some time ago I already presented my idea on HN with a landing page. Your feedback has been great and very valuable, we continued iterating on the product with customers and now have our first public version online.
StorageRoom is a cloud-based CMS built specifically for Mobile Apps. If you have your own mobile app or if you are an agency or freelancer developing apps for others you can use it to create apps faster and to combine the advantages of native mobile applications with the ease of maintenance of websites.
http://storageroomapp.com
What do you think? Do you see other use cases for this?
Any feedback about the service and the idea is highly appreciated... thanks!
You cannot ask non-technical content editors to edit JSON manually and they don't want to edit content in a technical phpMyAdmin-like interface (believe me, we tried!).
We provide an easy way for an administrator/developer to set up collections for different content types. They can choose between many different basic (strings, integers, ...) and advanced (attachment, image, location) fields and configure how editors can enter the content into the fields (including validations, so that an URL field really contains a valid URL).
Developers can then query the content from their mobile applications on different platforms. In the future we will also provide open-source libraries for iOS/Android to make the integration even easier.
The other market I'm seing targets users of the CMS system, i.e. the people who actually maintain the data. In most data centric projects I've been working on, you could be sure that the client will at some stage ask, how (not whether) he can change the existing data and add datasets after development has finished. This usually involved creating a CRUD user interface, which was tedious and in almost all cases, was never used.
Your front page focuses a lot on the former target group (create general datastructures, update and query them) whereas I think you might be offering more value in the latter group ("see how simple it is to add another recipe into your cooking app"). If you could combine the client's desire to control his money and time investment while making the solution easy to integrate for the developer, that might be good enough.
[1] CouchDB for iOS devices - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310863
[2] Amazon S3 for iOS: http://aws.amazon.com/sdkforios/faqs/
[3] Earlier discussion on StorageRoom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1847115
CouchDB is useful for storing content like high scores into a central database from your mobile app, but you cannot use it to easily provide a nice interface for editors to manage news stories or points of interests (maybe you have a google map in your app that shows store locations). This is what we focus on, a flexible CMS for mobile apps with a nice interface for editors and not only a nice API for developers.
S3 on the other hand is useful to store files. You can also upload static JSON or XML files there, but how do your editors manage those? They cannot edit them manually and static files don't provide search capabilities from the app (e.g. only give me store locations around the user's current location).
Obviously, you could easily create your own interface for users to do things like this, but why reinvent the wheel when it is already well designed and available at a decent price?
We build a lot of mobile apps, and we use a combination of the Django admin, and django-tastypie. This gets a JSON API up and running with authentication in very short order, but a product in this space would be very welcome, especially as it allows the data model to be built with a GUI. Our programmers spend a lot of time on model development and being able to delegate that to less technical staff would be a big benefit.
White-label would obviously be a very strong requirement.
Hosting and maintaining those backends hasn't been fun either, in our opinion mobile devs are better off using our service. They get a better solution faster.
This is our main problem, too. I don't have any data from our clients, but I have a feeling that being able to provide a clean, user-friendly, branded back-end would increase participation in content creation quite considerably.
We just integrated a purpose built CMS with a bunch of iPhone apps for a client and it was not a lot of fun so I'll give your product a try for sure.
As for feedback - the one thing with the UI is that having three different types of save buttons is a bit confusing at first but I'm not sure if there is a more efficient way to do it. Also, a big win would be if you added an etag along with the JSON with the location of the images to download. I do like very much that collections can be attached to multiple applications.
If your are ever in the Bay Area come by our weekly iPhone Meetup Monday nights in SF. (search iPhone in sf on meetup.com - our logo bleeds six colors...) or shoot me an email (profile)
The iPhone Meetup is on the list for the next Bay area visit.
Maybe I'm missing something? The closest thing I've found to what I'm looking for is: http://www.pureedit.com/ and storageroomapp.com seems very similar (although much better) judging by the Introduction Video.
But actually you can of course use the CMS from wherever you want to. We already have some websites that pull content via the RESTful API. You can even use JSON-P to load content in the browser dynamically from Javascript across domains (think of widgets).
I can also imagine that our system is useful for desktop apps or games.
Please give it a try and report back if it fulfills your requirements.
You can also directly use the RESTful API from your server, query content and serve websites in HTML.
