BrokerMarket Acquires LayerVault IP
BrokerMarket, a OneBounce Capital Company, purchased the intellectual property of LayerVault, Inc. I was the COO at LayerVault and know what great design technology the team built.
LayerVault was a version control SaaS product for the designer community, with thousands of users worldwide. In addition to the core LayerVault product, the IP also includes PSD_native, the closed-source native Ruby extension that offers massive speed improvements to PSD.rb, a very popular open-source Ruby library developed by LayerVault to read and parse Photoshop files.
The IP also includes LayerVault’s powerful preview generation software.
We don’t currently intend to resurrect the LayerVault product, as it previously existed. Instead, we will license portions of the technology, including PSD_native. In addition, we’ll bring back portions of the LayerVault service, such as preview generation.
Former LayerVault employees will be involved in product development and licensing, inclduing possible consulting and support. Accordingly, we’ll have the institutional knowledge of the product and are pleased to be bringing back parts of the technology.
We’re open to suggestions and would love to hear from former LayerVault customers. Let us know what you would like to see us launch from the LayerVault IP. Designers and developers who might want to be part of the new LayerVault product are welcome as well. Contact me at Dan@LayerVault.com
Daniel Marren
An interview with Mike Antonic, a founder of PaintCode
The combination of executing the right idea at the right time often plays a role in the success of an application. Mike Antonic, Peter Krajcik and Matt Dunik made the choice to drop everything and work on building PaintCode for the resolution independent future they envisioned.
In our interview, Mike talks about the series of events that led to the creation of PaintCode.
Tell us about the origins of PaintCode. Why did you choose to create it?
We were working on a different Mac app with Peter Krajcik (now my co-founder at PixelCut). Even then, it was pretty clear that resolution-independence is the future, so we tried to avoid using raster images whenever possible. The entire user interface of the app was drawn using code that we wrote by hand.
This was extremely tedious, but the results were good. It sparked the idea for PaintCode.
For a while, we did nothing with the idea. But then, at the end of 2011, rumors about the upcoming iPad 3 (the first one with the Retina display) started circulating. We realized this might be a great marketing opportunity for a tool like PaintCode, because many people would need something like it to make their iPad apps Retina-ready.
It must have been risky to start developing an app solely based on rumors. How long did it take to build the first version of PaintCode?
It was already December 2011 and the rumors were indicating that the new iPad 3 will launch in March 2012. This unfortunately meant that if we wanted to use this opportunity, we only had 3 months to develop PaintCode from scratch. Ultimately, we figured this is a “now or never” situation, dropped everything we were doing at that time and started working like crazy.
The rumors turned out to be true. Apple launched the iPad 3 with Retina display on March 8th, 2012.
Three days later, we started selling PaintCode on the Mac App Store, which means this was one of those very rare software projects that was actually finished on time!
Just a few days after that, PaintCode totally exploded on Hacker News, and it has been one of the most popular developer tools on the Mac ever since.
Together with Peter, we established PixelCut, a new company centered around PaintCode. Soon, we were joined by Matt Dunik who is now also working with us on PaintCode.
What does your workflow look like? What are some of the tools you use?
This will sound horribly self-serving, but if we don’t count auxiliary apps like bug tracker or email client, we basically only use 2 tools to build PaintCode: Xcode and PaintCode itself.
We’ve designed PaintCode in PaintCode. Then, we’ve taken the generated code and actually used it to implement PaintCode’s user interface. This was true even for version 1.0, it was designed and implemented in itself.
Dogfooding is extremely important. We use PaintCode for nearly all of our internal design work. Even for designing our website.
What are some of the biggest challenges you faced when developing PaintCode?
This is not specific to the design community, but it is really, really hard to break user habits.
When designing a new feature, we often have to decide between a familiar way of doing it and a new, potentially better way. We often choose the latter, but it means we take risks. It also means that we have more explaining and convincing to do for our potential customers. Some of our most advanced features are not instantly familiar.
For example, all colors in PaintCode are reusable. You can create a color and then reuse it several times across your document. Each document contains a library of colors, gradients and other such things. When you change a color in the library, every shape that uses that color is automatically updated.
This is not the way it traditionally works in drawing apps. It is hard to explain to people, because the fact that color can be an “entity” or “object” that has existence on its own is pretty alien. But the feature turned out to be extremely useful and powerful.
There are so many problems that one could choose to work on. What do you think are the most important to solve?
I’m probably biased, but these are the biggest challenges in no particular order:
- resolution-independence (on 1x, 2x, 3x displays and beyond).
- responsive layouts for apps.
- designing flat user interfaces that not only look great, but that are also perfectly usable can be a challenge, particularly for more complicated interfaces.
What are some of the failures you faced and overcame?
When we started, we knew nearly nothing about launching and marketing a product. We’re still not very good at this, by the way.
We’ve made a lot of horrible mistakes, such as launching PaintCode 1.0 on Sunday, not even having a Twitter account or a demo version at launch and so on.
When launching PaintCode 2.0 two years later, we were unable to convince any tech reporter to review it. Either we totally suck at writing pitches or big websites simply don’t want to review an app with “code” in its name these days. It might be a combination of the two.
I’m also sure there were some huge missed opportunities we don’t even know about.
Do you have any advice for aspiring developers or designers looking to create something?
If you don’t desperately need it yourself, don’t do it. After you do it, use it as often as possible.
What are some of the biggest milestones for PaintCode?
One was just after we launched PaintCode 1.0, when we made it to #1 spot on Hacker News. There were probably several others, such as when John Gruber first mentioned us on Daring Fireball, when we launched PaintCode 2.0 and when we published our very popular iPhone 6 Screens Demystified article.
Who is your favorite person to follow on Twitter?
Probably @wilshipley, the developer of Delicious Library, who has been a personal hero of mine for many years.
What has your favorite Designer News story been of all time?
Perhaps more important to us than a particular story, Designer News is like a window into the designer community. None of us at PixelCut have a formal design education - we all have science or engineering backgrounds. We design a lot of things internally, but ultimately, we always find ourselves somewhere at the intersection of design and development.
Thanks to Designer News, we are always up-to-date on latest design trends and opinions of the designer community, which definitely helps.
If you would like to learn more about PaintCode, you can do so easily on their site.
If you liked this interview, you will also like the other interviews we’ve done with creators of design-centric software.
As always, you can discuss this post on Designer News.
LayerVault 3
Today, we’re announcing a new version of LayerVault. We’re calling it LayerVault 3, and its main focus is on speed. The team has gone to great lengths to refine the LayerVault interface, and make it even faster for our customers. We’ve improved upon dozens and dozens of small things, some of which we’ll list at the end of this post.
We do, however, have three major improvements we would like to highlight: Speed, Web Uploads, and Realtime Updates.
LayerVault is free to try and used by some great design teams worldwide.
An Interview with Meng To, author of Design+Code
After dealing with the debilitating set back of a failed visa renewal, Meng To decided to travel the world.
During this expedition, armed with twelve years of design experience, he decided to take on the challenge of creating and publishing a book. That book, Design+Code, has been a massive success.
In this interview, we learn the story behind Meng’s journey to follow his passion while faced with uncertainty.
An Interview with Tom Giannattasio, a Founder of Macaw
Macaw made waves last year when it raised $275,000 on Kickstarter. It was born out of a personal problem that the founders, Tom Giannattasio and Adam Christ, shared.
In our interview, Tom talks about letting the community lead the product, responsive design changing the requirements for modern design tools, and never quitting.
Get Sketch for Free with the LayerVault Sketch Bundle
Starting today, LayerVault customers on our annual Pro Plan get Bohemian Coding’s Sketch, including upgrades, for free.
Over the past two years, we’ve seen Sketch usage among LayerVault customers explode. Over time, LayerVault and Sketch have grown. Design teams large and small are switching to Sketch-only workflows. Today, we’re taking things one step further. The Sketch Bundle lets teams on LayerVault get Sketch for free. We’ve worked with Bohemian Coding to put together something that makes sense for LayerVault customers. To take advantage of this offer, organizations must be on the Professional Plan and be billed annually.
An Interview with Sacha Greif
For the past few weeks, we’ve been conducting interviews with various founders building applications for designers. This week we’re interviewing self-described maker of Internet products, Sacha Greif.
Sacha has a long history of client work with companies like Codecademy, Hipmunk and Rubymotion to name a few. However you’d most likely recognize his personal projects that include the popular design email list Sidebar or his book Discover Meteor.
