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Apply HN: Finch.io – Edit any live website’s design

17 points by degif ↗ HN
https://finch.io

It is nearly impossible to quickly fine-tune or experiment on a live website. E-mails, screenshots and psd's are used to communicate the changes between designers, developers, project managers and clients. We believe that this is wrong. Web professionals should work in a medium that they are creating for.

Finch is a visual, collaborative tool which allows users to edit or comment any web site’s design and content directly in the browser. Users can create different versions of the website and share them with their team or client. Finch helps to quickly iterate and test new ideas, improve collaboration across different departments and boost the workflow. It doesn’t matter how the web site is built – either it’s custom made, a template, Wordpress blog or Shopify shop - Finch will work on top of that.

We are a team of two - UX designer and developer. We both come from a full-service digital agency and we faced the same problems every day – there was no painless way to quickly iterate on website's design and content after it is developed. We were struggling with making final touches and fulfilling client requests. It took too much time, tools and patience to get it done the right way.

Currently we are working on the final steps on our first beta version (the demo on our landing page is just an insight and the real tool is much more powerful).

We would love to get some questions or feedback!

12 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 39.2 ms ] thread
theideasmith
Kudos to you guys! Your website is magical and extremely well done. Instead of giving a whole load of talk you let me experience just how powerful Finch is the moment I arrive (and I understand this is only a beta version).

I can see so many reasons for this to be revolutionary to web publishing/design.

Good luck!

degif
Thanks! The tool on the site is not even beta, it's just a visual insight of what we are building. The real tool is much more powerful (e.g. we put a lot of thought into the responsive design controls and workflow). We would love to show you that, but it's not ready for prime time yet.
[dead] chris2chris
There are different software languages for different websites.
vr3690
Pretty cool. Signed up for beta.

It's difficult to provide feedback without trying the actual tool and you mentioned that the demo isn't the full blown tool. To fix that maybe you can think of providing the HN crowd with a code they can use to sign up for the beta instantly instead of waiting for an email from you.

seeing
This is really cool guys.

Some feedback:

- I love the toolbox on the right

- moving the F around doesn't work

degif
F is now tamed, thank you!
ApolloRising
Some Feedback: When a user clicks the first try finch button and then decides to sign up the submission does not go through until you close the finch side bar. You are probably losing quite a few sign ups to that issue.
degif
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, we are aware of this one, but the alternative would be to brake the interaction with the tool and disallow users to fiddle around with the design of the form :/
hoodoof
I don't know about all the collaboration and sharing hoo-ha.

I can say though that when I'm doing front end development I waste alot of time iterating on user interface changes by changing the code and building the app and running it.

I try to reduce this by doing live CSS tuning as much as possible using Chrome developer tools then I move my adjustments into my code.

Something I have thought would be helpful would be a tool that displays all the colors that I am using on a page and allows me to easily change them.

Also to be able to list all the fonts I am using on a page and rapdily find the best looking font by allowing me to cycle through different fonts.

degif
This. As an ex-freelancer myself I totally understand you are talking about and is one of the main reasons why we came up with the idea of Finch. Apart from the collaboration (which comes in really handy when you work together with a nitpicky freelance designer), you can think about Finch as a browser developer tool with an UI that can save the changes you make.

Page colors, fonts and text styles already are on our roadmap marked as "must-have" ;)

hoodoof
I only need code saved to the extent that I can copy and paste it into may application.

Trying to build some sort of live site editor would be of no value to me personally, maybe to others.

hoodoof
I know it's not something your software does, but as a developer I would pay cold hard cash for something that dynamically allowed me to adjust the flexbox properties of the elements on my page.

Flexbox makes life easy(ier), but it's still complex to work out how to get the outcomes that I want to align and position elements.