I think I require further explanation. I played with this and all it seems is a quick and easy way to build a feed reader with a data source of your choice. It does look like you can put your own HTML and CSS to change the look but I don't see how to change or add functionality with code. I think that part needs to be explained more because otherwise it just appears to be a "Look at my feed!" app. I'm sure those have their uses but it's easy enough to make a page on our site that's a feed.
Plus, why is there a debugger if I'm not writing any code? That is what's making me think I'm missing something somewhere.
Thanks for the feedback, we will try to clarify this in the future.
There are two ways to use the Joshfire Factory:
- no development, using the available applications templates.
- import your own application code
Most templates help you to generate content-based applications. Which means, adding existing online data into an application well designed for the object it will be deployed on. They may be "Look at my feed" apps, but there is a need from professionals for this kind of app today. They have online content, and they want to reach more devices.
If you import your own code via git, you are able to build any kind of application you want. You may want to use the debugger add-on to debug it on a built native application.
I had the same questions as the grandparent, but I whipped through to the end (just building a generic 'Twitter' app to get there, and then realized that I can download the source and (presumably) import it into Eclipse.
To me, this is the sweet spot that nobody else is doing, and that will likely have me using it, if only as a bootstrap for an application.
If I might suggest a (potentially premium) feature, make it so that I could store and upload my own 'skeleton' apps and use them with the GUI builder (to whatever degree of possibility that might be.)
Imagine being able to take my data sources and, in response to a particular piece of information on Twitter, get an alert on my phone. I push a button, and a news report is pushed to my TV, while accompanying text goes to my iPad. A monitor shows the stock price of the company involved in the story. Instantly, I'm informed! Then I close the report, marking the story as read and sending a message to another source to keep it on file. All without any programming.
To put it another way: mail-style rules for data and devices would make this killer.
I testes this and I found the application to be very well wtitten and the ui is impressive. It didn't take long time to create an app, but I was a little disappointed that the end application didn't aggregate the data, but rather kept each data source in a separate tab.
I don't think its worth breaking horizontal scrolling for those fancy page transitions or whatever reason you have for discriminating small screens / split screen users. Not everyone surfs the web full screen on a large monitor.
Hi, i'm the product manager of the Joshfire Factory.
In the Factory, is your application showing UI and data in the preview panel on the right?
It would help us understand if it is an "xproj project" issue or more an application issue.
Yeah, it works. I downloaded the Xproj, opened the project and clicked 'Run' and it fired off with no problems at all, working in both resolution types.
Hi, I'm the product manager of the Joshfire Factory.
Most of the templates we provide do not use hardware features. However, because you can import your own application code in the Factory as a "private template", you can access hardware features in deploys that expose them. We are using the excellent Phonegap for our Android, iOS and Blackberry deploys. We automatically inject the Phonegap javascript API to the generated application.
I don't know for sure, but according to their FAQ they use PhoneGap behind the scenes for iOS, Android and BlackBerry.
PhoneGap often has APIs for some of features you listed, so exposing them through their abstraction is probably quite possible.
Hi, I'm from joshfire. Thanks for the feedback, for this text, we are using the "Ubuntu" webfont from Google Fonts. I will investigate why it doesn't look nice.
Web fonts typically look crappy on Windows in general. I've Googled around to try and solve the problem as a user, but I think it's because browsers tend to use Windows' GDI rendering instead of DirectDraw (or vice-versa, I forget).
Now that I think about it, I might switch to Safari for Windows for just this reason.
Well, not so much. The only similarity is that Squarespace generates websites.
The Joshfire Factory targets all the connected things: Mobiles, Tablets and desktops, but also connected TVs, kiosks...
It also generates more than websites or webapps: you can build on Joshfire's servers a packaged applicatios that can be distributed on Apple's App Store, Google Play, or other marketplaces
Another example of a potentially great technology that loses credibility at a critical juncture due to execution details.