Invision and similar apps like it, technically, do everything Red Pen does. But in doing everything, they become overwhelming to use. The clients I worked with on freelance struggled to understand Invision: the signup was lengthy and distracting, the mode switching confused them, they lost their place in the hierarchy— it required me to prod them to use it, and it produced shallow feedback. Conversely, I have a folder of Red Pen customer emails who report their clients produce significantly greater feedback.
This word's meaning has been hugely diluted but "experience" matters. If you're trying to communicate something, you want your message to come across as you intend. If you want someone to be honest with you, you want them to feel at ease. That's the difference. It's easy to give feedback on Red Pen.
My co-founder @8apixel and I co-designed it (we make competing designs then choose/merge the best ideas.) We both shared in coding the front-end.
Coding front-end and animations is just searching google for examples + practice. I didn't find a shortcut, sadly! I fiddle with CSS animations until they match what I imagine them to be. Ceasar (http://matthewlein.com/ceaser/) is really good for getting kinetics right.
It's also a huge help when designers better than you give you feedback and suggestions; because they can picture a different finished product to you. During Red Pen's development I would share Red Pen with other designers who would give me feedback about Red Pen on Red Pen (whoa).
Back-end learning was harder because I came in (a year ago) with little Ruby or Rails knowledge. Why the Lucky Stiff's ebook on Ruby was inspirational (and it had cartoons cats!!). Rails for Zombies was a nice primer to Rails. The rest was Google. Knowing devs was a bonus because I could hire them to cover my arse (security audits and performance optimisation.)
Yeah, we designed the pricing model based on what we would actually use as designers. I've always been able to spot arbitrary obstructions products throw up on purpose— and it never felt right.
Hi HN. I'm Matt, the co-founder of Red Pen. I'm a designer who turned developer because I wanted to make Red Pen.
This is our big v2. Cool things you could try: the front page has an onboarding bot that simulates using the product; commenting on designs use Pusher and stream live; and I like to think I made it pretty damn fast.