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p/mason-1Make front-end features, faster.
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Chad Whitaker

Mason 2.0 - Make front-end features, faster

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Today we're so excited to share Mason 2.0, now free and open to use.

Mason is a front-end feature-building platform for modern product teams. Create beautiful front-end features for your app in one place, together. Then embed those features seamlessly into your existing codebase, drastically shortening development and deployment cycles.

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Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
Hey Product Hunt! We are so excited to open up Mason to the world, and what better audience to kick it off than all of you :) We previously launched about six months ago on a waitlist-only basis, but today, we’re opening Mason up. Anyone with an email address can register and get started—free. Every day, engineers write the exact same front-end software. Authentication suites, content feeds, user profiles, dashboards—they’re virtually identical, minus unique data and styling. Mason consolidates these fundamental web building blocks. It’s like AWS for the front-end, and we call it Front-end-as-a-Service. Mason users can make production-quality front-end software features that look and function as handwritten code. Features live in your existing codebase, among and alongside the rest of your code and can be extended to fit your custom data handling requirements. Building with Mason means never again reinventing the solutions to solved software problems and it points toward the next giant leap forward in frontend software abstraction - a world where frontend engineers can move faster because the rest of the organization can suddenly become much more technical. We couldn't be more thrilled to have you join us. Questions? Hit us up in the comments. We can’t wait to see what you build! PS - fun fact: about 60% of what you see in Mason is actually built and powered by Mason! We hope you think of us when you think of production software, not just prototypes anymore 😉
David OKuniev
@thomasmclaughlin Congrats on the launch guys. Love the website btw, communicates well the value prop. D
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@okuiux Thanks!!
Kayleigh Karutis
Maker
@okuiux Thanks so much David! Tried to focus on value and functionality with the latest website iteration, glad it is coming through!
Mike Ritchie
@thomasmclaughlin I would highlight the "Front-end-as-a-Service" aspect of the product as the first value prop (i.e. the first section of the landing page). Quickly glancing at this and scrolling around, I thought this was almost identical to Figma, but it's actually quite different.
Saba Mohebpour
@thomasmclaughlin Awesome software Thomas. Are we able to do A/B testing too?
Anna Filou
Looks awesome! @thomasmclaughlin Question about the "Feed" solution: You write "Mason Feed works by connecting a data source to a configurable UI. Mason abstracts away all the front-end logic and has engineering best practices built in." Can it connect to any API? I'm interested in using it with Airtable :) Question about the "Canvas" solution: Can it also pull data from a backend (i.e. Airtable again) or is that only possible with the feed? I'll sign up and try it later today, would just love to know in advance!
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@anna_0x Thanks for checking us out! tl;dr - yes and yes Our vision for Mason is that frontend developers never need to rewrite secure fetch logic to grab data from an API for repeated content (feeds) or for standalone content. We work with any API that can send/receive JSON data (including Airtable). All you do is add your Airtable endpoint in your project as a data source, and then you can use data from that endpoint in anything you build on Mason. We make the connectivity and visual mapping super easy. It's just like writing custom HTML in code - any element you build with can be just static data, or it can be driven by custom data from an API. We wrote up a section in Mason Academy walking you through data mapping in Mason - find it anytime in your account at https://app.trymason.com/academy in Section 3 - "Connect Your Data source". Reach out when you get going - we're excited to see what you build!
Romero Mckay
It has Auth... Going to check this out <3
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@helloromero Can't wait to hear how it goes! Let me know if we can help you get started
Arnob Mukherjee
Loving it!! Definitely going to give it a try 😄
Mircea Ricci Facalet
Just curious, would you consider supporting imports from external tools like sketch? Designers have all their design system in there and might not want to duplicate all the styling everytime.
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@mirceariccifaca Absolutely. Our focus is on making design implementation dead simple - but we think you should still create the designs in your favorite design tools. We have Sketch, Figma and XD automatic imports on the short term roadmap!
Mohd Danish
@thomasmclaughlin it's seems good tool. But I think your signup page is broken. https://www.screenmailer.com/v/l...
Anna Filou
@thomasmclaughlin @mddanishyusuf Ouch, yes, looks pretty broken. It took me a while to realize it's horizontally scrollable.
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@mddanishyusuf @anna_0x 😃 It's just not a launch if something silly doesn't happen! Thanks a ton for sharing; it's fixed now. Please try again at https://app.trymason.com/sign-up!
Chris Davis
🔥 🔥
Guillaume Bardet
Congrats on the launch of the 2.0 version, it seems very well executed :)
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@guillaumebardet Thanks Guillaume!
Cody Z Anderson
Congrats Yall!
叶铭
It's cool
Sasha Radoslavov
Looks buggy
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@sasha_radoslavov Hey Sasha - could you shoot me an email at tom[at] trymason.com with any quirks you ran into? Will be sure to address right away
Arpit Choudhury
Exciting! The onboarding is a bit broken though. After clicking the confirmation link, saw an error that said {"error":"Hash already used"}, assumed I will be able to login which I could. Then I was stuck at the Welcome modal and could go in only after another refresh. And my first impression is that it's too feature-heavy and not very user-friendly. But definitely a very useful tool and wish you the best!
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@irhymeth Hey Arpit - could you shoot me an email at tom @ trymason.com with the account you signed up with? We'll take a look immediately
Andu Potorac
The product looks great! I can see the iteration on the builder UI and it's been positive. Can you share why the basic blocks were removed? Like the video. Small issue FIY on the investors page - when written manually in the browser it takes you to 404 - https://www.trymason.com/investors. When clicked in the footer it doesn't work either.
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@andupotorac thanks Andu! We're always adding new templates and building blocks and we have quite a few UI elements landing in the next couple of weeks (including video). Hope Mason is helpful for your team - get in touch at any time if I can be helpful. PS thanks for the heads up on that page, we're on it :)
Andu Potorac
@thomasmclaughlin Just got in touch by email, as we might collaborate on that part of the product, which I imagine is an edge case for your team, but a core case for us. :)
Colum Donahue
Congrats on the launch!
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@colum_donahue Thanks! Get in touch if there's anyway we can be helpful :)
Jeff Kao
Very cool. How are you guys addressing things like loading speed and mobile-responsiveness? Also, the landing page is still copyrighted at 2018... so maybe you can make use of Mason and have a non-engineer update it ;)
Thomas McLaughlin
Maker
@jeff_kao Hey Jeff - good catch on 2018 ;) In Mason you can build your features on different breakpoints - we give you the full power to make every bit of your UI fully responsive, and you can customize the look and feel at each screen size with as much detail as you want. Re: loading speed - we batch your entire set of Mason features into one API request, and have spent a ton of time making sure it's blazing fast. Most of Mason is built using Mason and we haven't run into any speed problems at all.
Emily Tran
Amazing