Comment by 0verAchiever | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0verAchiever | Hacker News Reader

I regularly want to share what I've worked on with others on Twitter or Slack/Telegram.

However, sharing a simple screenshot always was a bit too bland for my taste... I wanted to make it look better. Give it a background, put it in a fake window with some shadows etc.

You can do this in Photoshop or Sketch with some templates but that takes a lot of time if you just quickly want to share something with friends or coworkers.

That's why I build Screely. With Screely you can instantly generate a beautiful image from a simple screenshot without needing to dive into Photoshop or Sketch first.

Upload an image, choose your background color and hit that download button so you can share it with others.

I have many more features I want to add like gradient backgrounds, ability to generate an image without the fake window, adjusting the padding and size and much more customization options. But I first wanted to ship the MVP and get some feedback from others and hear their opinions.

PS. I only started to learn programming pretty recently so if you find a bug or something weird. Let me know and I'll try to fix it as fast as possible!

> I wanted to make it look better. Give it a background, put it in a fake window with some shadows etc.

Interesting, I'm the complete opposite. When I make or receive a screenshot I want to crop down to the focal point.

One of the best IT investments ${BIGCORP} made when I worked for them was to install SnagIt on every user's machine. Suddenly their documents had neat, inline cropped screenshots instead of huge one-per-page full-screen dumps. Saving in storage costs alone must have paid for that deployment.

And our bug reports became much easier to triage since the users just included an image of the problematic field, instead of the whole screen with a comment 'see error'. Where?!

Reporting bugs and sharing designs on social media or in chat with friends or co-workers are very different use cases though. Screely is aimed at making the latter easier, SnagIt fixed the first one for you.

Congrats on the launch!

I love apps like these. It's great to see what someone who just started to learn to code can achieve and how well it is accepted by the community. I mean, these simple niche apps have sometimes so much impact to a specific community, because they're solving a specific problem that people forgot (or didn't think) to address.

Thank you, I'm glad to hear you like it!

I'm happy it was received so well because I had a lot of doubts when I launched it. There are still bugs to be fixed and features I want to add but I first wanted to see the response to the MVP before I spent months developing this further.

I suspect the simplicity is what people like about it so much. It only does one thing and has one button so it's easy to use and also very easy to try.

Hopefully this inspires others that also recently started coding that you really don't need to build a super complex product to do well!

That were exactly my thoughts when I did a similarly simple project this year. No need for the product to be perfect or completely finished if you're putting it out there for free (in my opinion).

Also, there will always be room for improvement and people wo won't like it or demand features, so remember to keep your head up even in those situations and be proud of what you've accomplished.

Cool product! Mind sharing what kind of deployment architecture you used? I'm curious what beginning programmers go to for such things.

The site runs on Netlify. I love it!

Easy to setup, add https and offers deploying from the command line right away.

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