[jimmytucson]

Here's the discussion from the last time he submitted this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3959486

Would be interested to hear how the product has evolved since then. Have they incorporated any of the feedback they received the first time around?

[longneckdeer]

Yes, we've worked on A LOT of items from the last submission.

The biggest problem was that it's not really easy for people to get started on how to build applications with Ragic. People don't like to read documents, so we added an "Interactive Tutorial".

The interactive tutorial takes new users step by step to build a simple application on Ragic, pretty much like how you do it on a flash game or online game. If you click through the tutorial, you will have built a simple Ragic application. We really hope that this can help our users get the hang of it.

[chj]

I love the idea. the interactive guide is horrible. far from simple. Sorry for being blunt.

[longneckdeer]

Hi, did you run into some problems in the tutorial? Or because the steps of the tutorial is too complex?

[DeepDuh]

Trying to answer here for him: I ran into troubles with the third field added - the demo didn't react anymore, I couldn't type in the field name. Also I agree that it should be a bit less restrictive. For example it only accepts the step when I actually type in "Customer". I'd prefer arrows and a fixed help box instead of the overlays - as it is at one time had to look around where it wants me to go next.

A few more things:

- It was hard for me to get into design mode again after having tried the form view. I'd make that more prominent. Right now I think it's only in the context menu for the entities, not for the whole db however.

- I see forms, but do you have (dynamic) list views as well? How do I format / generate them?

- Try to get rid of all the "leave this page" browser warnings.

- paragraph text fields behave very odd in Chrome (graphical issues after resizing, I think it also cut some pasted text). I also think rich text capability might be critical there, but I can understand that you wanted to avoid that beast at first.

In general I like the approach - I think it's a very valid business idea to try to give benefits to all those businesses with Excel 'workflow applications'. The ability to do multiuser editing might be a big enough benefit alone to get some customers - maybe you could accentuate more on that. IMO however the UX from the developer end needs a lot of streamlining.

[longneckdeer]

Hi,

1. What browser/OS version are you using? I would like to reproduce this issue.

2. It's in the context menu you mentioned, and in the upper right corner of the form. We should find some way to make it more prominent.

3. The dynamic list views are generated automatically. When you finish designing a form, just click "<< Back Listing" and it will take you to the listing page.

4. We added the "leave this page" warning because a lot of users have mentioned that they accidentally click on the exit button.

5. There's some special feature that we added to the copy and paste function that might confuse new users. I think we need to disable it by default. The feature is mean to match the field names from the source with the field names in the Ragic form, and put values from the source to their corresponding fields.

Really appreciate the feedback, please let me know if there's any other advices. I can be contacted at jeff at ragic dot com

[DeepDuh]

1) OSX 10.8.x, latest Chrome (omw right now, can't check)

4) How about a save-by-default stance? is versioning and rollback hard to implement on your stack? (those two characteristics should be used together IMO) Alternatively I'd just implement a message that asks whether to save, forget changes or cancel.

[chj]

Yes, I signed up and gave it a try. However, what I expected is a freestyle drag and drop, not a workflow fixed at every step.

[longneckdeer]

I see. It's freestyle drag and drop after you exit the tutorial. Fixed workflow is only for teaching purpose only.