Ask HN: Give feedback on my project and I'll do yours | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Give feedback on my project and I'll do yours

15 pointsescot13 comments

In the spirit of helping each other out to make our projects better I would like to offer to review your project in exchange for you doing the same for mine. If you're interested:

a) Go to my project (a flowchart editor) at https://www.knotend.com

b) Try it out

c) Leave a comment here with feedback AND a link to your project that you want reviewed

d) I'll respond with feedback on your project

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It took a long while to 'get' what it can do, or how it's doing it. I started out thinking it was a list of lists. After playing with it some, realized that there was no 'nesting' and that all nodes are 'at the same level'. Ended up with the model being a directed acyclic graph (DAG).

I made this structure:

    / a1 / a21
  a - a2 - a22
    \ a3 \ a23

Then wanted to make a node that follows a1, (a21, a22, a23), a3. [I do realize that the (a21, a22, a23) grouping is only in my head.] So I selected each of those and clicked the '>' button and ended up with:

    /------ a1  \
  a ------- a3  \\
    \     / a21 -- b
     \ a2 - a22 //
          \ a23 /

This is the graph I was expecting but not laid out as I expected. Showing a grid gives the sense that you are working in a spreadsheet mode with some control where things go. It would be better to show nodes and edges with arrows that rearrange as the graph is changed to more closely set expectations.

One thing that I really wanted was a grouping mechanism where I could treat a subgraph as a node. But then a list of lists fits better than a DAG. What sort of information would a DAG suit better than a list of lists? My above example would be [a, [a1, [a2, [a21, a22, a23]], a3], b]. It seems what's lost is the ability to fan-in from arbitrary nodes and not a single group.

My main feedback point is that the layout I choose also encodes information additional to the actual graph. For that reason if I were to want something more than a list of lists would go for a drawing tool.

I had/have many projects but none that I'm actively working on. If I get to that point, I'll do as you've done and post a feedback for feedback post.

Thanks for your detailed look at it. Im glad you got something working, but I agree its not great it was so confusing at first. Youre right that its a DAG, like how many flowchart tools represent the data.

> grouping mechanism

This would be cool. I want to nail down the basics before adding more features. For most of my use cases I havent found it to be a show stopper, but once it can support larger graphs it will be required.

> the layout I choose also encodes information

Thats true however Im trying to make a tool optimized for speed. Manually adjusting layout doesnt help with that. It should feel more like editing a text doc where everything is done from the keyboard. However, I could see adding layout adjustment as a final step in producing some visualization you want to share.

Thanks again. And please reply here with a project, or email/tweet me (bio).

I do recognize that this is an early sneak peek and it will be interesting to see how it evolves. The thought about grouping wasn't merely to deal with larger graphs, but rather if it was the core way in which organization happens, I believe that it would 'click' in the user's mind and produce autolayouts that more closely resemble what the user had in mind.

So, the idea is really cool. I do get what it does, and I played with it for a bit.

It is not very intuitive though. What I suggest is, for each cell, allow creating an "arrow" on the left, or on the right. Then, for each arrow, be able to drag it to another node (where you want).

Right now, I simply don't know how to link a node I created (below "party!") to "cleanup".

My project: https://cinematicstudio.app

Thanks!

I agree there should be a mouse-based way to add connections from cell to cell. Right now to make a connection from one node to another you first 'stage' one which highlights it orange (option-s, or use the button in the nav bar). Then you navigate to another node and use the add right/left buttons to make a connection between the staged node and the one you've selected. Clearly that's not intuitive. I'll work on a click and drag mechanism.

Now for a review of CinematicStudio:

I don't have a Windows machine so I'll mostly comment on what I find from your website. Do you have any mac builds? I saw you had a link about Mac but it didn't lead to downloads.

I like the landing page. It's immediately clear that what you're selling is a nice video editing application.

One issue, about 3/4 down the page, is that you repeat a block of text 3 times. The one beginning "Custom Music Visualizers...".

For the little dropdowns in the FAQ I wouldn't close the accordion when the user clicks the body of one of the expanded items. Only close it if they click the header, or an explicit caret. A lot of users click on text even if it isnt necessary, just out of habit (or if they want to copy it).

It seems like you would benefit from making this mobile friendly. Since its a landing page that's selling something, and many potential customers would find it from mobile, you're probably missing potential users.

Little bug -- I noticed the footer has a 'Downloads' section with Windows and Mac links, but they link to the Pricing page, not the Downloads page.

It would be nice to link to a gallery of example videos made with CinematicStudio.

this is very cool! I friggin love note taking things especially how you built workflows into it

I really see where you're going here, so I have some initial feedback:

PSA: I only tried on mobile chrome Android but I'll respond with my desktop experience tomorrow, so my comments here are limited to mobile

- rendered nicely on mobile, switched to desktop mode and then I saw the help icon top left, so layout may need to be adjusted

- the spreadsheet layout is cool but I kept thinking if a trello sorta layout would work, empty cells were slightly confusing at first

- I wasn't able to save text on mobile but double tapping did bring up the keyboard

- typing then pressing soft enter didn't save (mobile)

- back on Android triggered an undo?

- the nav bar buttons at the top didn't seem to do anything, but the embedded left/right arrows on top of the cells were amazing to make new connections, well done

- (once again, mobile) I wish I had a context menu (right click) when in a cell, or disable buttons in the nav bar to show what I'm allowed to do

that's all the feedback I have for now, but I'll check desktop tomorrow

in the meantime, I'd love your feedback on my project I'm getting started, hit me up with your feedback hackernews <at> cnuss dot com

https://docs.scaffold.ly/tutorials

Thanks for your feedback. I'll leave some responses first, then give feedback on Scaffoldly below.

You're right, a lot of the issues you hit are because I haven't optimized it for mobile. I'll mostly respond to the other issues:

> trello sorta layout would work, empty cells were slightly confusing at first

People do seem to get a bit confused at first as to what the empty cells are used for. Maybe there's a stylistic change I can make (on desktop you get better warning hints if you try to interact with them in a weird way). The empty cells are there so you can a) add a new node in empty cells that are adjacent to full nodes, and b) so your selection box can have a grid to work in and you can select multiple nodes that may have empty nodes between them

> wasn't able to save text

What is your use case for saving the text? Did you want to copy and paste it somewhere? Its true that won't work. I'm going to implement c/p but within knotend so you can copy one part of a graph and paste it elsewhere. But I would need to implement a different feature to c/p from knotend into, say, text doc.

> back on Android triggered an undo?

That is intended. cmd-z/cmd-shift-z and browser history back/forward will do undo/redo.

> nav bar buttons at the top didn't seem to do anything

They are individually disabled based on the state of the graph and your selection. Probably isn't obvious on mobile.

Ok feedback on Scaffoldly...

You linked specifically to the tutorial so I'll start there. I looked on both mobile (iphone) and desktop (mac).

My initial impression is that the site is well made and nicely designed. Its easy to read.

My biggest initial hurdle was that I somewhat understood this was an infrastructure as code product, but had a hard time figuring out the details. For example, is it a custom web framework or do I bring my own framework? Does it work with many languages, and many cloud providers? How do I run this stack locally, and test it? I think it would be helpful to have a short paragraph somewhere prominent (home page, docs intro) describing those nuts and bolts early on. I think the text in your "What Does it Do?" is pretty good, but should be more granular.

I agree that AWS configuration is a pain. So the initial hook gets me to read further.

I'm not sure you need the "for Startups" in your tagline "The SaaS builder for Startups". It seems useful to anyone? Or maybe explain why this wouldn't be great for hobbyist, academic, enterprise, etc.

I wouldn't use insider terms like 'persona' in your copy, eg "Out target persona is a CTO". Even mentioning that its for CTOs is probably a bit limiting.

> Multiple Environments: Scaffoldly provisions Non-Live and Live "environments/stages"

This is really cool. This is something we hand-rolled at work previously. One challenge can be that people have different ideas of how different environments should behave, its not a one size fits all type problem.

Overall I get a sense it may address my pain points with deployment but its hard to crystalize a picture of what exactly it does. I'd like to walk away thinking "ok, I write in these languages with these frameworks and scaffoldly takes care of x,y,z". Or have a sense of comparison, like "its similar to Heroku but with x,y,z differences".

Thanks again for the feedback! Please let me know if mine was helpful or if I missed anything you wanted some eyes on.

Thanks @escot! Great feedback it was really helpful, you're one of the first outside my circle to digest it. If you find the time to actually go through project onboarding I'd love that too (video 1-3 (one time setup ---> web portal), but also, I could give you some 1-1 time to see if you could host knotend on it, as your project is also exactly what i'm trying to help incubate. I'll work on the pitch and background so its more clear and you made some great suggestions.

Back to Knotend (FYI i keep wanting to type Knoted):

(I tried on desktop now and have more feedback [sorry if it's duplicate of what you already received, I didn't review other's feedback])

First, here's a screen recording of my desktop experience, i annotated my thoughts in the cells so hopefully its clear what i was thinking when something happened, but let me know if you need any clarifications of what i pressed/did...

Also I got a big fat Unexpected End of Input Error at the end.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QExurVaWTdDpi-BCFxgC17hbKsx...

Here's some responses to your responses/questions on knotend: - Empty cells: Perhaps try a (+) icon in the empty cell where stuff can be added, so its clear where stuff can be added. - I'd love to be able to drag/drop cells - I'd love to be able to click on one of the lines and change a relationship - Saving Text on Mobile: Screen recording: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ylJzOm0_O6cVyc9dWcuBsL47iu0...

Cheers mate, keep in touch, would love to continue to evaluate each others tech!

Wow thanks for the videos. In the first video, you're right its confusing that the new node jumps to the top left. What's happening is that you create a new node that has no connections, then the layout algorithm re-runs and places your node in the top left since it has no upstream dependencies. I should probably just disallow editing an empty cell that doesn't have any adjacent nodes or something, there isnt really any use case for it.

The |+| button is only activated if you have multiple nodes selected. Clicking it will add a new node thats placed inbetween the other nodes. Like A->B, (then click), will result in A -> new -> B. There's a html title on that button but you have to hover for a second to get the details.

Sorry for the json bug :/. That probably happened when serializing to the url. I'll have to try to reproduce it. Maybe I allowed you to introduce a cyclic connection or something.

For Scaffoldly:

How do you see it as compared to Netlify or Github pages for folks like myself just deploying a static site? At some point I'll build a backend but I don't need it yet.

Is there a way I can give some feedback without altering my aws/github accounts?

Thanks again for the detailed feedback.

Let me know when you have a new release and I'll try it out some more!

Scaffoldly+Knotend:

- Compare with Netlify/GH Pages: Big bonus is that you get Nonlive and Live out-of-the-box (e.g. app-dev.knotend.com and app.knotend.com for examples) and CI+CD+Releases in GH Actions to run it all. I have a "Generic CDN" template (not yet documented) that will push a public_html/ directory to S3+CloudFront too, here's an example repo: https://github.com/scaffoldly-demo/demo-web-cdn, in your case, you'd update the GitHub action to compile whatever into the public_html directory

- Feedback w/o altering AWS/GH: Everything is contained to A) a new GH organization and B) an AWS sub-organization. If you want to "edit-undo" any changes Scaffoldly did, it should be as simple as (1) delete the github org and (2) terminate the AWS sub-org account.

- I presume you're eventually going to need a backend, which is where Scaffoldly will help, wires up APIs + Swagger Docs for you, and takes care of all that CORS stuff too.

Let me know what you think!

Very good idea to EXCHANGE feedback between creators. I'd like to see this more often. Does anyone know a platform for it?

Do you mean you would like a good way to share a flowchart with other people? There are a few products that have persistence/collaboration builtin, like lucidcharts or miro. With knotend you can share the url with anyone to see your graph, but theres no collaboration yet.

No, sorry, I was not clear. I'm talking about what you did with Ask HN. "Give me feedback and I'll give you feedback". This is an extremely valuable exchange for both sides. It should happen more often.

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