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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Do you want to completely change the way that native mobile apps are developed?

I'm looking for a co-founder for Neonto, join me on this trip:

The product is a native Mac app. It's close to alpha stage, and I'm confident that there will be a usable beta in a few months. (Much of the code is recycled from a previous project of mine, Radi [1], so there's a proven foundation.)

The company has a tiny pre-seed investment and a handful of real customers lined up who are eager to use the product even in an alpha quality release.

Having previously done a company alone, I don't want to be in that situation again. I'd love to meet a co-founder who preferably would have either a design or business background combined with a good understanding of mobile user experience.

[1] http://radiapp.com

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Your website design needs work. I don't want to wait a long time for single words to appear.

I think it's kind of awesome. You're trying to get people's attention, and while you're not going to go through the process of laying out the whole product and what it is (because it's not there yet), this kind of thing I find very effective.

I take it you don't find the video appealing to watch on its own?

I guess I wanted the teaser site to reflect the product's output: it's a tool for creating mobile apps with high visual impact and motion graphics style, so the website is also like that (perhaps to the point of being form over function).

We get the idea but just let people skip if they want to. Like the infamous "Skip Intro" buttons from the flash era haha.

Is that for designing cross-platform, just Android, or is it better than XCode in some way?

Cross-platform native code generation: Objective-C for iOS, Java for Android. The tool itself works only on Mac - it still needs Xcode for building and deploying to the App Store, so a Windows version wouldn't be useful.

The big difference from Xcode is that Neonto Studio is completely visual. It's for designers. It's not an IDE; there's no code editor, no property bindings, or any of those things that make Xcode / Interface Builder so intimidating.

The generated code is therefore basically the view / view-controller side of an app. A programmer can easily integrate it into a project, and it saves a lot of time compared to doing the same work in code.

There's also a whole class of content-centric apps that can be done completely within this tool: books, video apps, music albums... Anything that's self-contained, doesn't need a server and doesn't have complex business logic.

Got it, that's what I was assuming it was. That's very cool. Will it handle screen sizes, scroll views, tablet vs. phone, etc? If not, I can't give my design team this tool then code from their views, it just won't work. My Storyboards look nothing like what comes out, because I have to do so much manipulation of the views to fit all the screens I need and to do Scroll View bullshit.

If you solve that, I'd use it and I'm a coder not a designer. Regardless, that is a REALLY exciting idea. It's one of those things where an 80% solution won't cut it which always worries me (that's what WYSIWYG web design tools rarely catch on) but a 100% solution doesn't seem impossible.

Yeah, support for various tablet and phone screen sizes is a core feature. I'm trying to keep it as close to a traditional desktop publishing workflow as possible while still respecting the interactive nature of the medium.

Personally I don't like the built-in autolayout solutions on iOS and Android at all. The latter is too limited, while the constraint system on iOS is over-engineered and difficult to reason about. Since neither platform provides a designer-friendly solution, I feel there's a good opportunity for a third party here.

I find iOS autolayout to be horrible, so I agree. Even dealing with iPhone4 vs. iPhone 5 is ridiculously hard for no reason.

Really interesting project, would love to learn more about your vision.

Let's talk! Drop me an email (address is in my profile).

Is this like PaintCode or different?

Many similarities, but different use case and workflow. It's to PaintCode like Indesign (or After Effects) is to Photoshop.

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