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Gordon, as I said, I'd be the first to admit that our UI is not great at the moment, we been concentrating on the architectural aspects of ThingStudio so far. Certainly, UI's are hard, even when using a great service like (ahem) ThingStudio, there is still a lot of work to get a really good UI. Reading this thread inspired me though, and I've started work on the widget system, so here is a teaser image of yesterday's prototype of an SVG widget made in ThingStudio. We'll be providing a set of widgets, but unlike everyone else, you'll also be able to make your own, and we hope the community will take up the challenge. It's still rough, but you can see where we are going. We will also shortly have a new, really spiffy UI for the actual IDE as well.
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mkarliner
I think as @LawrenceGrif says, an MQTT Library for Arduino/Espruino does give people who don't know anything about web technologies a good way to push their data to a server.
While I guess quite a lot of developers see making a webpage that pushes data into a database as a 10 minute job, for someone who has only ever done embedded that's actually a pretty steep learning curve.
Getting back to UIs though, it feels like the sentiment here is "UIs are easy, the hard part is all the communications under the hood". I'm totally unconvinced by that - if anything what I see from Blynk, Thingstudio, Evothings, etc is that even people who have a product whose whole focus is the UI still don't have very professional UIs (sorry Mike).
I guess the argument is "well everyone's going to want their own customised UI anyway" - but it seems to me that you have to be a HTML/CSS/JS ninja and a graphic designer to actually do that.