Hacker News Reader

I'm sure you come at this with good intentions, but god do I hate low effort 'advice' like this. Basically you're saying 'just make everything better, that'll be great!'. No shit Sherlock, I'm sure nobody ever thought of that. If you're going to offer unsolicited advice, at least give specific, actionable advice of things that are not multi-year projects by themselves. It's like telling a car designer 'yeah cool car, but maybe you should add some drag racing stripes, oh and it'd be cool if the car could drive over water, too!' Uh, thanks, I guess?

It's hard to be specific.

The site at a first glance looks dated and very early 00's. The colour scheme, the stripy background, the layout, the fact it isn't responsive (well it tries to be with a burger menu but fails), the GIF clipart (esp. the 'new' graphic and the flags).

As a prospective customer you might be a bit put off at first glance and think the software is dated too and go off looking for something newer.

> As a prospective customer

The site is selling anything; complaining that the free gift comes in insufficiently fancy wrapping is tacky.

Non-profit operations have customers too. I think they’d better achieve their mission with a nice website, referral revenue to help with upkeep, and an iOS app for wider reach. People live off of their mobile devices, especially the people that most need free software. I’d totally understand if they don’t have the capacity to do any of that though.

Unless the project itself is about the web, a polished fancy website is to me a yellow flag that the project is not open source first but trying to sell me something.

A lot of open source projects that are serious about the actual software have ugly websites or even nothing beyond a README.md on Github.

a paid version available on the Mac App Store, sandboxed, automatically updated and bundled with 1400 pieces of furniture and 418 textures.

https://apps.apple.com/app/sweet-home-3d/id669289700

I can tell you that this prospective customer didn’t care one iota about whether the site looks on-trend. If anything, the site design confirmed the app was likely free and — significantly — probably free of late ‘10s-era tracking/adware/user-as-product nonsense. It actually makes me want to use it. I looked at the screen shots, read the device/OS support and I’m sold. I’ll download it as soon as I have time/energy.

If it had a mobile version, I’d have run it, but I fully expect to only want to use it on larger format devices. I’m happy to be proved wrong, but I doubt a purely touch interface would ease creation of a model of my weird-shaped rooms.

2/3 suggestions can be implemented in a few days. The devs can probably make a great looking website with ease, so why not pick the low hanging fruit? The age of the website might be the #1 thing that struck people when they clicked on that link. Consumers of interior design software are especially sensitive to good design. Maybe the devs like to maintain the retro look, but all I was saying was: hey, from the perspective of a consumer, people would be more likely to download with better UI/UX. Judging by the website, potential customers might incorrectly think that the software isn’t updated at all. Customers are brutally efficient with product selection. As for the app, I want their software on my iPad. So what?

I thought that a “low effort” comment would have zero feedback or attempt at insight of any kind. I also thought that bringing up ML might generate discussion about the future of design software so that’s why I threw it out there. That’s a big market opportunity that most people reading this on HN can take advantage of.

> I just visited the website and have 3 suggestions

Just to be clear, 'Show HN: ' wasn't an accidental or unknowing omission - I have nothing to do with the project. I just happened across it, thought it was cool, and wanted to read the HN comments.

Got it, I had figured the devs would notice and read the comments.

I'm a long time user of SH3D.

- Yes it is dated (and very fast) - so what? The app is the important thing, the website works.

- If you need to find it, you will. I cannot recall failing to find download links (at least two of them on the home page)

- Mobile. Perhaps if you have a 21" screen on it!

ML? Not too sure about that here. Perhaps Ikea et al could run with that. I use it starting from reality. Perhaps hitching it up to a theodolite, EDM and other measuring tools would be more useful than a "what if I could read your mind and get it badly wrong" tool.

Wow how touchy. Was just a suggestion

- It would look more appealing to the users, and maybe lead to more recomandations

- People might not find it and just leave frustrated, resulting in lower users

Basically they created a nice software, but then "scare" away their users with their website. Not very ideal.

- The website is a matter of personal taste. I actually like it: fast and simple. It also needs no fix ups with uBlock Origin, P Badger and uMatrix running.

- There are at least two links on the homepage labelled Download. If you Google for it then Download is linked directly in the top hit. Big G can parse it OK and so can I. Also I got a few of my non technical staff to take a look and they all downloaded it OK. One of them then asked me to set it up for them - another SH3D customer in the making 8) They had watched the video on the home page and were positively salivating!

I understand where you are coming from but if you look at it carefully it is actually quite a decent presentation in my opinion. Just the facts and no flim flam.

> Put the download buttons on the front page to increase conversions

Conversions are visitors turned into paying customers; since there is nothing offered for pay, the site has no conversions no matter what it does.

Well, unless you count donations, but you need to move the donate link, not the download link, to improve that.

> Make a mobile version, especially for tablets.

Maintaining an additional version is an additional cost. Since, again, this is a free offering with no monetization besides donations, and no obvious aspirations in that direction, suggesting additional costs are taken on seems entitled, or, at best, badly confused.

> combined with sites like Wayfair, IKEA, and Overstock.com, you can have a design --> purchase pipeline which is both convenient for consumers and beneficial for you via referral revenue.

Is there anything on the site indicating that the creator has any interest in building a marketing platform for retail outlets instead of free non-commercial tool?

Renovations 3D is the Android companion app to Sweet Home. A little clunky, but it exists.

I dunno, I kind of like this website design. I wonder if a newer design would really help users or sites with "more shiny" visuals are just following a trend without thinking too much about it.

Needs to be a SPA with autoplaying video, nagging popups and 100MB+ of JS dependencies. Oh, and it needs to show a blank page to anyone who dares have JS disabled.

Firstly, disabling JavaScript is your choice, you shouldn't expect the web to cater to you.

SPAs can be server-side rendered (See: Gatsby) and work without JavaScript enabled however.

> I wonder if a newer design would really help users or sites with "more shiny" visuals are just following a trend without thinking too much about it.

This isn't about shinny visual, it's about what feeling someone gets when they visit the page.

I get the wrong feeling that it's old, because it use old trends. That impression will make me believe that the software is just as outdated, when actually it has been updated a few months ago.

The website has all the information I need nicely organized and labelled and the homepage has a screenshots and a video as basically the first things you see. I couldn't care less if it looks dated, it's already better than 90% of project landing pages I've seen. (And it's got translations for 19 different languages).

Maybe send these suggestions to the site admin

Thanks, I just did.

Is there a way to run Java code on iOS?

Furniture libraries from major vendors would be great!

Here's a thread from Stack Overflow on that topic. Google created a Java-to-Obj. C converter years ago. That's useful for Android, but the resulting Objective C code can also be used to some extent with Swift in iOS apps too. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27920948/java-code-to-sw...

Now I'm wondering if IKEA offers a 3D model of their furnitures.

Too many suggestions, well I too have one for you, scratch your own itch and send a PR. Also perhaps the site design works with 10000 Downloads per day, why change something that works? From your logic the site design of HN is dated aswell?

I like the software, but I thought that giving my 2 cents on what I’d like to see from a consumer standpoint might be helpful.

Are you actually a customer of theirs?