Weld - Be creative without code – Interactive content tool

Hi all, I'm the founder of Weld. The idea of Weld came from my own struggling with web and app technologies for quick prototyping. When I started building web/mobile apps in 2006, I was really frustrated with the tools and processes involved just to build a simple proof of concept. Having a Visual Basic and Flash background, the notion of going back to plain coding just felt off. After years of dwelling on this problem and procrastinating, I started working on this in late 2013. I split up the problem in three problems/phases/pieces: 1. interaction design 2. visual design 3. interactivity. So, I started interviewing UX designers, and found that 1) non-interactive wireframes made little sense to their clients, 2) there rarely was time/budget for real prototyping, and 3) responsive design was really painful with their existing toolset. With these problems in mind, we started building Weld v1.0. Much more to come. Hope you like it! Let me know if you have any questions! Tom. (@tomsoderlund)

Looks awesome! How does it compare to InVision?

Really cool product! Another great Swedish startup.

Hello everyone! I'm the CTO and co-founder of Weld. I've been a proponent of the open web since I was a kid and for me this is all about allowing people of all different skill levels to publish ideas online. Creating a prototype and sharing it with somebody should never be more than 15 minutes away! For techies: We built this on Angular and a lot of websockets that communicate with a few microservices mostly consisting of node.js processes. AMA! (but especially technical questions :)

I've tried so many of these ben that I don't code. What's different?

I love the concept. It's much more responsive than some of the other web based prototyping softwares I have used. The process to link screens is super easy. One thing I have always wondered about prototyping tools is why they don't allow text input fields to be functional. Example: A login screen where it asks user for his/her name, next screen could be onboarding and may say "Welcome ___Name___". Can this be done in Weid?

@tomsoderlund Game changing product Tom. Especially for the non-technical among us who like to conceptualize product designs but cant seem to navigate through photoshop or even sketch. I use sketch for design then Invision for interactive demos. Weld replaces both

Awesome first look, Tom. The onboarding experience is great too, which is where a lot of these prototyping tools lose me. Are you guys planning on adding mobile gestures as well? Also, maybe it's the traffic, but whenever I try to share my app to my phone, it "disconnects" from the Weld servers. Will check again later!

Wins the best name award in this category!

Just tried it. Fantastic job guys. I can see myself using this.

Cool. Any chance we'll see an iOS version? I've been using Marvel.

Hi everybody. I’m Andres, Lead Designer at weld. First of all, Thank you so much for the support. you guy are amazing! We build a tool that is simple but powerful. Allowing people how can not code to craft things. We spend a lot of time thinking how to make it simpler, how to make it faster. And we try to avoid any kind of “programer lingo” making the app accessible for anyone. Not technical knowledge required!

Love this! //Proud Swede!

Wow! Thanks for all the votes, and all the new people flowing in! I wanted to take the opportunity to share a bit of Weld's philosophy. What you see today is Weld 1, with a focus on interaction design. We will emphasize visual design and interactivity in upcoming releases. Here's what we believe: 1. There's not enough prototyping being done. Prototypes enable faster iterations, and more iterations equal a better product in the end. 2. All screens should be handled as one. Screens are becoming more fragmented: phones, TVs, watches. We need smart responsive tools to work with this. 3. Similar approach to platforms (e.g. web vs. native apps). In an early phase of product development, you might not even know what platform you should develop for. 4. Interaction design, visual design, and interactivity/programming are three processes that currently are serialized, but can be parallelized for time and cost benefits. Thanks!

@tomsoderlund Can you explain us how you got the idea and the vision you're trying to execute?

An iOS version is not in immediate roadmap but the prototypes you make with weld are published on the web and runnable on any modern device, iOS included. You can even create/edit your prototypes on iOS. Works well on the iPad's big screen for example.

Weld is awesome.

Really well executed. It deserved vote #721 ;-)

@spencerrwise Probably Tom or Henric can explain this a little better than me. My contact with invision was really short and some time ago. But based in what i remember invision allow you to import image and made links between screens. In my own personal opinion, the first big difference is responsive design. I don’t remember if invision give you the chance to make the version require for responsive desing without the duplication of assets for every screen. Another difference: Weld lives and “is” the web. Exactly the same technology, Fonts render exactly like in the web, colours are the same, Antialiasing, effects, transitions, etc etc. It’s not about pixel o vector representing the web. is the web representing the web. But is important too what we have en common. And probably in Both companies we understand the importance of prototype more and more. Hope it helps and thanks very much for your kind words!

Coooool. So simple.