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Show HN: My weekend project, written on Friday and Today

fasterdev.com

79 pointsmootothemax44 comments

I have what feels like a stupid question: Most of the weekend projects I see here on HN look surprisingly polished, this one included. Any quick projects I make just don't have that polished look and feel. Is it just a matter of have enough design experience that you can just make it happen, are you using templates or a library of some sort? Any advice on how to get my projects to look nicer faster would be greatly appreciated!

Template from ThemeForest are what I use to add some polish; plenty of people will criticise for using themes, but in my opinion, and coming from someone with zero design skills, they get you in a better place right from the start :)

So, most of my sites are written using Kohana and a couple of themes from ThemeForest - one for the sales side, and one for the admin area itself.

Edit: and really, that's nowhere near to being a stupid question - I only found out about options like TF when a friend told me a few months ago :)

just curious, did you use the Facebook Oauth 2 Graph API for Kohana 3? I'm the author. [http://forum.kohanaframework.org/discussion/5772/]

I didn't. I looked through the available modules and whilst they looked decent for a long-term project, for my needs of knocking something short-sighted out pretty quickly, I found writing my own code a bit less demanding.

Just a question about the theme from ThemeForest - which I didn't know about until now. Looks like you're using this theme:

http://themeforest.net/item/freemium-saas-wordpress-cms-blog...

$30 is a great deal if the license covers a single commercial app (I assume you need to buy it each time you use it in an app?) but when do you need to pay for the "Extended License" which is $1500?

From my cursory reading of the licensing, the key difference is that the Extended License allows you to distribute the theme with your app (the regular license would be limited to a hosted app).

http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-te...

I accept that I could be doing it wrong, but my general idea is to buy a fresh license for every site that I create :)

Oh man, you have no idea how helpful this is. I'm working on a web app myself, and design is my biggest hangup... I've thought about hiring someone, but not sure I can justify the expense. For some reason I didn't consider seeking out premium themes like this.

Looks like there's a lot of great stuff on ThemeForest... only problem now is the paradox of choice. Too many good themes to choose from.

There's also http://www.freecsstemplates.org/ which is, as the name says, free.

Thanks for pointing that out. In this case though, I think you get what you pay for. Most of those don't look nearly as good as the Themeforest stuff.

There's another site along these lines that used to be pretty good -- Open Source Web Design (http://www.oswd.org/). Unfortunately they stopped updating it several years ago.

Most of those don't look nearly as good as the Themeforest stuff.

See, this is the crux of the matter for me: would I rather mess around with a truly free template to get it looking decent, or pay someone the huge amount of $20 to have it instantly. Obviously, by and large, the latter wins.

How does ThemeForest compare to WooThemes?

I am planning on buying one of WooTheme's Wordpress themes and adapting it into a Django template.

If you looked carefully, you'll find out flaws that prove that he is using an already designed theme and has poor design skills.

1. Look at the images in the sliders. They are poorly chosen, positioned

2. The Tour and Facebook button on the top.

3. The icons are also poorly chosen.

Hehe, thanks for the constructive criticism, as you've shown there's a lot of work still to do design-wise.

Oh, and I don't mean to give you nightmares, but just think what it would look like if I wasn't using a theme ;)

I dont think that was a "constructive criticism". He didnt give any examples as of what would be "good design". Your site looks pro in IE/FF/Chrome/Opera and Safari. Layout is clear and simple. Love it! Navigation is straightforward. Cool!

Thanks, and make no mistake - I really appreciate hearing comments from people like you :)

At the same time though, I realise that sometimes people don't have the time to phrase things in a nice way, but at the same time still have valid criticisms - and I'd rather hear the criticisms in the first place than hope they'd be written in a nice way - if that makes sense (it's late here, and I'm not sure which space my brain is in) :)

Frankly, I don't care if he has poor design skills. He had the humility and generosity to explain that he used a template to speed dev time, the site looks awesome and he kicks my ass because he finished the project, put it out and has figured out a strategy to quickly implement his ideas from storyboard to finished product. I don't know if you intended to sound like a snob or if this is your idea of "constructive criticism" but I think you could have worded it more generously.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure that I've been equally cruel - albeit unintentionally - in the past, and whilst what the user wrote could have been written in a more favourable light, his points are still valid :)

some folks are probably lying. statistically speaking. anything to make themselves look better.

that said, sure, some are probably not. my sense has been that there are certain design tricks/styles that, once you learn them, you can apply them fairly fast if the scope and complexity are small enough.

Quote:

"What is FasterDev?

This is the initial release of FasterDev, written by Thomas Buck, a developer originally from London, UK. It was only launched on February 20th 2011, and if you have any questions or comments, please ..."

That doesn't really answer the question.

Thanks, you're right - really need to tighten up the copy :)

I wrote this tool after seeing a number of beginner Facebook developers complaining about how difficult it is to set up test users. The plan is to keep on adding more helper tasks (e.g. banning users from apps - and I'm open to other ideas!) as time goes on.

Right now, it asks for the Offline Access permission purely because managing access token expiry dates is a low priority - I want to see if anyone will use it first :) Once a few people do, I'll sit down and write the session management properly :)

Error? Database_Exception [ 0 ]: [1062] Duplicate entry '' for key 'uniq_email' ( INSERT INTO `users` (`username`, `password`) VALUES ('xxx', 'yyy') )

Damn, that's two bugs - one that the production site's showing real errors, and that there's a db bug. I think I've now fixed this - can you try again? :)

Oh, and thanks for letting me know :)

Thanks, now working.

Plaintext password?

not necessary. sql quoted does not prove it.

No passwords stored at all - I've hacked my Kohana install for the stake of convenience, and all stored passwords are the MD5 of the user's facebook id, i.e. basically meaningless.

Your two days worth is looking like a great site! Well done! :) Two points: On the tour page, there are two "tour" headers right under each other, which is strange. I recommend the tour bar in the header section just leaving the tour header in the main section. Secondly, on homepage, under "why do you ask for offline access" typo anyony=>anyone. Also, no-body really reads the lots of text in footers (or anywhere really!) so if you have something important to say (like why you want offline access), somewhere physically closer to the facebook login step would make more sense. And lastly, who did you design? If you did it in just 2 days, that's amazing, well done!

Oh, i see my design question has just been answered. There's definitely nothing wrong with using templates if they look that good. Well done!

Thanks for the typo catch, and point about the header, I'll get started on fixing these :)

And lastly, who did you design?

I cheated and used a couple of templates from ThemeForest :)

"For a limited time during this soft launch, we're making our amazing service available for $19.99 per year. This offer won't last forever, so get in early."

This is good, but it would work better if I knew what the price would eventually be and when it would change. Right now, I'm sitting here saying "well, maybe I don't need this right now, but I might in a few weeks. If the price is going to go from $20 to $25, I don't care about getting in now. If the price is going from $20 to $200, I might throw the money at it right now just to lock it in.

Alternatively, at least tell me when the price change will happen.

My suggestion for the homepage would be to make the screenshots expandable/zoomable. They're so small I can't really make any detail out apart from a few pieces of bolded text.

Moving on from that, I'd be willing to give this a try but currently I'm getting a MySQL error after trying to login with my Facebook account.

"Database_Exception [ 0 ]: [1062] Duplicate entry '' for key 'uniq_email' ( INSERT INTO `users` (`username`, `password`) VALUES ('<removed for privacy's sake>', '<removed for privacy's sake>') )"

Ooh, great suggestion about the screenshots, I'll see what I can do about that with the time I have left today :)

Can you try logging in again? I think that I've fixed that bug now - although need to generate some more test users to make sure ;)

Just tried again and I am able to login now. Will be testing this shortly!

Brilliant, and thanks again - I really appreciate having someone that isn't me testing it :)

Looks great, especially for a weekend's work. But I think that is a classical example of going too far with the minimum viable product concept.

I would never let you have offline access. I think that quite a few others might not as well. So you might have a great idea but without that feature you might not have a mvp and your trial run will give you misleading data.

Thanks, and you have a good point about offline access; I'm honestly not sure about how big a gamble this is. The thing is, I've noticed that whilst a lot of people who work in IT are completely against the idea (myself included, to be perfectly honest), it seems that there are also lots of people who plainly - for want of a better term - don't give a damn.

My rough plan is to give it a week, and if I don't get even a couple of sign ins by then, spend the weekend sorting out session fun. If you like, I can reply to your comment with an update? :)

Whatever eases the massive pain and frustration involved in developing things for facebook, is imho a good thing.

That's incredibly polished for a weekend project. That said, I'm quite confused by the choice of icons on the right of the "Tour" page. The calendar doesn't scream "Test Users" to me, nor do any of the other icons seem to be tied to what they're meant to be describing.

Thanks! Because it's a weekend project, I basically threw together the icons as a last-minute "text goes here" kinda thing. I'm hoping to sort this out later on this week :)

I'm not clear on what this gives me that I can't already do. Is it somehow easier to preview dialogs or create test users?

Looks really good, nice work.

Btw, typo in point 1 on home page, launced = launched. Also hovering over the feature set links in /public/tour looks like you've left the default title tags on them.

Fantastic, thanks for the typo catches - now fixed :)

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