HotGloo is a startup that aims to simplify the prototyping phase in the design of a web-site. In their own words, “Hot Gloo is designed by IA’s for IA’s” (Information Architect, I’d presume). Having read that, I immediately recognized the need for improving wire-frames in an app’s development. Not much has been done in this space. With no standard “efficient” practices, we’ve got conflicting ideologies with the 37signal crowd preferring to skip this stage altogether and coding directly in HTML, albeit through several iterations.
Hoping for something unexpected and without any particular expectations, I signed up for their beta. What followed left me with mixed feelings. I’ll begin with the good. The quality of their web-application was impressive. Their Flash based app is extremely snappy. Runs quite well on my old Centrino based laptop, which I use for internet browsing. The not so good included the widgets. There’s a common set of widgets like the checkbox, radio, text-box, et al and from here on, its the usual drag and drop like other prototyping tools. This is also where the problem with HotGloo begins. Not matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see anything innovative in their features! Yes, they’ve added collaboration. Agreed, it’s online in one place, but just for those two I could’ve used DropBox with OmniGraffle or Visio or even Pencil, which is free. Startups need to understand, not only is innovation nice, it’s necessary to innovate. Of course, you can’t wait for a million dollar idea to come to you, so it’s prudent to start off somewhere on the map and innovate in iterations. But then I could argue, beta is an advanced stage in software production when a product is close to being shipped. The feature set is already frozen.
Startups today are moving away from innovation and treading closer to becoming a meme-plague. Everyone wants to make a quick buck and retire early, which is alright. Nothing wrong in that. But could there be a better way?
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