The last discussion of Twitter Bootstrap seemed to end pretty ambiguously.
Is Twitter Bootstrap what everyone should be using to make their MVP when they don't have a designer? Or is it sufficiently non-cross-platform compatible and specific to Twitter's requirements (no jQuery/jQuery UI?) that one should just use another admin theme from Theme Forest?
(Also, Blekko somehow supports grep on its dataset, but doesn't support it without voting? Is this a social mechanism, or does their infrastructure actually work in a way that this is an expensive operation?!)
That's an interesting point -- Bootstrap can really help out on projects who don't have the time or money for a designer, where that project would otherwise look like a Geocities page.
At the foursquare hackathon in SF last weekend, there were at least three teams using it. I think it'll get old very quickly unless someone writes some sort of generator to customize the way it looks. But until then, I think it looks solid and has a lot more uses than anything on ThemeForest.
When they say "grep", they appear to literally be running grep on four billion documents[1]. I'm assuming that is a significantly more expensive operation than their normal search algorithm as it won't use whatever search tree they've got set up.
I was previously using 960GS as my starting point and Bootstrap is a significant improvement because it comes with better default theming and the LESS layout is robust so I can churn out better looking designs quicker. It's also more flexible since you can specify an arbitrary number of columns not just 12 16 or 24.
I have been using a themeforest theme for the first version of http://www.kodesk.com and it gets very cumbersome to update very quickly. Too many jQuery plugins I don't know about, to many dependencies and you end up not really understanding how some CSS classes work too. And support is clearly lacking.
Now I'm completely rewriting the site using Bootstrap because 1) its documentation is simply awesome and 2) being an open source project, the support is likely to be much better.
Very cool for prototyping. Using the lesscss version for my side project now and feeling comfortable. I just added the github repo as a submodule in my project's repo. Also, if you are worried about writing semantic CSS - I have a small snippet on my blog http://blog.akash.im/semantic-css-with-twitters-bootstrap that'll help.
I think bootstrap is perfect for internal products, generally those product have low budget, and using bootstrap give you a nice design and "guidelines",
It will also consolidate all your product with one interface which is always nice.
I think it is also good for mvp, thing is, yeah as said earlier, if everyone start having project looking the same its not going to be good, and the first impression might change from wow i like this product, to ah, another twitter bootstrap project
I started with including bootstrap linked from github to try it out and ended up keeping it. Ended up writing an entire weekend project in it. It's a great way to simply organize your site and keep it looking nice.
If you're a themeforest person you can totally use bootstrap to override for better form elements and still enjoy a decent theme.
It's seeing a lot of nice updates regularly too, which is nice. I was really happy to see the drop down menu on the menu bar.
At Code for America we're using for a number of internal projects — it's incredibly easy to customize, and the code itself is surprisingly well-written.
I am using it as a template for a side project and we decided to switch our internal tools over to it within my company to limit the amount of time we waste trying to make our tools look just right when we're the only ones looking at them.
We use compass (sass), haml, coffeescript, and sinatra for most of our stuff, so our apps are super clean and easy to manage. There is a Twitter bootstrap compass port on github too.
I used it for http://analyticsrock.com/ - initially I was using 960js and a bunch of other CSS projects, but Bootstrap allowed me to replace almost all of them resulting in a much cleaner code base.
Love it, using v 1.3 as a ruby gem in dev and 1.1 in production: https://www.tentative.ly . Worked out well for our product, moved to it from Blueprint/Compass.
I launched a site in production using a slightly modified bootstrap. It was a weekend project I showed off here.
Unless it gains traction, spending any time or money on a themeforest design just seems like a waste. If it takes off then I can always get it professionally designed later!
Plus, bootstrap looks amazing and the design of the site got a ton of complements from non-technical folk.
what's interesting is what a need there was in the market for such a project. just a good looking set of defaults that hackers can start using and make things look good. i think this thing will blow up if they add some mobile components too. getskeleton.com or cssgrid.net etc.
Is Twitter Bootstrap what everyone should be using to make their MVP when they don't have a designer? Or is it sufficiently non-cross-platform compatible and specific to Twitter's requirements (no jQuery/jQuery UI?) that one should just use another admin theme from Theme Forest?
(Also, Blekko somehow supports grep on its dataset, but doesn't support it without voting? Is this a social mechanism, or does their infrastructure actually work in a way that this is an expensive operation?!)