Project IDX and a Better Way to Build Apps! 🔥
App development should be fun and productive. What happened? Let's improve it together!
Hi everybody! As many of you know, I care a lot about helping designers and developers be successful. It is what got me into my parallel life as a blogger in the late 1990s, and it has driven the entirety of my professional career, where I helped build tools, frameworks, and related doodads for a variety of platforms.
On that related path, today, I want to share the latest on something that I had the opportunity to build with a handful of exceptional colleagues at Google. I think you’re going to love what we’ve done!
Meet Project IDX
Project IDX is a browser-based development environment designed to kick the productivity (and fun!) of developing apps up many notches:
It’s designed to be familiar (built on Microsoft’s Code OSS, which powers Visual Studio Code) and refreshing at the same time with a lot of niceties to reduce the usual frustration and irritations we take for granted when we build apps these days. Oh, and Project IDX is also backed by a powerful VM, so the things you like to do on your local machine, you can totally do from your browser as well.
To try out Project IDX, sign-up for our waitlist:
For more details, you can read our launch blog post, visit our landing page, or check out my LinkedIn post.
Let’s Back up a Bit
While app development was never easy, the bulk of the difficulty used to be in learning a programming language and its many quirks:
Over the years, this difficulty compounded. Today, knowing a programming language (or two) is the beginning of our journey as developers as captured (as always) by an XKCD entry:
The questions that developers need to answer seem endless. For a sample of questions I ran into recently are as follows:
There are libraries and frameworks that abstract and enhance the underlying programming language, so which one should I use?
What unit testing framework will work with my setup?
What about the backend - which of the many API solutions would work best?
How do I ensure my project is securely version controlled for my team?
What build system do I need to get my app to…build!
How do I deploy my app and get it into the hands of users?
???
I JUST WANT TO BUILD AN APP WITH A GREAT UX. HELP ME BATMAN! 🐱
The decisions one needs to make before hello, world! is printed on screen is many. It doesn’t have to be this way. Project IDX is the beginning of a long journey we want to undertake to bring simplicity and joy back to app development.
And we want to go on this journey with you!
Till Next Time
For more updates on Project IDX from my colleagues and me, do follow my Tweet thread that I’ll continuously update as new things come up.
Cheers,
Kirupa 🥳