Thanks for letting us know! We're happy to hear that.
We've changed the product quite a bit in response to the huge projects that our users create on our design platform. Nevertheless, we've also faced quite a few engineering issues in respect to browser performance and real time backend data synchronization.
We're still bootstrapped and fairly small (< 25 employees including the founders). We've grown organically to about 1 million users since then. The feedback we've got on our submission back then gave us enough courage to go from just a pet side-project to a full time business, so Big Thanks HN! That day was one of the happiest days in the history of our business.
Moqups[1], our HTML5 based mockup/wireframing app, is completely free for education, non profit and open source projects. To our great surprise, we get a fairly large amount of requests each week from many universities and from open source developers. Aaaand we're happy to fulfill all of them :-)
It's probably because Firefox does not support many presentation attributes as well as proper font antialiasing for the text and tspan SVG tags. It looks like they did create their own text layout engine with support for flowing around arbitrary shapes.
I'm curious how well this works, since emulating native text capabilities (just think RTL vs LTR) requires an insane amount of Javascript and the performance is pretty terrible for texts longer than a few hundred words. If they got this right, it must be a masterpiece of Javascript code. Google recently introduced their own text layout capabilities in Google Docs (also SVG based) and it's pretty buggy beyond simple text. Just to highlight the complexity of the issue, they used to render text into SVG on the server until recently.
It's one of the reasons we had to use foreignObject with pure HTML inside for Moqups instead, although it prevents us from supporting IE at all, including IE 11. We can at least target Webkit/Blink & Gecko this way.
We decided to avoid publishing an indexable listing of public projects so we can protect the privacy of our users at least to the extent where they don't publish the unique, indecipherable link themselves ("Available to anyone who knows the link"). We think it's the most ethical approach for handling this situation.
Hi Matt, don't worry - we really appreciate and reflect upon all kinds of feedback, specially the most honest ones. We may disagree on various topics, but that's what makes a good debate!
Thank you - you have a very valid point with the image limitations so we'll reconsider.
We're also planning many more integrations and Basecamp is close our radar. We're seeing huge amounts of traffic coming from tools like Aptana, Trello or Basecamp so this makes a lot of sense.
It took us a while (and more than 60,000 free users!) to better understand our business metrics and see what our opportunities are until we've made these not always easy decisions. We also had a look at what our competing products are offering and many times it's nothing more than a free, very limited trial.
Let me try to shed some more light about the free version:
- We've tried to avoid disabling common sense functionality just for forcing users to upgrade. Unlimited saving, unlimited exporting, unlimited pages and so on. Keep in mind that all mockups are throwaway artifacts that one can simply export and then safely delete their projects. It's a little inconvenient but it's not a finite resource that users can't replenish like in a case of a time limited trial. The premium features are typically wanted by business users who like a little more granular privacy settings, run multiple projects through their many customers or prospects or have extremely big projects that can benefit from productivity features like master pages. The premium users even avoid using our service for free if they don't have some confidence that someone is running a sustainable and trustworthy business in behind.
- There is no data loss when you downgrade from a premium plan. The only thing we do is gracefully disable some premium functionality and restrict editing (not viewing) to projects created in the premium period.
- All the users who signed up before got to keep their projects and the editing capabilities. Some of them have more than 150 huge projects.
- On top of this, we are giving non profit and educational organizations as well as open source teams free premium plans.
- We rarely say no to users asking for discounts or extended trials if they can't afford the premium plans.
Our most important goal for us is to create a business we can grow so we can bring more value for our users - we really have a ton of great features in the pipeline that we're excited about.
Time will tell whether we've made the right steps or if we have to make certain adjustments to our business.
At Moqups ( https://moqups.com ) we've been through a very painful process of trying to implement a word wrap component in SVG and after a few months decided to throw it out and use foreignObject. We decided that it's impossible to be able to cover the thousands of text handling scenarios for all the languages and scripts out there and the performance makes it very unfeasible beyond a few hundred words. With few exceptions related to measuring text across browsers/operating systems, this was a very good decision.
Sadly it's also the main reason for why we're not planning to support any version of IE moving forward although many users request it.
Slightly unrelated, but I'm also happy to see getStrokeBBox in there. It's been a total pain to manually compute the stroked bbox of each stencil so the layout engine can properly arrange each element in respect to its painted area.
Moqups is free while in Beta. Additionally, the main use cases will always be free (with some reasonable limitations).
The premium features will revolve around collaboration, feedback, annotations and other things. When these are launched, we'll definitely make the pricing clear and visible for everyone.
- With SVG we can easily draw very complex geometry, resulting in nice looking, configurable stencils, interactivity and many other features that would've required immense engineering efforts to achieve in pure Canvas backed up by heavy Javascript. This would've have reduced our creativity and ability to adapt fast moving forward. Creating new stencils and adapting to new UI trends is a breeze now. With Canvas, the situation would've been different and highly coupled in the back of the Javascript code.
- SVG is resolution independent. While we haven't optimized Moqups for a full mobile experience YET, if you look at some mockups on any Hi-DPI (Retina) display, the experience is simply gorgeous. Printing is also a great addition, because you can virtually print huge sheets without loss of quality, making face to face collaboration great.
- SVG is heavily used for precise visualizations and technical drawing in industrial engineering, outside its web roots. Not sure how to properly explain this - We just kind of wanted to pay some homage to these folks.
The learning curve for SVG was tremendous though, with many obstacles that made us cringe and almost and quit at points. This is mostly because SVG is such an underused technology nowadays and the documentation is still scarce. However, it was extremely fun and it's nice to see that SVG is becoming more and more relevant nowadays in the context of HTML5.
About performance: Despite the many optimizations we have done, we still have quite a few technical debts that, once fixed, will make Moqups even faster and behave well with a lot of objects. Beside this, Chrome and others are about to introduce hardware acceleration for the SVG layers soon, so all in all, more good news.
Moqups is free while in Beta. Additionally, the main use cases will always be free (with some reasonable limitations).
The premium features will revolve around collaboration, feedback, annotations and other things. When these are launched, we'll definitely make the pricing clear and visible for everyone.
A lot of these items are on our plate already and we'll address them as soon as we get some bandwidth.
- We'll try to improve the Stencil/Images tab usability
- Stencils are already using tags/aliases when searching them. Categories will be extremely beneficial as well.
- Templates are on our plate too.