Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeCortopassi | Hacker News Reader

"Oh wow, that seems neat. I should check that out"

clicks link on Hacker News

"Hmm, not sure what this is about. I'll just hit the 'Start' button"

Hits start button. 'Add a button' dialog pops up

"That seems pretty straight forward, I'll just add drag that thing labelled 'Button' from the left window pane, on to what looks like a smartphone"

Drags button over. Gets 'Congratulations' box

"Wow, this is really intuitive so far. With a little effort, something like this would be a real game changer in the mobile space!"

New dialog pops up: 'Add a randomcat component to your app

Looks around for anything labelled 'randomcat'

"Huh, thats strange. I wondered if it's labelled something else and I'm just missing it"

Looks for 'random', 'cat', 'Cat.random()', and any other possible combination

"Wtf mate?"

Gives up and leaves

View on HN

I think I said this in another comment, but the gamification levels were really just to test our gamification APIs, the levels are not at all right, or useful. We'll remove that ASAP.

done.

That's fast, nice! I wonder if you could "anonymize" the phone, which looks too much like an Apple device for my taste. I think Mozilla has always shown the right direction for net neutrality, and trademark neturality is also important in my mind.

Ha. It's intended to look like a FirefoxOS phone if anything =)

LOL, yes, this is exactly what I did. It felt like I wasn't supposed to be seeing what I was seeing, like the software was some kind of funny inside joke at Mozilla or something.

All I could think after that was - Is Random Cat funny? Is this something I should know as a developer? Am I out of some loop?

At any rate, it was so odd I just decided not to do anything else, and left. I think they goofed here, but once it's fixed, I'm sure people will go back.

That being said, it does go down as possibly the biggest tutorial fail I've seen to date - and I'm a little shocked given the source.

There is a GREAT lesson to be learned from this - and that's probably that leaving strange humor out of sign-up processes and tutorials is a good idea. I've seen other sign-ups that try to be "funny" and it just throws me off.

Agreed. Reminds me of a joke at the end of Django tutorial[1]:

    Coming soon

    The tutorial ends here for the time being. Future installments of the tutorial will cover:

    * Advanced form processing
    * Using the RSS framework
    * Using the cache framework
    * Using the comments framework
    * Advanced admin features: Permissions
    * Advanced admin features: Custom JavaScript

I get it now. It now seems kinda funny. But when I was new to Django, I thought it was serious. I used to visit the page once in a while to check if new tutorials have been added yet. Fortunately, 1.4 was the last version which included this "joke".

[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/intro/tutorial04/#comi...

Sorry, but I don't get this. Care to explain?

Looks like a bug. I tried it out and it had a component called 'randomcat' on that part. It was just as straightforward as the button. But I just tried it again to take a screenshot to show you, and it didn't come up.

I got passed the randomCat but got stuck trying to add the 1 star rating

I think you need to add a button. Same thing in level 4 with fireworks.

I added a star gadget and a submit button. No joy.

Yer I added a star rating and clicked the 1, nothing happened, gave up.

It's like that Simon Says game. You have to complete all the previous steps plus the current one in order to progress to the randomcatfireworksratingsplosionbutton final stage, at which point you are deemed worthy of conquering the app store. If only I could get some kind of Mozilla Appmaker certification badge...

This was my exact thought process. Tried again and a bunch of new widgets showed up :shrugs:

"Mozilla Appmaker is a pre-alpha concept"

By the common understanding of alpha, pre alpha means its not really ready to demo.

True, but most of all we value working in the open so that we can both do user testing and find people who might want to contribute. In my book our mistake was not to prioritze issues 306 and 386 until we showed up on HN. Oh well!

Can I suggest not using alpha/beta - they are labels used to indicate the state of a proprietary project - how "polished" it is - whereas you are continuously exploring. if you must I suggest using a target audience - contributors, early adopters. etc etc

Try a bit harder. Within a couple minutes it becomes obvious how it works. At least to me.

Same thing here. Even tried other stuff like the image gallery.

Wow, you got dialog boxes? Lucky you...

Actually, the Randomcat came in very useful for CatChat: http://habitual-cracker-680.appalot.me/install.html

Exactly the experience I had...

exactly what I did

Reply on news.ycombinator.com