I completely disagree with everyone else, I believe there is a large market for tools like this. Adobe make a lot of money from photoshop and I personally along with most web designers I know are dissatisfied with photoshop and its alternatives, they are are terrible tools for designing websites and applications.
I think it needs a lot of polish, your application is designed like a website itself, dont have a footer, reduce the size of the header etc, make the "canvas" more obvious etc. I dont have time to do a proper critique right now, but the next time I need to design something I will make sure to write it all down and send it along
(I think you should rethink the name as well, jAnything just makes me things its some jquery plugin)
Awesome work so far, dont be disheartened if all the feedback isnt sunshine and roses right now.
Photoshop's power = macros and actions (IMHO there are commercial outfits producing actions for Photoshop)
I have yet to see a web based design tool that has a good macro system - even basic ones (like auto align, increase/decrease font size, etc.) are missing
It's like telling someone who uses emacs to go and use gedit.
Obviously power users will be hard to make switch, however there is a whole lot of people paying for "less powerful" code editors because they have a much lower barrier to entry and do the things way want to do better, bringing up textmate vs emacs at least to me strengthens the argument.
Thanks. I'd love to hear your feedback. You can email me at either matt@jmockups or matthew.h.mazur@gmail.com. That's the kind of feedback I want and need.
... And if this was an easy task, someone else would have already done it :)
some very quick details
* the canvas size is fixed, cant seem to be able to expand it
* the resize handlers are annoying, selections dont "feel" nice, "feeling nice" is important imo
* I didnt see how to define gradients
* Put a much nicer looking website for a demo than hacker news, maybe the 37 signals front page
Interesting -- the canvas size shouldn't be fixed. There's a grip in the bottom right corner which should allow you to resize it. If it doesn't, let me know.
Can you articulate why the selections don't feel nice?
Gradients are possible and also on the todo list. Designing a clean UX to facilitate their creation is tough though. If only there was a tool I could use to experiment with different designs...
As far as the demo site, I'll change it. But today's HackerNews launch day, so it only seems appropriate.
oh sorry, I didnt notice the canvas resize, I think thats more along the problem I mentioned before, it feels like a website a little much, I expect my "canvas" to be centered and on a darker gray bg, as it would be in gimp / photoshop / inkscape / fireworks etc.
the selection is harder to explain, the canvas can quite busy and its not very easy to know exactly what is selected, the combination with the floating dialog is kinda annoying as well.
but yeh, too busy to give you proper feedback, will email
also, whats with the weird feature detection for canvas, why not just send people straight to the demo and use standard canvas detection methods, it can bail out with a message if canvas isnt there.
I almost failed the test because the canvas text didnt render the same
I think it needs a lot of polish, your application is designed like a website itself, dont have a footer, reduce the size of the header etc, make the "canvas" more obvious etc. I dont have time to do a proper critique right now, but the next time I need to design something I will make sure to write it all down and send it along
(I think you should rethink the name as well, jAnything just makes me things its some jquery plugin)
Awesome work so far, dont be disheartened if all the feedback isnt sunshine and roses right now.