Ask HN: Please review my new project: almost.at
almost.at
almost.at
But perhaps an "About" clicky would be helpful.
But overall nice job with the interface. Very slick.
Very good, would benefit from a search bar on the homepage and integration of real time comments from social sites such as digg, reddit and even Facebook public profiles.
It's also nice to see Cappuccino being used for something outside of 280 North. :)
What's the backend like?
Views, suggesting events, and adding followees are sent to php pages on EC2 with MySQL.
All that aside, its a really great interface. Soon as you enable some additional functionality (like search) and speed up the interface, this will be something I want to come to.
There's a standalone app OS X that you can keep open for hours, so it won't bog down your main browser:
Yes, it's just a WebView... I hope people don't think I'm trying to push it as a "real" OS X app, because it's just javascript, so I'm trying to call it a "Standalone Browser."
Excellent work. I am not sure about the name, I presume you are trying to say 'almost like being there?'. It probably doesn't help that today's top story is the sad news about that missing plane :-/ ...one feature request would be some kind of feed/download option for the stats window at the bottom...though for the few who'd be interested in doing math on it, I suppose it wouldn't be much more effort to just go to Twitter directly. I found myself wondering about the absolute numbers represented by the graph, though.
My hunch is Mootools will still give you an edge. But it might not last long.
Alex will probably write slow animations with whatever framework he's using, because it depends way more on how you program than with what.
You have to be cognizant of your DOM, your scripting practices, your loops, etc., etc.
I'm gonna be a total whore and probably get downmodded but, hey, I wrote a book on this exact topic: http://jsrocks.com/ with Thomas Fuchs, the creator of Scriptaculous. (Wait til you see Scripty2.)
In windows firefox it works (a bit sluggish, though).
Anyways, apart from that problem and a few minor bugs it's a really nice tech-demo. I don't see myself using such a service, but you might find some followers in the twitter crowd.
Kudos.
I welcome the traffic rush, though, because I want to figure out how to scale it!
You might want to mention that on the initial page. Yesterday I also gave up after 30 seconds, and I only came back today because this is still on the HN frontpage.
But it looks like a great way of visualizing developing stories, with the downside being that you can only really track one thing at a time.
How are you dealing with reducing noise from stuff that you pull from twitter or the web?
The "Followees" feature is going to be key in avoiding the twitter hashtag spam. Basically, you add people on twitter who are actually attending the event... and their posts are highlighted in yellow. You can also see only followee posts with the button at the top.
I was testing Google I/O last week with 50-60 followees and it really cut through the spam and all the "I wish I were at Google I/O!!!!" posts.
I'll be at WWDC next week and I'm hoping that the big Keynote will be a good test for the system.
2) It might be nice to include a throttle for the refresh speed. 5 seconds, for a high-volume item like the BEA, was total information overload.
EDIT: I should be more precise about #2. I'm seeing that even though it's been constantly refreshing every 5 sec for a couple minutes, it's still up to May 29. So maybe it's not actually that high-volume, but there's still something going on where I'm seeing a hard-to-follow stream of text.
2) There isn't currently a throttle, but if you mouse-over a column, it will pause so you can read something interesting that you see. Mouse out and it un-pauses. Also, it's like an IM conversation... if you scroll up, it will stop auto-scrolling to the bottom.
One bug I noticed: Expanding the left column seems to have some issues. More specifically, the content doesn't seem to expand with it until you click on another event. (In Safari 4 on a Mac)
It was speedy in google chrome too.
It appears you can pause individual columns but clicking on the pause button doesn't work (in Firefox at least)
The columns should have titles
The last column (Links) keeps the background title over the text (in Firefox at least)
Selecting different stories on the left seems not to work some of the time and there is no pointer icon when hovering over them (in Firefox at least)
I think you need a page explaining what is going on and how the site works because it seems to assume you already know.
Great stuff overall.
Edit: Having said that... yes, I'm sure there are bugs!
Here's a link if you're interested: http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4345/
When a user clicks on CNN, BBC or others could you not on the left most side bring up the article they clicked so they dont go to another site? Would be a UI thing, but I would never leave the page and I could click and read all the news stories about X, while staying within your site.
On my computer, I can come back to my data very easily. The next time I open an app, everything is where I left it. Does Capuccino work the same way?
I gave up trying to figure out what to do after about a minute.
Favicon maybe a bit too reminiscent of Alexa.
This is really very good toy - just sit and watch and sometimes read, but not much (140 chars of very simple language) - that is exactly what a people wants from time waster.