The nicest / most surprising thing to me was the instant image preview. In less than a second I had 'uploaded' a huge image and was editing. Nice work.
I felt like Backbone.js (when I was actively using it) had really clean and complete docs. Couple that with the fact that the source is incredibly readable and debugging anything strange was never that tough.
Sure, but Backbone does a fraction of what Angular does. And, it's pretty consistent with how most people write JS anyway -- whereas Angular pretty much re-envisioned everything.
whereas Angular pretty much re-envisioned everything.
Angular is the first time I've written a web-app and been completely lost from second one without a fully stateful JavaScript debugger willing to break at any point and letting me inspect the call-stack, parameters and locals.
Everything which was simple about the web up until now, Angular transformed into horrible, black voodoo magic which either just worked or didn't at all.
If that's what "re-envisioned everything" is all about, consider me out.
To each their own, I guess. I've rewritten numerous apps in a fraction of the original time (and original line count) using Angular. There's a bit of a learning curve, but once I started "thinking Angular" (aka, if you're touching the DOM you're doing it wrong), it was great.
> Everything which was simple transformed into horrible, black voodoo magic
That's what radical re-envisionings always look like. Anything that fits easily into your toolbelt is an incremental improvement. That's what the word "radical" means.
The promise is that after doing some hard work to learn new data structures you will be more powerful, but it's certainly your right to be skeptical of that.
It depends on your point of view. Personally I've never been too happy about the state of JS code, so trying something different is absolutely a good thing.
Is Angular the best approach? Is there even such a thing as a best approach? Probably not. Look at the proliferation of server side frameworks. They each have their pros and cons.
I do like that Angular is a real framework, rather than a library that only gets called a framework. It handles all sorts of stuff for you in the same way serverside frameworks tend to do.
I think you're pretty spot on in your analyses though. We use static sites for our landing pages (currently using Jekyll, Grunt & S3) and I can't see a real reason to switch to something like this.
From a business standpoint I worry Forge will have a really hard time building a sustainable business off of $10 / month / user. That's a lot of users they'll need to build something profitable. There is likely room here though for add-on services or some unique features.
As a fiduciary you'll need to add a lot more content to your landing page to build trust. While the idea sounds great you're asking someone to put a lot of faith (and there paycheck) in your hands.
I'm also curious - what's to stop a client from never releasing payment? Who resolves disputes?
Great question! We currently offer this payment system on matchist and many of our developers have requested to use it with clients outside of matchist. Online dispute resolution processes tend to be standard (check out Modria). The cool thing about having a 3rd party hold payment is that they (or an arbitrator) can rule in your favor if you are in the right and a client is withholding payment as long as the contract is followed.
