Unveiling Bildy

This is truly exciting day for us. After one and a half years of intense development, it's time to unveil Bildy to the public. There's some tweaking we want to do before we can call this "1.0", but most of all, we're eager to hear your thoughts and get your input before we can say it's done.

Aisti's main food is interaction design. We help our clients to make their products easier, more understandable and enjoyable. It was a big step and even bigger cultural change to start creating our own product. The idea grew slowly and the concept of Bildy lured us in a way that it was hard to think of other options.

Bildy's development was first started in 2005. Yes, you can throw the first-to-market rush out of the window. Back then our idea was to build a desktop software because we didn't know how to get all the pieces (mainly development tools and parts not yet unveiled) working in browser. However the project died under the impossibly heavy development costs of Java. We loved the concept that was totally different from any other CMS we've seen, but we simply didn't have the resources nor culture to create a desktop software.

Few years went by. In a majority of our web projects our client had some CMS in place, and most often that CMS was the troubling piece in the puzzle. Smart people had trouble using the software daily, which clearly wasn't designed for everyday use. Developers were telling other side of the story: hacking, bending and fixing. It wasn't that you could choose a system that would fit perfectly into your project. It was more like choosing a system that is close enough and then choosing right size machete to hack in what the project needed.

Best solutions were achieved when systems were custom designed for the customer. That way they fit their process and need perfectly. However custom systems were really expensive and took long to produce —for the customer and developers. Upkeep also became a burden.

Fighting with these problems and knowing what we had designed earlier to solve the pain, we restarted the project. This time, we found ways to get Bildy fully working in a browser. That was the way to go and we transformed enough power to make it happen. We wanted to give more enjoyable solutions to our customers and to the developers.

First pilot project started roughly a year ago. The highly positive feedback and experience was enforced with our second pilot project in the beginning of this year where Bildy was brought in to be a quick fix for MOSS problems and ended up as a permanent solution and a base for a large goverment site.

One of the corner stones of Bildy is openness. We've had good experiences with Bildy, but it was originally designed for other developers to use freely: for you and your clients. We are now ready to let you in to explore, test and innovate.

We are excited to have you here and hear your insight. This is the ultimate test for our design and for Bildy. We are looking forward what the future brings.

- Henrik Rydberg
Aisti