Fantastic! We need more of this kind of thinking. "No computer required" should be the default, not the exception.
I've been playing with some ideas in my head for a while now that we should be able to build most apps this way, and not just prototypes. If we can extract the default widgets and behaviour from applications and make them reusable and connectable without code, then we'd be taking steps towards a real revolution.
I am really excited about the direction we're going in with products and tech like this.
I agree this is a great idea for prototypes but I disagree that this is a way to build anything but the most basic of apps. There are way to many subtle choices that we make as developers, that require knowledge and reasoning, and an understanding of what we are trying to build. Visual programming has been tried multiple times, but it has never had any mainstream success.
It's one of those problems where execution is extremely important.
Look at the game development world. There have been countless "game makers" that saw limited, niche success if that, usually because they were not powerful or expressive enough.
Then along came Unity.
Of course, you still have to write game scripts in Unity... but you do a whole lot of your work in the Unity IDE, dragging and dropping, clicking to attach things or to change properties, tweaking animations, colours and materials.
It is a revolutionary way of making games, and is rightfully enjoying huge success.
We need (at least!) a Unity for application development, and we need it yesterday.
But instead we have... Sublime Text, LightTable and Visual Studio. All ways of writing enhanced text.
* Our iPhone app ties in with our web app, which allows you to prototype both web and mobile. http://www.marvelapp.com. Our iPhone app is just one part of the eco-system
* We support PSD importing directly into the iPhone app
* All your images are synced with Dropbox so you can easily access them
* Our web app allows you to download prototypes as ZIPs to run offline or on your own server
* You can select dozens of different device frames (HTC One, Lumia, iPhone 5S etc)
* You can export iPad prototypes using our iPhone app
No offense, but did you bother to research Marvel _at all_ before asking this question? popapp app's landing page makes it very clear the workflow is physical paper -> photo -> storyboard, whereas Marvel's landing page is very clear their workflow is PSD/etc. -> storyboard.
Sometimes I feel like HN asks "how is this different from X app" without doing any research, just to be lazy.
No offense, I don't know where you did your research but I don't see anywhere on Marvel's landing page where it makes clear its main flow is PSD -> storyboard. In my opinion, Marvel's landing page makes it very clear that workflow is paper -> photo -> storyboard just like Popapp, but also supports importing a PSD image (which doesn't seem like a groundbreaking differentiation). Granted, the founder explained the difference somewhere above but they're still "improvements", they fundamentally do the same thing.
Any plans to increase the depth of the prototype beyond simple wireframe linking? (e.g., a drawn camera icon pops open the devices camera, editable fields, etc.)
We have some plans to try and add more and more realism without needing much user input. For example on the web app you can access your iPhone prototype and add things like fixed header and footers, app icons, iOS7 transitions etc
The hardest part i've found is trying to include this all in the iPhone app design. This version is definitely our base, from here we can start adding a few more things to make your prototypes more app-like
What a great idea! I've been using Balsamiq for a few years now, but I usually sketch my idea out on paper before translating that to the editor manually. I would kill for this kind of hot-linking functionality for general web apps with the off-the-cuff feel of hand-drawn sketches.
Just browsing your site, it looks like your main app is used like that, albeit apparently for more refined mockups (I'm sure I'm mixing up terminology here, but I'm not a designer so bear with me). Next time I have to design a site I'll try integrating Marvel with my Balsamiq workflow and see what happens.
App looks nice (can't check it out, no iDevice). I like the simplicity of it. Do you plan on adding any vision capabilities, like auto-detecting rectangles as candidates for buttons, circles as candidates for radio buttons, etc? I can also see you app used to make quick&funny games, which you can send your friends. Think taking a picture of a street, with a bar door as a button, and then taking a picture inside, making the bartender a button, then a picture of the drink, etc...
We don't have any image recognition stuff coming or pre-made elements but we are adding transitions/animations so that you can get a sense of what your apps might feel like.
Very nice! It took me roughly 2 minutes to upload the sample photos I had on my dropbox account, and link between them like a little game. Very intuitive interface.
A few friends and I experimented with this at a hackathon a few months ago. Check out a video demo at http://youtu.be/9ZAbQi_8y_A. Note: the OCR is mocked.
It's a beautiful site. Are you at all worried about the name Marvel? Especially now that Marvel Comics is trying to work with designers and developers too? [1]
Stumbled upon this last week and used it in conjunction with FiftyThree's Paper app to create a pretty impressive prototype that I was able to view right on my device.
Bit more of a process when using Paper, as it only seems to be able to export an entire notebook in PDF, requiring me save pages individually in order to use them in the app. I seem to recall reading somewhere that MarvelApp was capable of dealing with PDFs, but I'm obviously mistaken. Would have been a nice feature, though I'm not sure if many others would benefit from such functionality.
Hey! We're close to PDF support, i think next month we'll have it in.
It's actually a pretty common request as many people have their wireframes and visuals in PDF format and want to prototype it up so you're not alone :)
"Marvel App Prototyping would like access to .ai files, .eps files, .pdf files, .psd files, .sketch files, and images in your Dropbox."
It needs access to a hell of a lot of files in my dropbox account. Definitely not something I want scouring my files, just so it can show a few mockups - is there any way to restrict it to being able to access just a single folder, or is it really an all-or-nothing problem with Dropbox auth?
We actually started with a single folder but the UX wasn't great. It meant that everyone had to drag their existing projects and files into a specific Marvel folder in Dropbox/apps.
After we saw that no one was doing it, we figured it would be better to go to the files, rather than force people to bring the files to us.
We only access the files you choose, also Marvel was approved by the DB API team to use the service (a bit like the App Store)
Well, it's pretty frightening that you're asking for such massive, wide-scale permissions.
I understand that people are permission-clicky-happy nowadays, so it's probably something that won't even remotely affect your growth - it's just a shock to see new, tech-friendly services going with permission-grabs (even if it is, as you say, to allow for better UX)
I can't imagine why anyone would want to give up such massive access, and potentially commercially sensitive info (that they possibly don't own), but I definitely wish you all the best with this
How hard would it be to offer both options? I.e. access restricted to one or several folders, vs. access to the whole Dropbox. Also at least between users you can grant permissions for folders to other Users from within Dropbox. Is there a way to do the same for Apps?
We had an idea for how to do a dynamic matrix generator which made a lot of swipe navigation possible very easily, Will see if I can find the HTML prototype somewhere.
I've put together a blog post evaluating your iPhone app landing page. Feel free to reach out for clarification or further evaluation. Just started this service and ready to evaluate anyone else's product as well.
Quick question about marvelapp which I'm going to try out as well. Why make dropbox or google drive a requirement to use it? Doesn't that create a higher barrier to entry for your visitors? Why not just allow anyone to sign up and upload files? (Like invisionapp)
After freelancing in agencies, startups and design teams for so long I saw that everyone was using Dropbox for projects and design file storage.
With designers making hundreds of changes to their designs each day, the time it would take to keep your prototype updated is prohibative. So we figured instead of forcing the user to bring the files to our cloud solution, why don't we just go to theirs?
If we let users leave their files where they are it's one less click and thing to manage. We just keep the files in sync so the prototypes update automatically with the user lifting a finger.
On the flip-side, no everyone uses Dropbox of course and it's a barrier. But it allows us to save money on storage which we pass back onto the user and provide a great free plan (no upload or project limits)
Thanks! We actually finished .sketch support weeks ago, however the Dropbox API doesn't recognise the format yet (it sees it as a folder) so we've got to wait until it becomes available. Soon as it does we'll push it live :)
I love this! I could see this being a HUGE timesaver with my workflow.
Question for you: Is working with prototypes offline in your roadmap? I have limited connectivity where I work, and playing with your app has been troublesome.
Yes that's 100% coming, we just need a bit more time to get it right.
We launched a feature in the web app where you can download your prototype as a ZIP containing html/css/js to run offline but we really want to have offline in-browser working for everyone
In my comment I was more referring to the iPhone app side of things as that's my typical use case. I noticed that I need an active connection to do pretty much anything.
This is definitely something we have planned, our main aim was just to get this version released (it was a long painful road) but the next step is sorting out its offline capabilities
Great work. What I really like about this is how it lowers the barrier of entry for non-tech people. It is the sort of application I can show my wife or kids and let them play.
I've been playing with some ideas in my head for a while now that we should be able to build most apps this way, and not just prototypes. If we can extract the default widgets and behaviour from applications and make them reusable and connectable without code, then we'd be taking steps towards a real revolution.
I am really excited about the direction we're going in with products and tech like this.