The feedback for Simulify 2, the Desktop & Web addition, have been very encouraging. Thanks to all who participated in pre release version.

A series of smaller post will follow detailing the new stuff.

Again, thanks to all

Simulify 2 - completely overhauled, sleek and simple - on the way.

More details in coming days!

Simulify desktop was released yesterday.

It unique in it’s approach that you can build it local and share it online and also gather feedback online.

Simulify Desktop is built on Adobe AIR , which means that it will run on Windows, Mac and Linux.

As it is on your computer, you can create / manage as many projects as you wish.

Each client comes with FREE 5 project online repository for you to show and gather feedbacks online.

Download it now from http://www.Simulify.com/download.aspx

I am sure you will enjoy the offline experiance and with online sync.

vikas

The date for release for desktop was 12th. And today it’s 22nd. 10 days, ten verrry looong days.

Reason - Things in new platform - AIR Adobe for us, that threw some curve balls at us, taking the Beta phase much more time consuming.

Lesson - Don’t underestimate.

Conclusion - Desktop to be available by this Friday 25 - 2 weeks delayed but worth the wait.

Cool Highlights - Publish to Simulify site for showing & gathering feedback.

vikas

Funny.

We made a full browser based tool with easy sharing and now before first quarter is up, we are working on a desktop version, due to market needs.

Funny because I never thought we need that. All the trends point to that everything is moving to cloud, even MS office.

The cloud based service has so many advantages  -

• Available for any box.
• Great for a team. All members can see what’s happening.
• Great for instant sharing.

So basically if you have a team, that wants to work  on the same project, then there is no way to beat the browser based app.

So with all the known & perceived advantages, What is going on here? Why !!??

My gut feeling is that for a tool that is normally not used daily, unlike the project management tools, the thought of paying per month might be a block.

What is  great for teams and UX persons is not the best solution for freelancers. So we are making a desktop app which will publish projects into the cloud for showing and gathering feedbacks from others.

So here we are. The desktop version should be out before 12th of September. How 1 person converted a online browser based application into a desktop will be a good case study on “How to Make a desktop app from a Browser App in 3 Weeks”,  though I doubt the reverse can be achieved.

Thanks to everyone  for all the feedbacks & suggestions. All who actively participated,  would be getting a complimentary copy of the desktop, with a thank you note  :-).

Simulify now has a “more X widgets” drop box in which there are  a huge number of pre made widgets.

The best part is that all these widgets have been made using basic Simulify widgets and Actions and have been added from different internal projects.

In future we can add to these widgets at a very high clip and nothing will gladden my heart more if we were to add widgets shared by community.

These are interactive widgets and to explore them further you can add these to any page.

Further you can add them in “My Widgets” and modify as required. Then you will have custom modified widget set that you can use in your projects.

I hope you all enjoy this, and we will be adding more every week.

I believe that you don’t do wireframing / prototyping for yourself only. You want to share it with the world and get their feedbacks to further iterate it.

We have a great new update to Simulify site. We are now much more collaborative.

A Browsable directory of wireframes- Public & Private Projects.

Sandboxed Wireframes - meaning you can check out the simulify without signing in.

Shared Exported Wireframes - These are the wireframes exported by Simulify community which anyone can use for their own projects.

Wireframes not exported but shared can be viewed but not imported.

Private Projects - Then there are projects that are shared only within a company and for yourself only.

Embeddable - You can embed any shared wireframe like I have embedded it here.

The above is a embeded wireframe - click it to interact, leave feedback on simulify site.

This is a technical post - will make a series of challenges we face technically in simulify.

It was a event full first month. Lots of changes and improvements.

Problem -

Simulify has  Auto Save feature where it saves your changes in background including all the Undo - Redo information.

Technically we faced one big issue at this point. Some of the pages became very big as Simulify allows you to do a huge lot of things on a single page with dynamic panels, tabs etc.

If you post a large data using Ajax, then depending on the net connection speed, sometime full data didn’t reach the server and there was unexpected behavior.

Solution -

• Breakup one big request into many small request
• stitch them back into one on server.

So we picked a decent size in number of characters to submit, broke the request string into those many small strings, attached a marker and made send them back in a sequence.

On the server side we added the glue which kept track of each request and when it received the final request it combined those into a single request.

Results -

Much better response, better speed and fully scalable. Now the page can be as big as you want it to be. I didn’t realize that making many small hits takes less time than one big one. Had a interesting side effect that it allowed us to show accurate % saved value.

Simulify team is also available for consulting projects. Get Simulify team

I am very exited, today we have put www.Simulify.com on live server. We are a small company in Chandigarh, India and firmly believe in eating our own dog food.

I hope that you will also find it as useful and that Simulify will be the key in allowing you to refine & convey your ideas to all. The key here is the low learning curve that allows you to simply & quickly Visualize Apps & websites.

Being browser based, it allows instant collaboration & is sharable to anyone with a browser & internet connection. Different team member can work on the same project with full revision. We are really proud of the type of things we have been able to do in browser environment, best being that you can actually run actions step by step and then rollback them back.

As Simulify is browser based product, we are able to offer it as SaaS ( software as a service) model. We have kept the entry threshold as zero, we have free accounts and a 30 day free trial for all other accounts.

Our story is going to be a little different from the other startup stories that you read about and I will keep posting on how it plays out as we also aim for services around Simulify for the busy and the impatient. “Get that word doc converted into a visual representation overnight for the presentation!”

The final decision before going live was where to host the server. We jumped 3 services in months leading to today but finally decided to go with Amazon EC2. The biggest reason being the safety of data when one uses snapshot facility which but the whole disk in Amazon S3. So at least we can sleep easy that all the customer data is always totally safe. Second being the high availability and scalability offered. I will also try and write about how our experience goes with Amazon, SaaS and our business model in general.

- Vikas