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by CaveTech 4375 days ago
I'm on the same page as the parent comment. It literally looks like any other Javascript graph framework.

There seems to be no additional tools added to make it intuitive for non engineers. You want them to run web servers, save text documents and edit JSON markup. Not a single one of my non engineering coworkers would ever make it through this on their own. Further, if they make a mistake in the JSON syntax they're going to be ruined. Absolutely no chance that they figure out what's wrong. JSON syntax is pretty straightforward for engineers, but others aren't going to understand the requirement of quotes, escaping, etc. The JSON markup has a ton of parameters that aren't explained and aren't super obvious.

I understand what you're trying to provide by what you've just stated, but this product definitely isn't that, unfortunately.

3 comments

You've completely missed the point. The site is for developers who make visualisations to be able to allow users to use the visualisations with their own data. It requires you to first create the vis code, then use the Blockspring API to wrap the data source, then the website auto-generates a data upload form that populates the plot.
As someone unfamiliar with the product entirely, this point was very non-obvious. Especially since nothing on the original page linked to the main ui.
Got it - just updated some language in our blog post since this was clearly confusing :)

Also added a link to the main page.

When an engineer does all that code, it gets posted to the front page of blockspring.com. That front-page definitely does not require code to use.

Thanks for pointing this out

Blahah got it right! Sorry but it's our bad. We're updating the post right now to clarify.