Bootstrap Studio
>A powerful web design tool for creating responsive websites using the Bootstrap framework.
Then there is call to action button, which says that we don't support you.
Most users then close tab.
$50 for 1 year free updates and only 3 installs is a little bit steep.
Charge me again for Bootstrap studio 3 or something but don't end updates for 2 after 1 year.
If this becomes a good solid product - I would expect to be paying several hundred dollars.
It still comes down to how skillful the creator is, to not end up with nested divs and classes like "rt-col1-flex-span-head".
That's been my experience in the past with these kind of tools as well. Its easy to make a mess.
Sorry guys, but if your little app doesn't work in Firefox, I don't care about it, it's probably not worth time to even look at it.
...
Please
[1] http://macaw.co
You can define your layout pretty quickly if you have ever made a bootstrap layout before.
I know there are other alternatives as well but does anyone have any significant experience with this?Is this a lot better, is this the best one out there?
They hooked me on the $49 price when I started playing around and I was ready to buy until I saw that the price jumps to $99 if I want master page support and some other nice things.
I realize it is well worth it but I just can't justify a $100 editor for my hobby projects. I just purchased this tool for $25 as its pricing aligns with what I'm willing to spend much better.
And good to see another Bulgarian venture :-)
I always ask my team, how is that as developers we always want free software but yet want a salary hike every year as a software programmer!
A lot of people are short-sighted and self-centered. It's completely and totally rational to buy this product if you're billing at $75/hr and this tool saves you 10+ hours that you couldn't justify billing.
Some people just don't "get it" - that you must produce something of value before you can consume, and that every exchange must leave everyone better off. This is what used to upset me about the software pirates, torrenters, etc. It'll all catch up in the end though, so no need to over-analyze people like this.
When you're at work, you typically just have to use the tools the rest of the team does. Then when you are at home, working on a side project... it's essentially a hobby and saving time in a hobby is just a 'nice to have'.
The 50% off on the other hand brings it down to where I'm willing to pay for it. So I did.
Software pricing is a very strange beast. It seems to vary so widely, with not always a very obvious price/quality connection. And over time, it doesn't seem to follow any reasonable expectation; I paid £65 for a game 25 years ago, which would be over £90 in today's money.
In the end everyone has to put food on the table.
If you're not working, you're not the target market for an application for professional developers and designers.
a dedicated app is not needed.
Now you're just wasting your marketing..
If they wrote it in Java and in that way claim multiple platforms, I daresay it would be even worse, on all platforms.
If they used a tool that did the conversion for them, it would likely be a security and usability disaster, even though I need sources for that.
So a bias against a multi-platform tool is understandable.
The one exception is a Javascript tool, since things like Chromium have a LOT of effort put into them by companies with thousands of developers on payroll. However the number of tools that should run in such a environment is limitted.
http://electron.atom.io/
However, based on the fact that this app has an "in-Chrome browser" demo mode available... I'm assuming that it's REALLY a web application, packaged up for desktop use (like the Atom text editor).
Personally, I think that the Atom route of "HTML/JavaScript on the desktop" is a poor choice in most cases (a Bootstrap designer tool might be the rare exception). Regardless, there are multiple cross-platform frameworks out there today that look and work just great. Being turned off by cross-plat support is really an outdated bias, I think.
But if something like this existed for email, I would buy it in a snap. I have yet to find a desktop tool that can make decent responsive html emails, and that is one of the main strengths that Bootstrap should offer. Skip the JQ efects.
Perhaps you can make a email mode that is JS free, strips out the unused CSS, and inlines the remaining rules?
http://foundation.zurb.com/emails
In the interim, their online tool has serious limitations (it has been a few months since I last tried, but iirc it wouldn't let me save my templates, add images, make edits after exporting or even edit generated styles).
If you're looking to code, you should check out Litmus Builder (http://litmus.com/email-builder), a code editor specifically built for email design. Has a bunch of templates available, instant previews in a bunch of different clients, email-specific CSS inlining, etc. Full disclosure: I work at Litmus, but even if I didn't, I'd still use Builder for the previews alone.
I wouldn't be surprised if Campaign Monitor's email templates built in their builder follow the same approach. MailChimp's too, for that matter. The team there use similar techniques.
* Drag and drop with common content types. Text, HTML, image, button, divider, social icons.
* Controls for fonts, colors, borders, padding, etc. You don't want to adjust CSS after the CSS is inlined.
* Control over email structure. Most email layouts are a single column or pre-built with a multi-column area. A good editor allows you to add new sections that are single or multi-column.
* Responsive by default. For email this means that multi-column layouts can "collapse" to one column on mobile. So a 3x3 grid becomes 1x9 and the content of each cell isn't tiny on a phone.
* Cross email client compatible. It handle Outlook, GMail and Apple Mail out of the box. This means lots of <table>s, that's just life.
* One-click export to HTML with inlined CSS.
* Image hosting. You can host the images yourself, but most of the time that's an extra step you don't care about.
* Allows for saving and re-editing. It's not fun creating a variation of a template from scratch.
For the last three years, we've been working on our email builder: https://www.klaviyo.com/email-templates. I think it has all of the above.
[0] https://bootstrapstudio.io/demo/assets/css/styles.css
[1] - https://www.blocsapp.com