This is great. I think something like this is very valuable to a small startup or indie hacker who has a product that requires a sign up before their users can see/use.
You know how a lot of SaaS has a video of the user story and what their app does and looks like on the landing page? Well, I think this can be way better, less time consuming, and way cheaper than hiring an animation studio to create that video. You can also edit the textframe as the product grows; something that is much harder to do for videos.
A few of small features can make this way better.
1. The ability to put the textframe in an iframe. So users can use it on their landing page.
2. The ability to auto play the steps. (it should stop autoplay if user clicks on a step to view)
3. More UI customizability so it goes with the landing page.
I see this being more valuable as a marketing tool than a tutorial tool, but I'm only one person. Good work and good luck =)
This is very cool. Nice job on this! I like how slick the UI feels when I'm scrolling up and down the tutorial steps.
One quick piece of feedback that I saw right away: Clicking on the next step on the left and then seeing the video update on the right is distracting, so I ended up not even reading the text on the left after a while.
Perhaps you could show "subway stops" on the left to indicate which step you are and how many there are in total, and then have the instruction text above or below the video? The way it works now, your eyes have to dart back and forth from left to right to read the text and then watch the video.
Anyway, best of luck with this.
This looks great. The Marketing Website can use some flair/oberall design — but the product looks stellar. Good luck w that!
Hey, cool project! Congrats! A few more comments that I believe could help improve it:
1.If you click on a box with a step on the left side of a tutorial, it should take you to that step. At least that is how I tried to use it initially. Right now, you can only control going forward/backward through scrolling the page.
2. In the landing page the "View Examples" and "View a Tutorial" buttons look off in Firefox (the text overflows).
Can the tutorials be embedded into a support article?
These look good for visualising user stories too.
It's really cool! would be great a figma-like interface with dropdown, input field etc.. to better redesign the UI. Otherwise a way to build a sketch of the UI using a screenshot.
On my latest mobile safari I’m getting an error:
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
How come?
Great landing page. Can I ask how much time did you spend working on it?
Pretty cool!
[flagged]
Hi HN,
My name is Rahul Sarathy and I posted TextFrame a few months ago on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29234636) as a tool to create animated technical papers. After gathering feedback from the community, I found that the best use case for my tool was for creating tutorials.
I am proud to share my next iteration as a tool to create animated product tutorials. Hopefully you can find use in it to create more engaging tutorials for onboarding and helping out your users.
You can check out some examples I’ve created using the software: at https://textframe.app/examples
Please let me know what you think! You can also email me at rahul@textframe.app if you have any questions or just want to say hello