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Fuse Studio — The world's first visual, real-time app development tool
Fuse Studio is a visual IDE that lets you write real production code without typing a single line.
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Guido Arata
Terrific work, well done! I'm a fan of Ionic since its 0.1 beta and than played a bit with Ract Native. Can you explain me the benefits of moving away from Ionic and evaluate Fuse? Thanks and congrats
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@guidoarata I'd say that if you know Ionic well, it does the job you need it to and you have ongoing projects using Ionic, you should probably stick to using it. That said, Fuse is free (Fuse Professional is available as a 30-day trial too), and one thing we keep hearing from people is that "once you go Fuse you never go back". :)
As for the differences, I don't know of any comparison with Ionic directly, but Smashing Magazine did a deep-dive into Fuse and how it compares to React Native and Native Script which also lays out some of the good choices we have made while building Fuse. I'd give that a read: https://www.smashingmagazine.com... (please note that there are some errors in it, like our core libraries not being Open Source and a few tidbits, but overall it's a _great_ article).
@gloom303 How does this stack up against Neonto Native Studio? What are the differentiators?
@mattproto Hey Matt! I actually don't know Neonto, so I can't say. Send me an email and I'll check it out and get back to you :) (I'm at my first name AT fusetools.com)
@mattproto @dmerms Thanks for the tip — I believe Creo is only for Mac and only allows you to build iOS apps, so we're quite different in that regard. It looks as though they have built a nice drag-and-drop tool though, which is very rare. :)
I agree with all the pricing comments. I think if you approach it from the functional angle, there's an argument to charge 100+/month. But as many of the comments point out, if you approach it from the "who are you targeting to actually pay for it" angle, the 100/month doesn't feel great. This is squarely targeted at coding-as-a-2nd/3rd-discipline people (primarily designers), in an indie use case.
It's actually pretty hard to monetize even just $100/month from an app just to break even and justify the cost. At $20-$30, an indie designer could financially justify keeping the app alive for at least several months to give the app a fighting chance for some resemblance of traction.
Going to go out on a limb and guess here, but I'm thinking you'll also get a lot more people signing up and forgetting/not caring to cancel at the 20-30 price point, vs. people completely dismissing it at $100.
@wuss Thanks for your comments — a lot of this we have definitely discussed a lot internally. As for the target audience of Fuse Professional, our most active users are not at all "coding-as-a-2nd/3rd-discipline-people", but rather professional developers and teams of creatives working together on projects or who are simply trying to cut down their time-to-market.
You are right that making money on apps is difficult (very difficult), which is also why the regular Fuse offering is for those audiences. Fuse Professional (including Fuse Studio) is not geared towards indie developers struggling to make ends meet, but rather agencies, larger teams and yes — freelancers with sustainable recurring revenue.
This is our first commercial product we are releasing, with more to come, and while I cannot guarantee anything at this time, we're definitely interested in being able to provide even more app development products to the price-sentitive market. For now, however, we are targeting the premium market with the Professional package (like Unity does with theirs, as an example).
@gloom303 Thanks for the thoughtful reply. If your bread and butter customer base is made up of primarily agencies and full-time freelancers (i.e. not self-starters), then it would seem offering the full package but with publishing limits wouldn't effect your bottom line, and only potentially increase the indie market.
While all these pricing comments may seem really whiny, what we're all really saying is "WE WANT TO USE IT", but it's just slightly out of reach. :)
@wuss Haha, yeah — I totally get it, no worries :) Yeah, we definitely want to make it more accessible, but we're starting by targeting a market we know and will take it from there.
I should mention that we're sending out discount codes to tens of thousands of users who have been part of our awesome community so far too, making it far more accessible, for this exact reason.
It seems like an awesome product but the price is just not reasonable. I was a bit blown away when I saw the pricing page.
@robertsozolins Hey Rob, and thanks for the comment — we do know we're on the higher end right now. There are a couple of reasons for that (which I covered here: https://www.producthunt.com/post...), and we are aware. As we are adding even more features to Fuse Studio (and as the included premium content in the Professional plan keeps expanding), we do feel it's justifiable for the target audience (which is freelancers, agencies, and enterprises who have a steady income and are interested in the benefits that the plan offers). For freelancers and occasional builders, the Fuse Free plan contains the same UX Markup language, the same desktop simulator (so you can build your cross-platform app without the need for Android Studio or Xcode), the same layout, interaction, UI and animation engine and it works with the same community and 3rd party packages.
We went out of our way to make sure Fuse Free is not crippled or a step-down product for most developers and designers out there. I'd recommend giving the Professional plan a try (there's a 30-day free trial on www.fusetools.com/trial) and see if you really need the features included in it. We find that most people do not, and we're very comfortable with that. :)
Looks like a great tool for designers... But priced for enterprise devs who will not touch a WYSIWYG tool no matter how good (they are paid big bucks for their programming skills) Not many dev will say I used a drag and drop tool to do this app. This app is perfect for UX designers but it expects them to code, while giving a visual tool for programmers🤔🤔 something wrong with that picture. But tool looks fantastic.. good luck!!
@ramganesh Thanks for your comment! Fuse Studio is actually not a WYSIWYG or "drag and drop" tool for designers. I’ll elaborate on why though: There is simply no way to build a WYSIWYG tool for building apps (*that works well*). Many have tried, but they have all failed. We believe that they have failed because the _idea_ of dragging and dropping and inspecting elements to put together an _actual_ mobile app is deeply flawed.
App development consists of so much more and is incredibly complex, so the format of a WYSIWYG design environment simply doesn’t fit the problem it's trying to solve.
A fundamental pain point in mobile app development is the waterfall-based process, where an app is first designed, then prototyped, and then handed over to development for implementation on each platform. This leads to a disconnect between the design process and the actual end product, making it hard to iterate and improve on the end-to-end user experience. Because of this, nuances in design, animation and look and feel tend to be the first things to go out the window when resources are scarce.
Fuse instead offers an integrated workflow where design and development can happen continuously on the same code base and within the same tool suite. This allows fast, direct iterations on the actual end product running on real devices and with real data, and frequent real-world user testing. Fuse can be used to build full production apps, components for use in existing native apps, or high fidelity rapid prototyping with a sliding transition from prototype to production.
So Fuse (and Fuse Studio) exists to bridge that gap. Though I can understand why it might at first glance look like a WYSIWYG editor. :)
Hi all! My name is Bent and I work at Fuse. Today I'm super-excited to share Fuse Studio and Fuse 1.0 with you all. We've been in beta for three years (wow, has it really been that long..?) building our platform, and finally we are able to announce the next iteration of app development tools built on Fuse.
This is really a few announcements baked into one:
1) Fuse Studio, our next-generation visual desktop tool suite for making iOS and Android apps in real-time.
2) Fuse 1.0, our platform has finally reached 1.0 which is also out today, free for all users.
3) We're making our core libraries Open Source. This has been in flight for a long time, and finally we were able to make it happen (https://github.com/fusetools/fus...)
I, and other members of the Fuse team, are here today to answer any and all questions you might have (and to have a small glass of celebratory bubbly :)
Edit: I'm taking the liberty to add this description of the Fuse platform itself (that Fuse Studio sits on top of), for technical clarity and disambiguation. It's an important point that you do NOT need Fuse Studio or a paid plan to take advantage of Fuse as your app development platform:
---[ copy paste begins ]---
Fuse introduces UX Markup, a declarative-reactive XML-based language for creating native, responsive and smoothly animated interactive components for iOS and Android. UX is easy to learn, fun to write and incredibly powerful.
UX Markup gives you unified access to the three most powerful UI technologies available in phones: each platform's native UI components, ultra-fast OpenGL-based rendering and flexible vector-based graphics, all wrapped in intuitive declarative abstractions.
UX Markup compiles down to C++ for optimal native performance on mobile devices. Fuse is powered by Uno, a lightweight C# dialect that compiles to C++, and has seamless interoperability with Objective-C (iOS) and Java (Android) where needed.
UX Markup components can be dropped into existing native apps, or used to build stand-alone cross-platform apps within Fuse by adding business logic in JavaScript.
Fuse values non-verbosity, reactive programming, and expressiveness. Fuse strives to design the most intuitive APIs out there to make UX development accessible to all creatives.
---[ copy paste ends ]---
@pravilz Thanks Pravil! You can play around, but I'm going to break your heart here a little and say no; you can't make an app by stitching together already written code (either from our examples or elsewhere).
Making an app requires coding — always have, always will. :) Now: we make a point that the _amount_ of code you need and the _complexity_ of it is greatly reduced when you use Fuse, but we're also clear on not being a drag'n'drop "app maker". Those things seem appealing on the surface but they don't work very well. It's a little like expecting to use a Wordpress template and some plugins to put together a functioning and beautiful website — it's practically impossible.
But: if you want to dip your feet in, I'd recommend taking a look at our Getting Started-tutorial to see how you feel about it: https://www.fusetools.com/docs/t...
@gloom303 @pravilz I'd add on to this to say that I've looked at Fuse for about an hour, and it's by far the friendliest and most achievable framework (IMO) to develop an app. @pravilz I'd go ahead through the awesome tutorial Bent mentioned, and also take a look on Fuse's GitHub for further examples. Even if you aren't a seasoned developer, I would say Fuse won't take you long to get your head around.
Would love to see some videos of Fuse Studio in action. The teaser video doesn't show much.
@tomjohndesign It's coming up, we simply didn't have time to get to it before the release (all that coding).
@gloom303 No worries, totally understandable. Looking forward to learning more about it when they're ready!
@firasalmanna Hey Firas, thanks for the good question! I'd say that one of the primary differences is that Fuse has a cross-platform UI, layout, interaction and animation engine built in. As far as we know, we're the only ones that have that.
As for other well-known frameworks where "cross-platform" is the main differentiators, check out the article Smashing Magazine wrote about Fuse (https://www.smashingmagazine.com...) as well as a piece we wrote ourselves a while back: https://medium.com/fuseblog/how-...
I have seen a lot of code generators before. There were some differences and some common stuff. The thing that united them all - the code was sh... I mean awful . Maybe this one is different, who knows, I am not the person to find it out for hundred bucks a month.
But A+ for an effort!
@ipstas Obviously I can't comment on what code generators you've used before (and yes, some of them do produce utter bullocks :) though I should point out a few things: Fuse isn't just a cross-compiler, it's a whole platform with animation and interaction built in. It's also free — it's just the Fuse Professional plan (that includes the visual Fuse Studio tooling and other elements for professionals, that we charge for).
So if you'd like to check it out, I'd suggest to just download the regular Fuse (or the 30-day trial of Fuse Studio) and see if it's worth it for you in terms of what it can offer of convenience and production speed-up.
Hi @gloom303 interesting product you have there. I don’t consider myself a programmer although I know how to code a little (mainly javascript thanks to Google Sheets) so I look forward to see if Fuse can lower the difficulty and allow me to create an app by myself.
One question: is Fuse also suitable for making web app or just iOS and Android?
Thanks
@aminadavg That's a pretty open-ended question — care to scope it down a little? :)
Great! Congratulations!
Fuse Studio — only available for teams, from $104 in month? Not good price for a designer who want just prototyping applications without sending them to stores :(
@nleonid I totally get that — thankfully Fuse 1.0 remains free and better than ever (has the same real-time desktop preview engine for both Windows and macOS, uses the same descriptive UX Markup language, and lets you deploy without cost to both iOS and Android like you're used to).
Fuse Studio is meant for people who want or need extra tooling on top, and is indeed our premium offering (the Fuse Professional plan doesn't just include Fuse Studio, but also premium components, Xcode and Android Studio library export support, multiple viewports and more). It's definitely not just for teams either, it's just _more suited_ if you work together with others.
There's a 30-day free trial of Fuse Studio too, so check it out and see if you'll do more than well enough with regular Fuse.
@gloom303 @nleonid Hi Brent, congrats from me also.
At the first view, it seems, that designers like Leonid are your target group. Every company has developers and mostly no need for visual development, because developers have their tools and routines already.
I think, you are missing the target, if you provide studio only to the professional plan. You really should think about offering an indie plan, which includes Studio also. for example for 20$/mo and a limitation in app downloads or monthly app income. @nleonid you are totally right. I am in the same boat. And for a lot of other indies this will be a deal breaker.
@lars_kwiatkowski @nleonid Thanks for the feedback, we'll definitely take that into account moving forward! We deliberately didn't want to include any kind of limitations on what you can make with Fuse (or Fuse Studio) — stuff like making it incredibly expensive if you have many users / start making money, or making the experience crippled in some way just feels wrong to us.
@gloom303 @nleonid Just to give you an example about working payment plans. The well known company Adobe has a plan for a single application for around 20$/mo. the whole package costs around 50$/mo and offers a huge package of applications. Pinegrow (a really great visual web editor) costs 99$/year. Sketch 99$/year. You see the differences?