Show HN: I shipped my first product | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I shipped my first product

chriseidhof.tumblr.com

163 pointschriseidhof65 comments

Congrats. Good luck w/ the app and future apps. I think that writing, launching, (and making a few bucks off of) a simple app might be the best way to get started down the right path. If you can get even the slightest bit of success, I'm sure it will lead to more.

It's amazing how hard it is just to ship something for yourself. I've been doing website development for 15 years and have launched 100's of sites, apps, major features, etc. for clients and companies. My history of developing my own projects has not been so stellar.

To date I've launched maybe 4 projects in the past say 10 years. 2 were very simple content sites not meant to generate revenue. 2 were fun sites which I hoped might generate a few dollars in ad revenue. I never really got any of them where I wanted them and have since folded all but one (I'm still hoping to make that last 10% of improvements to the 4th).

Launching is tough. You did it. Fair play to ya.

If you really want to, make a commitment to do it. Set apart time, and make sure you're always moving forward. Always have the next action defined.

If you're serious about beating that shipping-yourself-difficulty, read Pressfield's book 'the art of war'.

do you mean "The war of art"? and yes, that book delivers

Hahaha... yes. Silly me :)

fwiw, "The art of war" would also make a great read for the 'guerrilla' entrepreneur :)

I always include in large capital letters at the bottom of my to-do list the following words:

JUST FUCKING LAUNCH

It's there to always remind me (when I am thinking about adding ever more new features to the to-do list) about the importance of getting the product out there.

FYI, I have managed to launch three reasonably big projects in the past two and a bit years (during breaks from contact work); http://gambolio.com (create your own library of online games - pretty much dead now), http://www.casualgirlgamer.com (a blog about online games which peaked at about 250,000 uniques a month) and http://tiki-toki.com (create online timelines, which is just starting to make a bit of money)

I initially read that as JUST FUCKING LAUGH, which arguably has a place on most to-do lists as well.

I read it this way too, and immediately added it to my TODO list. It's important to get reminded occasionally to keep a healthy distance to yourself. Thanks for accidentally sharing a good idea :).

haha me too. Both are good additions.

It would be especially useful if the item above is "ask HN for feedback."

nice timelines

Congratz on the launch!

If you make the data useful beyond geeks (srsly, Mom and Pop aren't going to import CSV in a spreadsheet and start data mining), this could be really cool.

For example, you can get the locations from 4sq or gmaps, or allow the user to check in (but locally, without sending the data anywhere). Then, measure how much time is spent on each location and in transit between them (might want to make more samples for that to work), and give me a daily/weekly/mothly overview. Eg: "30 hours spent in office, 8 in transit, 20 in coffee shops, 5 in shopping". Something like RescueTime for location.

That would be interesting, thanks! I'll consider your suggestion, but for this product, my target is geeks / quantified self people, not the average user.

Also, do you plan on adding something like a "confidence radius" for the output? Are there cases where the GPS was not able to return an accurate lock and was only able to give a vague estimate?

By the way, very cool app. Looking forward to messing with it. :)

Just found it in the App Store - congrats on launching.

It took some effort though - even searching for "TrackMe" put you below another TrackMe (by kimptoc), Track Me (TM), TrackMe FindMe, Track-Me, and Track Me.

Did you find it tough choosing a name? Or (general questions) are names less important in the App store, perhaps because most people find Apps through 'most popular' type lists and people searching for specifics know specifically what they're looking for?

Thanks! I spent half a day thinking of a better name, but I couldn't come up with one, so I just launched. I might change it later, but I'm confident (naive?) that people will find me anyway. And the icon is very recognizable.

However, I still would have liked to have a better name, so thanks.

Another name: MapMe

My Way, I am the map, Every Step, <Prententious Latin Location-related name> etc

Here I Am!

Nice work!

One small point - the export format is listed as CSV but has semicolon delimiters. I know this is common in countries with comma decimal notation, but if targeting US customers you might want to make the separator configurable.

Thanks! I'll consider changing it!

you can also add this

    sep=;

as the first line of the .csv file. This way it will inform the opening application of the separator in use (tested with Excel.)

Wow, I didn't know that! I think all of the .csv parsing code I wrote in the last years will break on this... thanks!

Don't write CSV parsing code. You'll never get it right.

That's a really clever idea. I'd have loved this when I was travelling this summer. Something I would be interested in, though, is some sort of battery test comparison. I know that you say it uses minimal battery, but I'm very conscious about that (and I know many others are, too).

Yes, that's a very good suggestion. I'll think of a way to do that comparison. However, I'm going on a holiday first, so it'll have to wait a bit.

Well done!

It's funny, I was just looking at some sample code that Apple provides, and I came across this little nugget:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#samplecode/LocateMe/...

It's sample code that sends your coordinates to your iPhone. You may find it useful for your app :) There's some great sample code at developer.apple.com that is certainly helping me as I learn the ropes of iOS development. Congrats again!

This is very cool. I thought that having your position continuously logged was kind of neat. Incidentally, I also launched my first app about a week ago, and it's also kind of geek-friendly: save notes and photos with location, and back them up to Picasaweb and Google's Fusion Tables (private repository of info accessible with SQL-like syntax over http and exportable to many formats, including CSV). Kind of frustrating so far, got around 950 downloads when it was in the first 100 of France for a day, then back to about 2 to 10 a day.

If you want to check it out, http://alandair.com/geopostr/ (there's a free and a paid version).

Contrats!

Nice work! I think I could use this when I forget my GPS logger for photo time/location correlation. However, 1km would be too course-grained for that. Would it be possible to make this a user-defined setting?

Edit: GPX export would also be useful.

Open sourcing wouldn't help that much with trust on iOS, I think, because you can not install the app by compiling it yourself. You still have to trust that the version in the app store is the same as the open source version.

you could diff the binaries though

Signed binaries? Nope

strip the signature then? (os x devtools include a command line tool that can do that)

Not to nitpick, but anyone in the iOS developer program can do just that - compile and run their own binaries.

Alternately, jailbreak.

It's not like it's impossible (or even expensive).

I think it costs 100$ (per year?), a lot more than the average app.

But point taken - maybe for iOS developers, an OSS version would increase trust.

Neat idea. The app runs in the background and tracks when you move to a new location.

You say it uses very little extra battery - and also that it may affect battery life.

Do you have any test data for how it affects the device battery lifespan?

Yeah, the last sentence was suggested by the App Store Review team. I can't really notice the difference, but as I said above, I'll do a proper comparison soon!

Cool - I wish you well with it.

Congratulations! I've been independent for about a month now, and the most important lesson I've learned so far is that NOTHING feels good except shipping.

I'm in a similar boat. I quit my day job and I'm living off of the (moderately) passive income that I receive from Routesy, my public transit iPhone app. I've got a few more things in the pipeline and I too am doing some freelancing in the meantime.

It's really nice to see a post from someone who's on the same path as me. I look forward to keeping up with your progress. :)

Thanks for the share and congratulations on your release! Like you, I also tried to create something simple for the iPhone and released it not too long ago. It definitely feels really satisfying to get it out there. I guess the challenge is to continue the cycle. I find myself getting excited in too many things and never really focusing on one idea. Let me know how it goes with you! Good luck!

It's so difficult to launch your OWN product and I enjoyed reading about your experience and goals on your blog. I'm reading (again, this time to completion) "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" and a phrase in it really applies to this situation: "Begin with the end in mind" - and it looks like you've done just this. Congrats and I wish you the best in your goals!

Nice work. But how does constant background location track works for iPod touch? Don't we need constant wifi connection to make it work?

Congrats. As someone who is currently mid way through developing my first iOS app (although I've done plenty for clients) I've definitely found how hard it is to launch your own product. The beginning idea and excitement phase is great, but seeing it through to the end is hard. Right now I'm in the trenches, looking forward to coming out the other side!

Your text isn't resizeable (in Chrome, on Linux), which means I can't read the page, which means I can't care.

Thanks, I'm going to look into this.

Cool! :) I want this when being on holiday in various bigger cities. In the evening then I can check where I had actually random-walked around that day.

Very cool, well done! I'd love to use this to track analytics about myself over time. Unfortunately I'm on an iPhone 3G still so I don't get to play :(

Congrats. I would say charge $0.99 (or whatever you want), and see how the sales go.

You can always open-source it later, if the sales don't pan out the way you wanted.

Dude, I'm working on exactly the same kind of app (although more complex) for a startup, so I know what you've been through. Congratulations!

Congrats on the launch! I was just recently thinking about making something like this for my own use. Great to see that I don't have to!

Congratulations on shipping your first. You're in exactly the same boat as me. Keep it up till you've got a dozen apps, you can do it!

Congratulations! I wish you the best reviews. I will download the app myself shortly!

Absolutely, open source it!

Congratulations. Looks like a useful product too.

This is exactly what I am looking for =)

congratz.you should provide an option to save compass direction as well.

nice indeed. Waiting for Android to download and try.

Congratulations!

First-

Congratulations!

Second-

How does it work? I get that you can be periodically woken up by iOS to run in the background for short periods of time. But how do you know if you've moved 1.0km or more before before being woken up? It makes sense that you wouldn't want to fire up the GPS equipment if you haven't moved... but there's a chicken-egg problem.

Or do you just record only if you've moved 1.0km or more? How often does the app check your location?

iPhone has an API that gives you a notification when a significant location change happens.

You hope ;) Significant location change is based on cell phone towers. The update only seems to happen when you switch towers or are switching between towers. Less towers = less accurate, more towers = more accurate.

Also, a kilometer is optimistic, good test and article here describes what was discovered when iOS4 came out. http://longweekendmobile.com/2010/07/22/iphone-background-gp... iOS 5 is now in beta, there may have been improvements, can't say for sure.

You are totally correct. With iOS 4 the significant location changes API can be trusted with distances around 1 mile / 1.5 kilometers. Anything below that and you don't have any guarantee.

I speak from my own experience developing GPS Notifier for iOS (http://jetap.com and AppStore: http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/jetap/id400203653).

My first version was only using significant location changes and after a lot of users feedback, the second release was improved dramatically by switching the way I was using the significant location changes API and some other GPS API: the app now has a better accuracy and the feedback from my users has almost disappear.

Anyway congrats for the OP to ship his app! Enjoy the ride in the AppStore.

Thanks!

I used the CLLocationManager with the right values set for distanceFilter and desiredAccuracy (see http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/CoreLo...)

Nice. Is it possible to create an Android version?

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