Show HN: I finally relased my first product | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I finally relased my first product

11 pointsvColin11 comments

So, after many years of kicking about little apps and not putting the full effort in, I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it.

Very much inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I present Griddol (http://www.griddol.com) a tool to create and play word searches. Intended mainly for teachers, but encouraging those who like a word search too.

This been churning around in my head for over a year in various forms, and I used the concept to help learn CoffeeScript, CouchDB and node.js, so even if the product itself is a failure, the learning process has been valuable.

I'll be the first to admit that it's somewhat(!) unpolished and needs a lot of work and content, but it's out there now.

I appreciate any comments you might have.

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Congratulations. I strongly suggest a design which visually suggests what to click on. At the moment everything looks buttonesque and virtually nothing leads to you being happy if I click it.

Noted. At the moment I am just happy if anyone even visits the page though. But I realise that there is no clear direction to the new visitor. Another thing to add to the never-ending list.

You need to prioritize that never-ending list. Visitors having a bad experience should be somewhere at the top of things to fix. Adding feature X and Y should probably be somewhere at the bottom.

It's cool, but needs a lot of design, it's very raw yet.

One other thing, the program should not allow me to click anywhere, like, if I start to make a word in horizontal and them click 4 columns on the vertical he shoul not compute that, or something like this... (I don't know if you can understand this without some screenshot)

polish, polish and polish more. :D

I think I know exactly what you mean - restrict the highlighted letters to be in a single direction.

Something I was considering was changing the selection mechanics so that you click at the first letter and then drag to the final letter before releasing. I think that would be more intuitive.

Yes, I agree it's raw, almost embarrassingly so. Still, release early and iterate!

Great job getting on with it. I look forward to seeing if/how you modify your design and implementation.

As I was browsing through your JS code to figure out how you end up positioning the words (vertical, horizontal or diagonal), I found the "naughtyWords" list to be hilarious. It was immediately clear to me that the developer inhabits the UK.

Congratulations on your success!

Thanks for the encouragement!

That actually reminds me - that stuff shouldn't even be in the client-code. And even if it should be there, methinks it ought to be scrambled somehow :)

Your deductions are indeed correct - I am in the UK - Cambridge in fact.

First of all congratulations ! Some feedback : on IE9 at the registration page the textboxes appear emtry (no username,password,confirm passwork text) , a visitor would probably hit the back button !

Thanks for pointing that out - my IE testing has been sporadic at best! I'll definitely take a look at that.

Also , as patio11 mentioned a better visual design would be helpful for your site. You may find great templates for a low price at http://themeforest.net/

clickable: http://www.griddol.com

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