Cactus for Mac

schlagetown 12 years ago |

Really excited about this app. As someone who enjoys casually developing personal sites — I know my way around HTML/CSS but not enough to deploy something like this on my own — I think this looks to be a perfect way to ease into some slightly more advance site building, perhaps a happy medium between the lack of efficiency that comes with rolling a site totally from scratch, and the unnecessary bloat of doing a full Wordpress install to get a simple blog up and running.

Nice, simple documentation that explains the features and benefits of the app quite well. But I do agree with some of the comments about the UI. I don't find it entirely intuitive — for example it was initially unclear to me what the editing workflow is supposed to be, since selecting a project and clicking "edit" brings up a menu to select a text editor. I see the intent is to navigate the project structure within a full-featured editor like Sublime Text that allows such functionality, but before seeing that it's hard to tell whether it's possible to navigate the project from within the Cactus app, or whether it's all external and meant to be done in Finder.

Look forward to testing this out though — I have a couple small projects in mind that I think this will be great for. And a great opportunity to jump into learning basics of SASS, Coffeescript, and Django templating without the intimidation/overhead of setting it up myself.

koenbok 12 years ago |

The app is based on the open source https://github.com/koenbok/Cactus

jpdlla 12 years ago | |

I came here to ask this exact same thing. Recently used Cactus to develop a pretty big static website. Plugins made it very fun and easy to build more complex cases. Thanks for the great work!

micahroberson 12 years ago |

Seems a lot like http://mixture.io/

Kluny 12 years ago |

It looks really good. You did a great job of explaining the directory structure.

rgbrgb 12 years ago |

Who made this and how did they get an endorsement from Werner Vogels?

IE5point5 12 years ago |

Why does it look like an iOS app

IE5point5 12 years ago | |

- and the titlebar font is wrong

- and the titlebar text doesn't fade correctly when in the background

- and a 100 other inconsistencies with the rest of my OS

please developers stop rolling your own windows for no reason

LaSombra 12 years ago | | |

I agree with you. It seems they are trying to do what Windows developers had done for ages.

renn 12 years ago | | |

"omg I'm so afraid of change!"

fuzzywalrus 12 years ago | | |

Ok, I'll bite.

Rolling your own GUI should be done when the native OS GUI doesn't meet the expectation or needs of your application. A custom GUI may not play nicely with accessibility and may look increasingly alien with OS updates.

I don't see any advantage to using the iOS look, and it only added to my confusion when downloading. I wasn't sure if it was at first looking at the screen shot an app that required an iOS component.

1) No maximize dot, I wasn't sure if the window was resizable until I moved my mouse to the corner

2) No Resize in icon in upper right hand corner

3) Lack of menus (really, ever action must be found in the gui?)

4) clicking off the app window does not "grey" out the title bar letting me know its not the front window.

5) Close/minimize icons do not highlight on click

6) Settings fields cannot be tabbed between

7) Settings cannot use keyboard controls for the cancel / save like OS native dialogs

These are just the errors I noticed while writing this post. The app looks like it could be a nice MAMP alternative.