Jetstrap

I recently heard about Jetstap while browsing links from Hacker News. Watched a video demo. This is a tool that creates web pages using Twitter Bootsrap. Looks like is supposed to be a drag-and-drop type of page builder. The angle is that this saves you from figuring out how to manually code up the Boostrap code with JavaScript. I finally got around to trying out the free trial tonight.

I decided to log in with my Google ID. But it would not let me proceed to use Jetstrap until I allowed Jetstrap to view my email address and other Google account info. I reluctantly agreed. The I got to the page where I create a new screen. The place where you normally see an OK button had a button with no text on it. Umm is this a bug on the first screen? I use Internet Explorer 9. You would think this would work on this browser.

Getting back to page editing, I could not figure out how to add normal HTML onto my page. There was a strange read-only label button. Maybe that was Jetstrap's way of letting me know that I put a label on the screen? I found the generated HTML source for my page creation quickly enough. But I could not cut and paste the HTML. Apparently I need to download a zip file. Great. Not.

One good thing about the zip file Jetstrap produces is that it includes all the Bootstrap code in all the right directories for you. Another nice feature is the different views on the main Jetsrap design page. You can see what you page will look like on a mobile devide, a tablet, or a larger screen.

Jetstrap looks like it is blowing up pretty nicely. This is mainly due to being the number one link on Hacker News recently. I hear that already had 20k downloads. While the trial is free, they plan to charge monthly for usage. Intially they were thinking $10 a month. However it might be as high as $30 a month. This was a neat product to try out. However I don't see myself paying any amount of money for this right now.