You also need to do that if you ever write bash scripts. That such a weird thing to get hung up on. You'll get over it after a week of working in PHP.

Not if you use IDE that takes care of it. Intellij IDEA or PhpStorm just let you type the variable and put $ there for you.

I need to show this article to HOA.

I gotta say. The platform looks like it was made by a smart engineer that has never talked to a real person before.

Please read that as feedback =)

This is fully intentional =). I take that as a compliment.

Maybe I'm tired but after reading the landing page twice. I still have no idea how it works. Can I use the product without signing up? Or a video of someone using the product?

Thanks for the feedback. It's not you, it's us. ;-)

We've just been making some updates to our home page to hopefully make it clearer, but we realize we still have plenty of work to do.

If you sign in at the Rownd website, you can experience how the product will work on your own website.

We'll definitely get a shorter demo video posted soon that helps explain this too.

They provided a tutorial video [1] in the post.

I tried watching but didn't go past 90 seconds. Too verbose, TBH...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7fv17HSYrc

Thanks for the feedback! We can definitely produce a shorter demo video that provides a basic walkthrough of how it works without going into tons of detail. The one we produced for this was more of a live-coding dev walkthrough.

As someone who prefers reading text over watching videos, I can commiserate with you ;-)

Thank you for the kind words. It seems like export is a popular request. One question for you. If you export, how do you plan on making future edits? Going back to the platform to edit and export again or editing the exported code? I ask this because the export wont be html/css. It will be a small index.html with a large JSON.

Thanks for the publish suggestions. I will do some research to see how easy it is to implement.

When you say templating do you just mean pre-made sections/blocks? That already exist right now (on the second tab in the create menu). Also the ability to make custom pre-made is coming. But when you say templating do you actually mean having a component and when you edit that component, all other copies of the component changes as well?

Thanks for the feed back.

Yea, I was inspired by it but with another layer of abstraction. I wanted every element is able to have any style the user wants and hovering over elements will show spacing colors like the dev tools (I find it useful and haven't seen another site builder that does it).

I will definitely add some kind of onboarding, thanks for the suggestion. I just don't want it to be too heavy. I always felt like other users are like me and just skip all tutorials and start playing with the platform, but I'm starting to think its too complicated for that.

Thanks for the great feedback.

First of all, This platform is amazing. I love the feel, UI, and how I can easily try it out without signing up. It reeks of quality.

However, every platform in this market tries to solve a similar problem in a different way but I think no one tries to solve the biggest problem.

That problem is that there will be one or two people that really care about all of this tracking stuff but everyone else just don't. Developers don't need to check tracking tools everyday to know what they need to do and once they finish, they will not update the tracker. So when the people that cares check the tracker, it doesn't give them the latest info.

So the problem with tracking software is that it requires everyone to use it the way it was meant to be used, but employees just wanna do the 8 hours and go home and not care who is on what page.

Thanks for the feedback! It's really great to hear appreciation like that.

This is an awesome point, and one which we're keenly aware of. This is how we think about this:

Constructor must serve different roles with their own notions of success, and those notions may be at odds. That is, there are some tensions and tradeoffs within teams that exist independently of any tool, e.g., managers want stuff reported but developers just want to build software and not fill out TPS reports.

So our approach to solving your biggest problem is to try to create the best UX for each role, period, which implies Constructor must mediate these tensions where possible. For instance, our approach to blockers is very lightweight and we saw immediate uptake from devs when this was released, indicating they saw it as a help, not a burden. And of course it makes it apparent to managers what's going on without having to pester anyone. So we consider this a feature that helped both managers and devs do their jobs better without imposing an unwelcome burden on anyone. We're looking to extend this pattern in much more clever ways to get managers the facts they need without burdening developers with housekeeping tasks to provide those facts. It's a tough problem but we're optimistic we can make headway here.

Thanks for raising this point; it's really, really important.

That’s a good point. It makes me think that what one can do is to add a library in code that logs that the issue hasn’t been resolved.

Like `if (inputsNotHandled) _sendToJira(“issue is not resolved”)`

But that’s probably not easy to do in most cases…

This is great. I think something like this is very valuable to a small startup or indie hacker who has a product that requires a sign up before their users can see/use.

You know how a lot of SaaS has a video of the user story and what their app does and looks like on the landing page? Well, I think this can be way better, less time consuming, and way cheaper than hiring an animation studio to create that video. You can also edit the textframe as the product grows; something that is much harder to do for videos.

A few of small features can make this way better.

1. The ability to put the textframe in an iframe. So users can use it on their landing page.

2. The ability to auto play the steps. (it should stop autoplay if user clicks on a step to view)

3. More UI customizability so it goes with the landing page.

I see this being more valuable as a marketing tool than a tutorial tool, but I'm only one person. Good work and good luck =)

Thank you for the feedback!

When you say marketing tool, what sort of content do you have in mind?

Also, I do provide the ability to embed in your landing pages, the instructions are at the bottom of my landing page.

Oh, sorry. Must have missed it.

Don't misunderstand. I don't think the core functionality of textFrame should change. I'm just saying your users might use textFrame to convince their users how their product can solve their user's problems by showing them around the app without actually going into the app.

It is really helpful for SaaS that requires a sign up before users can use their app. Since registration is a big wall people wont go over unless they have a good understanding of the product. Most SaaS products try to do this now with images and videos.

So what I was suggesting is basically casting a wider net for textFrame. You currently market it as a tutorial solution. Consider marketing it as a "product show off/Demo" solution. Which would also include tutorials as well has any other way your users might want to show off their product.

I see what you mean now. That's a really valuable insight. Will definitely think about this for my next iteration.

I like the concept. Since users have to register to see the product, I think the landing page needs to be more informative. I was lost at "3. Add the link to your page to your website". Are you saying my app's support page needs to redirect to the link that the platform gave me? I think that should be reworded.

Ok this is amazing feedback. I'll work on this today and maybe even make a dummy dashboard that folk can play with.