I love this concept and have been anxious since Pasquale's first Dribbble shot about it to try it out! I had some time to toy with it last night and here's what I came across (in Chrome) -
- The blue steps/process didn't stand out very much (see last bullet).
- Couldn't initially tell it was drag-and-drop rather than just click one box to another.
- Wasn't intuitive that where you drag the line to and from are very important to the function you're trying to create. If there were little link icons that showed up for each attribute on element box (node?) hover that when clicked would show the possible attachment points on the other elements, that would have been more straight-forward.
- Don't like having to click an attribute to see and adjust it's value. And I was secretly hoping that there was an invisible slider ala Brett Victor so that I could just drag my cursor and have the value adjusted.
- My window only took up half the screen so when it came to applying the text, it inserted the text layer barely visible in the bottom corner. You could still move the element around, but the black modal that popped up with how to use it stayed on top and had no way of being closed, so my lesson ended there. I think a Layers window like digitalengineer suggested would be helpful here, but also possibly making it so that there's a wizard-like step system with an area underneath for specific instruction so people can see how far along they are and know exactly where to look for help.
Overall, great work! I think this will be a hit with kids and people that enjoy using tools like canv.as and makr.io.
- The blue steps/process didn't stand out very much (see last bullet).
- Couldn't initially tell it was drag-and-drop rather than just click one box to another.
- Wasn't intuitive that where you drag the line to and from are very important to the function you're trying to create. If there were little link icons that showed up for each attribute on element box (node?) hover that when clicked would show the possible attachment points on the other elements, that would have been more straight-forward.
- Don't like having to click an attribute to see and adjust it's value. And I was secretly hoping that there was an invisible slider ala Brett Victor so that I could just drag my cursor and have the value adjusted.
- My window only took up half the screen so when it came to applying the text, it inserted the text layer barely visible in the bottom corner. You could still move the element around, but the black modal that popped up with how to use it stayed on top and had no way of being closed, so my lesson ended there. I think a Layers window like digitalengineer suggested would be helpful here, but also possibly making it so that there's a wizard-like step system with an area underneath for specific instruction so people can see how far along they are and know exactly where to look for help.
Overall, great work! I think this will be a hit with kids and people that enjoy using tools like canv.as and makr.io.