Show HN: Review my startup project: CardPi, life in digital cards | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Review my startup project: CardPi, life in digital cards

cardpi.com

It's an interesting idea, but needs better explanation.

I don't have an iOS device to test the app, but it took me a while to work out what it is and does from the website.

The site should explain clearly what the benefits of using it are and why I should use it over another service. It's not easy to get right, but makes a huge difference.

I would also spend a bit of time working on the design – you have a good start but it needs polishing. You may not want to go full Google, especially if you're focusing on iOS, but the Material design spec has some really good principles for creating card-based components [0].

I think part of my confusion came from the name. At first I thought it was to do with a Raspberry Pi as [something]Pi seems to be the standard for RPi related projects.

[0]https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/cards.html

It looks very unpolished and crude. From the website I couldn't really figure out what it is for, but form what I gather now it is just some kind of blogging platform with images and such "content". What's the value proposition?

Exactly the same here, just spent 2 minutes on it but not sure what it is for.

I can understand the confusion. There is a lot of capability here and being used as a blogging platform is one of the things it can used for. The intention here is to provide for a way to show collections or groups of small units of conten. Blogging is an activity that has categories and hierarchies so it can be done using this platform. The value proposition is that its a better way to showcase collections of content. With many micro blogging platforms and the like it's quite difficult to find older posts or particular information sometimes, there's also some platforms where the focus is on what is currently the latest and everything else is old and more cumbersome to locate. Cards as the smallest unit of data are great for being a container for a mixture of imagery and text and something everyone is familiar with.

There is a need to add more polish, are you looking at the web site or app?

Personally I think that's not very useful - I don't often find myself looking at older blog posts and if I do I either use Google or the site's own search functionality. Your system seems to require content to be created in it to be searchable.

It's an interesting idea, but I wonder how many people are actually really trying to locate old content.

>the Best Way to Showcase and View Collections of Content

This just sounds ridiculous. 'Showcase and view collections of content' is so broad that it covers almost everything I do online. Needless to say, I really doubt that one app could be the best at all of those things.

CardPi is primarily a mobile app, currently on iOS but if you if you don’t have an iOS device please take a look at the website, I am keen to get feedback on that too.

App (iOS) download: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cardpi/id941081241?mt=8 (currently on USA, UK, Canada and Australia stores). To create content you will need to register an account but it’s quick and easy to do, viewing does not require registering.

CardPi is an app to showcase collections of content in series of digital cards on mobile and web.

For example a video game publisher wants to release information about an upcoming game. They can create series for characters, locations, items and then create cards for each character, location and item. Each card can be updated as little or as often as they like, they get discussion forums automatically for every update along with other features.

The idea is to have well organized nuggets of information and live blog style documents in a standardized card form with imagery/text all grouped by series and subseries keeping related content together and with appropriate hierarchy.

Apple does not allow apps mentioning ‘beta’ or ‘preview’ so if you view it on the App Store, other than being version 0.0.0, it won’t say this but really it is very early days and there is little content yet aside from sample data. Thanks for your time, all feedback is welcomed. In particular if it doesn’t make sense or you think it’s useless, say so, we want to talk to you.

I get the idea, and I'm willing to look past the work-in-progress nature of your app, but I don't think it's a very strong idea.

There's no value to me, as a content consumer, in viewing content in these cards. I have had no issues reading blogs in the current format, no issues with reading reddit or hacker news, no issues with youtube, etc. etc. This doesn't solve any problem I personally have.

I get that your cards are different but why is this format better? It's a cool UX paradigm that one might use on a personal blog, or as a feature in a large application, but I can't see it becoming a standard. The value proposition is not strong enough.

You could take this idea and do something like medium.com, where you become a platform for people to publish cards on, but then the value is in the content and hosting service, not really the format.

This is actually doing what you're last sentence suggests. It is intended as a platform and for people to publish series of cards on and it is a hosted service. The creation is limited to the app currently. The web site is secondary, this is primarily an app. A problem with apps and a reason why the web site even exists is that they lack discoverability when starting out. The web site offers a 'view only' view of the cards that are fully interactive on the app.

The value prop here is a combination of a few things. The card format stands out in usability when viewing on mobile devices particularly on larger screens such as iPhone 6 Plus. The way a card can be manipulated and expanded makes it ideally suited for that type of device. Combining that with a way to organize cards by series makes it a straightforward way to get at sometimes highly niche information such as the example of video game characters or items.

Also the web is not responsive! Today web apps deserve support for mobile devices and multiple screen sizes. This is someting you shoud care for before launch.

some other thinks I noticed: -Can't se registration, just Login. -Favicon would by nice. -Password reset function.

There is a favicon, but it 403s!

Thanks, favicon should be appearing now, there was a config error earlier. Registration and password reset are currently on the app but I may move this functionality to the web site too.

I have read the comments here and I wonder how this would be different from a wiki? Apart from the UI being very unclear, at least on the web version. What are the different colors for?

Excellent point, in many ways the series and subseries in CardPi does resemble a wiki structure. Whereas wikis are designed for collaboration however the focus here is still on personal content and engagement with update posts and discussions.

Just can't figure out what it is good for, or what's the purpose. Maybe some video could help explain describing what it acctualy is. Still I don't know :)

Evey card in CardPi is the smallest unit of content. It is a mixture of text and imagery. Cards belong to series. Together they form nodes of a structure of showcasing collections of data in a organized and hierarchical way.

Suppose your are a small game studio. You have a single profile card that describes your studio. Then you have a top level series for each of your games, say game A and game B. Then with the series for game A you can have sub series for Items, Characters, Locations. You then have cards that belong to each of those subseries featuring the items, characters, locations. Suppose there is a card for character x. That card can be updated with posts, every update has discussion forums... Best of all someone can quickly find all the characters in your game, all the locations and read information and discuss them.

Your point about a video is important. It has been considered but since there is considerable confusion about what this is for it seems wise to consider making one.

> "Evey card in CardPi is the smallest unit of content. It is a mixture of text and imagery. Cards belong to series. Together they form nodes of a structure of showcasing collections of data in a organized and hierarchical way."

How is this different from a bookmark manager - or Evernote (which would display you some of the content in form of cards)?

Here the cards are the content. So with your Evernote example, that's displaying some of your other content in the form of cards, but also this is a public system to showcase rather than a personal or private group solution.

I think the web site is probably more confusing than the app, especially if you're logged in the app and can view how to create cards.

Reminds me of CardStack: http://www.cardstack.io/

The search engine gives an error page and clicking on World never load the page. Maybe the site is overloaded. However an example would help: I expected to see something in those cards and because they are empty I'm left wondering what this service is about.

Sorry you're having problems. Can you try the site directly?

https://www.cardpi.com

Or the world page specifically: https://www.cardpi.com/world/

If you're still having issues can you let me know where you are located and what browser your are using.

Error

error getting search results page

I see, I thought he meant accessing from a search engine outside the web site, this is resolved now.

I will suggest to use other icon for "Help Indicators", that "Blue circle" looks confusing besides the other color circles on card. And I think the blue color is the same. Just my idea.

I worked for a startup for a while. We were doing the same thing. They're still kicking around - VisiKard.com

Do something else. This is a dud.

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