Like many web frameworks and libraries, the front page did not make it clear to me what the heck a Fizzgum is or why I should care. The tag line, "The power of an entire Operating System at your fingertips," told me basically nothing.
On the other hand, the "Is Fizzygum for me" page in the docs was wonderful! Good job to whoever wrote it. While not really discussing what Fizzygum is, it nonetheless gave a series of really good examples and guidelines as to whether I should bother investigating further for my use case. So many tools and libraries promise to be all things to all people and shy away from pointing out what they're NOT good for, and so I really appreciate that page. Good job.
I doubt this is a new trend and it doesn't seem very surprising. Being able to communicate "the point" of what you're doing to someone who doesn't know anything about it is a skill that is hard to acquire and hard to maintain for anyone.
It's important for all of us to stress its importance though. Anyone who wants to create something new probably have to constantly polish that skill.
> > the front page did not make it clear to me what the heck a Fizzgum is or why I should care
> This is a very depressing trend of late.
Yes, it's a maddening trend.
I have to evaluate many smaller company offerings and it has become crazy how most websites fail to communicate anything at all about what the product actually does.
Give me architectural diagrams and call sequences, high level API descriptions, etc. I want a page that will tell me what it actually does and what I, prospective user, need to very specifically do to use it or integrate with it. But no, none of that info is available 90+% of the time.
I blame it on how the website has transitioned from engineering to marketing. Way back, we'd get a website packed with information about what the product does and how to use it. Sure, it was ugly but whatever. I could spent 20 minutes reading and get a thorough understanding of how the product works.
Today websites are very pretty, smooth logos and lots of scrolling. But no info. Drives me crazy.
I went to the site, felt puzzled, watched the video, decided it was probably satire, then went to the comments here, and now I'm not sure what to believe anymore.
It seems to be a fast way to create Celery Man[1]-type GUIs. You can put gifs, mspaint clones and clocks into windows and move them around. Thats... neat, I guess. Does anyone have some more context of why this exists? Real-world use cases? Is it actually in use somewhere, or is it a tech demo? Or is it satire after all, and they just managed to balance it exactly at the point where I couldn't tell?
I love the term celery man-type GUI and do like that I have an easy way to make my own cinco identity generator now.
I've only watched the demo video, but a large portion of my last job was a) tuning devices with serial data streaming to a custom made live plotter b) analyzing tests in jupyter notebooks c) sharing that data. An easy to use, standardized live plotter and a way to share charts and analysis beyond emailing html/pdf versions of the notebooks or copy/pasting the graphs into a powerpoint both would have been very useful. It seems like this might fill one or both of those needs?
This seems to be a project that was derived from or a fork of Morphic.js, which in turn was inspired by the Smalltalk-based Squeak: https://squeak.org/
Not to be rude, I'm sure this is an amazing project by brilliant people, but for some reason something about this branding and marketing really struck me as almost satirical on a subconscious level. Unfortunately I can't give an exact reason why. Maybe it made me think of Fizzbuzz, plus the animated plots seem a bit over the top?
Anyhow you did a solid job explaining exactly what this really is in the landing page, so kudos to that
Same here. Kinda ironic that we had similar technology with let's say Delphi back in 1997, or similar"terrible" Oracle Forms thing and yet - no simple RAPID GUI tool for plain websites...
Not a web developer by trade, so I just kind of assumed someone out there had a forms builder equivalent to what VB, Delphi, or FoxPro (my old product) had 25 years ago. Throw some controls on a page, tie it to a data source, sorted. No?
Then the submitter (or probably the maintainer) should include a description of what this thing is. "FizzyGum: No-Code Data Visualizations" would be great!
So, there's a doc on building Dashboards, where I seem to be able to put a map of the USA or a randomly generated scatterplot into a dashboard... But how to I actually get useful data into the system from some external source?
On the other hand, the "Is Fizzygum for me" page in the docs was wonderful! Good job to whoever wrote it. While not really discussing what Fizzygum is, it nonetheless gave a series of really good examples and guidelines as to whether I should bother investigating further for my use case. So many tools and libraries promise to be all things to all people and shy away from pointing out what they're NOT good for, and so I really appreciate that page. Good job.