Bold: Make Your Words Stand Out | Hacker News Reader

Bold: Make Your Words Stand Out

bold.io

44 pointsGuiA38 comments

This basic post with two images (four counting the logo and author avatar) clocks in at 30 requests and a plump 6.10 MB. Bold!

I'm clocking in at 5.1MB which is still huge, but 4.4MB are from images alone. However their biggest image is a 2.8MB 24-bit monster PNG. That really could be a JPEG, with moderate compression it could come in at only a few hundred kilobyes I think.

Thanks for the heads up guys!

We spent a good amount of time compressing our blocking bundle size (html, JS, CSS), which actually is JS for the entire app, not just that page. Certainly have more work to do, but given the amount of code, our JS/CSS is pretty low.

I just compressed the large image and it dropped to ~430KB.

Meanwhile, the other large asset is the animated GIF, which I suppose we could switch to a looping webm/mp4. Was hard to reduce the GIF further and keep the same quality...

Where's Pied Piper when you need them?

> We spent a good amount of time compressing our blocking bundle size (html, JS, CSS), which actually is JS for the entire app, not just that page

The problem with this approach is that, whilst it might be great for readers that view > n pages, the experience for viewing the first page is so terrible that many won't get past that one. It's still running at 37 requests, 2.7 MB, and 4.2 seconds even after your optimisations. Didn't load at all on my iPad.

If the javascript is for editing, it's clearly wasteful to deliver that to people who definitely won't be doing any editing; isn't it possible to defer that until it's needed?

https://github.com/tjko/jpegoptim

https://github.com/Kjuly/pngcrush

You can use both from the cli as part of a build server/push to production.

jpegoptim in particular can make very good savings on lots of image types.

Example: http://i.imgur.com/Q4ggKXt.png

No appreciable loss in quality certainly for this use case.

I understand the large file size is a problem, but please don't suggest anyone use JPEG for images. It's a terrible format and I wish it would go away. It ruins artwork. I see the developer changed it to a JPEG and named it *.GIF. Weird, at any rate the problem is the large size of the image 2560x1600 @24. Even on my Surface Pro the image is far too large. Does anyone have a link the the original PNG? It would make a nice wallpaper. Also, anyone have credit for the artist?

JPEG doesn't ruin art any more than MP3 ruins music. I'd never send a compressed JPEG to a printer, just like I wouldn't send an MP3 to be mastered. But most users won't be able to tell the image quality difference if you fine tune the compression level, but they will notice a slow loading page.

As a pixel artist, I can say that: yes, JPEG does ruin art. I'm an artist, not a web developer so my perspective is different.

It's not even opening for me on mobile.

It's also completely broken on mobile

Why this gets so many upvotes? Just out of curiosity to know what it is (though personally it does not excite me)?

It's a bloated site - bold [0], people do not understand what it is [1][2], seems like a Medium clone [3], it does not seem to solve any problems [4].

To add from myself, to block ambient noise I launch my preferred music player with my likeable music, which blocks noise and does not distract me (same with many colleagues of mine), IMHO it's useless feature to have ambient music in you word processor.

Also, do we really need another (too) clean, (too) minimalistic, hipster writing/blogging platform, which looks like Medium clone and is probably 'made with <3 in Bay Area/NYC/Seattle/whatever (c)'?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858972

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11859159

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11859201

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858750

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858795

After reading over their landing page a few times, I think that this is writing assistant "service". You start writing out your proposal and some automated "asssistant, not a bot" is supposed to analyze your writing and provide suggestions to make it more memorizable and easy to understand (group this into 3 phrases instead of sentences. Remove this adverb. Change this sentence from passive to active). I assume once you write it up, it gives you the ability to share your masterpiece as a link, possibly export to word/pdf/stone tablet.

Much like Microsoft's Clippy, the idea is pretty sound, but a bad implementation will make it more of an annoyance than a feature. Given the confused meandering of their landing page, I don't have much hope for their product.

Is this a new blogging engine? I can't seem to get a proper mental picture for some reason.

Same. In my mind the post was all over the place.

It's not that complicated.

The second paragraph.

  > 'Bold aims to provide the best experience for reading and writing long-form content at work so that your best ideas can be heard.'

Seems like an unique and interesting product. My work doesn't involve writing 'long-form content', so I'm not in the target market but I didn't find it hard to work out what it does.

So...

Is it a blogging engine? A notepad app? A ... ?

I think it's what I've started calling "trendy pencils".

Hemmingway etc. attract because of a person's belief that just given the right tool and environment they'll be able to express all those wonderful ideas they've had but have been so far unable to express.

This is not unlike believing that they'll have a rash of creativity and be able to express themselves if they buy a set of blackwings and a moleskin.

FFS. I hate snark. Developing a product is hard. did you take even 5 mins to read the post. If you did then you wouldn't have any issues with understanding the product and the value it's trying to add. I didn't. And I'm not exactly Einstein.

I read it numerous times. And nowhere does it mention whether it's a web app in the browser, a standalone app for the desktop, if it's a social/sharing site, etc. The page discusses lots of features, lots of solutions to problems which they don't define the problem of, etc. It's one thing to assume what a product is, but that's not good marketing.

Agreed. I've spent 18 years as a computer journalist and I still can't make head or tail of exactly what "Bold" is. Really vague description on that page. Certainly hasn't encouraged me to investigate or write about it...

"Hi! It looks like you're trying to recycle an idea from the late 90's into yet another SaaS product. Would you like to (a) post to HN a bloated landing page with almost no details, (b) collect email addresses, or (c) both?"

What is the idea? I can't tell from reading the link. I'm surprised this managed to make it to the front page.

Perhaps people think it's a parody worth upvoting?

Clippy? Remember Clippy? "Hi, it looks like you're trying to write a letter."

What problem is this solving? I don't really need ambiance music in a word processor.

I truly honestly have no idea what this is. Is it a blogging platform? A CMS?

Looks like a blogging platform, like Medium.

My first thought was it was a new npm package for wrapping bold and/or strong tags around arbitrary DOM nodes.

Was slightly disappointed.

So I am not alone! Thought this was a satire of sorts at first.

I can definitely see how this could be useful for teams that create content collaboratively. When our team works on release notes, blog posts, support articles, etc we use a combination of Slack and Google Docs.

After editing, we post to tumblr (product updates), Medium (blog/marketing) or any one of half a dozen other places where we out stuff. Bold feels to me like Medium with bonus collaboration features + integrations. Tools like http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ built in sound awesome. Add in the ability to create your own assistants (import brand assets, pull up GitHub issues, insert content from your YouTube channel, find the right gif for this paragraph) and it adds up to a much more centralized writing experience for modern work-related content creation.

Looks like a Medium clone?

As an aside: I do not like the idea behind the Hemingway app. Editing prose is not the same as debugging code. Removing adverbs will not make you a good writer. And the whole idea of having some bot making automated comments on my text as I write it sounds distracting at best.

If you want to write better, write more. And let people read your writing. Hear what they have to say. Style handbooks like "Writing with Style" or "The Elements of Style" are great, but you should attempt to understand the reasons they behind their recommendations, not just use them as a mindless checklist.

Craft your own voice.

The content is served in a span in a span in 11 nested divs in a span in a section in 2 more nested divs -- at least it looks nice.

The "discuss on slack" feature is pretty neat. The thought of being able to hop into a discussion with people on a topic rather than making static posts would be cool.

How many times does the user need to read the page before they discover what bold.io even is? I'm at about five now and just want to know before I move on to my sixth.

Until reading these comments, I was completely convinced this was fairly good satire.

Absolutely no clue what this is.

What's the source for the first image?

http://orlincultureshop.com/blog/2015/2/2/opera

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