Review my hackathon MVP - Amazon instant search | Hacker News Reader

Review my hackathon MVP - Amazon instant search

shelfluv.com

61 pointswushupork49 comments

* Add paging of search results in some manner

* Delay search by a split second on keypress and cancel if another character is typed. Currently if you type a word quickly every keypress results in a separate search that flickers up on the screen, and if there is a delay in results you have to sit and wait for them to appear sequentially.

* Show more information about book in detail view

* Allow building of custom bookshelves (at least without login) by dragging book somewhere, then allow useful actions on that list like emailing info, send to amazon wishlist, compare in amazon somehow, etc.

I second the custom bookshelves. I think it'd be nice to have a wishlist show up as a custom bookshelf so that you can add books to it on the fly ..

Hi HN community

Please check out my lastest pet project ShelfLuv - an implementation of Amazon instant book search I made for the midVentures hackathon. It won Best Overall App.

I'd love to hear what this community thinks of it and how I can make it better.

I would integrate somewhere the kindle for web as a preview of the content if it's already possible to embed it.

Great idea. If there's an API to hook into - then YES!

The embedding code is the one below but doesn't seem to work when used with a different ASIN (tried some random books that had a kindle edition)

<div id='kindleReaderDiv'> </div> <script type='text/javascript' src='http://kindleweb.s3.amazonaws.com/app/KindleReader-min.js...; <script>KindleReader.LoadSample({containerID: 'kindleReaderDiv', asin: 'B003X28734', width: '915', height: '496'});</script>

Edit: Now that i think about it, how to post this kind of snippet on HN in a more clean way?

Nice work - one of the more exciting apps I saw at MidVentures. (And nice meeting you yesterday)

I really love the design. Any tips, books or tutorials you can recommend to learn web design?

Practice, watch the masters, browse a lot of sites, go to design sites and CSS sites and see what makes them good. Keep doing that for 10 years.

Very, very slick. I was happy to see you have an Amazon affiliate ID in your links :)

I like it. It would be nice if the buy button was more prominent. I found a book I was interested in buying, or at least finding more about. I tried clicking on the book cover and nothing happened. I did notice the Buy button in the top right at the end, but it's not prominent as it's the same colour as the shelf.

I agree. Other UI experts have told me - BIG GREEN BUY BUTTON!

A/B test with red - I'll bet you a drink red outperforms green. (Oh, and make sure your conversion isn't clicks, but purchases. I believe the Associates API will let you track by click. And, no Pek, we don't do that tracking at Dawdle. :( )

Also you should apply 'cursor:pointer;' so people know that it's a clickable link.

You took the instant, barebones style and turned it on it's head with a beautiful design. Could be slightly smoother, but loading images sucks (especially from Amazon).

Also, works perfectly in my iPad. Great job!

Couple questions... * You did this in 2 days? * What tech did you use to build it?

jquery php. I've had this idea for a while - ever since Youtube instant came out. And before that I've just had the idea of a nice book search app that wasn't necessarily 'instant'. So I hit the ground running so to speak.

I was honestly expecting another quick and dirty instant implementation but this is actually very nicely designed. Wish the book covers would slightly faster though.

It was quick and dirty and I wished it did more but that's all I could get done for the hackathon. I have plans to add a few more features and making it a bit more social.

Excellent app. I can see why you won.

One minor thing I saw: when I searched for "C#" it returned "c programming"

Hahaha, that's all Amazon suggest so I have no control over that.

One suggestion I have is that since search is the main feature of your site, you may want the search box to stand out. Maybe it should be little bigger and in center of the page

I think the affiliate tag might be messed up in the URL, looks like the ampersands are getting URL encoded?

http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Years-Well-All-Chicks/dp/0307717...

I think that should be &tag=amzn_instant-20

I think compelling user interfaces will be how a lot of new startups differentiate themselves. I came to this realization after seeing hipmunk. From a tech standpoint, there wasn't anything new. Just api calls. But the way the info was displayed was novel and intuitive. Same can be said for this app.

Now I'm trying to teach myself how to "do UI". All that said, so...how do you make the book titles smoothly re-arrange? Not sure how to do this.

QuickSand jquery plugin. I used to be a Flex guy and Flex has been doing this for years now. I've only recently seen it on javascript through QuickSand.

Thanks!

Really, really nice. I can see myself using this, as a peeve of mine searching Amazon for books was certainly the horrible UX. First big suggestion: please, please, include some way to scroll for more search results. Also, like another commenter I noticed some odd search behavior for the results to settle down. Last, the name is fantastic. Simple, short, easy to remember. Good job!

Looks very nice! (I like the power plugs on the left)

One tiny pet-peeves of mine: add a "cursor: pointer;" in the CSS for your buttons.

Looks good. My suggestions:

* After altering the sort, I can't click on a book in Firefox

* The URL changes when I do things, but the back button doesn't seem to work

* I'd like to see more than 10 results

* I'd like to be able to click on the suggestion

Nice work Pek, design looks great! I noticed some odd behavior of the search term suggestions as well, but overall it's awesome. Only suggestion would be having a brief summary of the books on your site, without having to click through to Amazon.

This is awesome! I shared it on Facebook, but your mugshot showed up in the preview rather than say a ShelfLuv logo. The latter would probably be more enticing for my friends to check out!

Great work .. I wish there was some sort of a pagination to browse more results.

Also, do you plan to open up this project at some point of time?

pagination is in the works. what do you mean by open this project up? Opensource? no. I do plan on expanding on it though.

I'd love to see what architectures are being used server side to make these instants work.

According to google, it's not map reduce.

One suggestion is to maybe restrict bad words similar to how google works. I typed in "sire" and got some unexpected results.

Hi - looks awesome. Looked through your profile to contact you to ask some questions and found this link - "http://hnofficehours.com/profile/wushupork/ This doesn't seem to work. Is there another way to contact you?

twitter @pekpongpaet

Nice! I noticed it still retains the previous image when I click on a book doesn't have an image available.

Yeah it needs to clear the image and have one of those spinning icon GIFs while it's loading the new cover art.

Dude, make the cover clickable to buy.

this immediately made me think, don't the amazon API limits prevent one from making more than a few thousand calls an hour. Would be very interested to learn how you are countering that. I simply avoid doing anything with Amazon's product api just because of that reason.

Wow, nice! It actually is an Instant search, i.e. not just Amazon Suggest.

Do you have to throttle back to 1 api request per second per ip? Any worries about hitting the daily request limit with Amazon?

Very cool! Your UI reminds me of shelfari.com

Shelfari is AWESOME! I have a shelf there myself. One annoying UI bug if you can call it that is the perspective of the books don't match the perspective of the shelf. The shelf is a head on shot and the books look like you see them from a slight angle from the left. Minor stuff that probably nobody notices. But if you look at the bottom right corner of the shelf and see a book, you'll know what I mean.

nice app, interesting design too... It would probably be good to have the mouse change to a pointer over books...

I totally agree. I'm making a spreadsheet of all the change requests.

As far as the detail page - any thoughts or ideas that should go on there. It's super bare bones right now

You should make your site compatible with IE.

I am allergic to IE

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