Show HN: My first project – Football voting app built in RubyMotion | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My first project – Football voting app built in RubyMotion

footpoll.com

73 pointsbg2365 comments

As a football fan, this looks like it can be fun. Especially as you're watching the game live, create a poll to see the opinion of people in real-time during a controversial play e.g. "Was Rooney tripped or did he dive?". Good stuff bg23.

One small nitpick: on your demo screen shots, you have "Which is the best player?". It should be "Who" not "Which".

Thanks waterside, and thanks for picking that error up.

Completely envision the app working in real-time too. Also for man of the match voting etc.

Future versions will also include a breakdown of the votes by supporters as Football is a tribal sport and opinions are biased towards your club.

Thanks for the feedback

I agree with the "event" polls aspect. There should be a way to say that you are live-watching a specific event and get/create realtime polls.

Microsoft did this with the presidential debates and it was a blast. I'm not a sports guy, but once this app is more developed you may consider forking it to politics or TV shows or maybe just generic mass events.

I think this will be a especially fun for the World Cup. Good stuff!

Impressive. Really like the design.

A quick note...on your Twitter auth page it's not possible to paste usernames and passwords into the fields. Probably not a huge problem for most but my passwords are at the long and un-typeable end of the spectrum and I normally paste these in from a separate password manager app.

Thanks for the heads up. I will look into improving that!

Really great idea and looks like it it well executed.

On a side note, I really enjoy the new turn of HN moderation which let a lot more of cool project / show HN rise to the front page.

Good job bg23!

Or google, intitle:show hn site:news.ycombinator.com

There's one thing I totally disliked: I hate when I need to login as the very first required step. I (may) still don't know what the app does and I already have to login or create an account. To me, that's a bad user experience and in general I uninstall apps that do that. Very few apps really need the user to be logged in from moment zero. I would suggest to let the user see what the app is for, so he feels by himself how cool it'd be to have an account to use the app at its 100%.

I understand this argument but I don't believe it is a slam dunk. On the web, a user has invested nothing other than a click or possibly typing a url. On mobile, a user has already downloaded and installed the app. They have more invested, so you would think, are more likely to create an account.

That being said, you are certainly making the "funnel" smaller at the top but possibly the slope of the edges are more forgiving to the app developer as the user progresses down the conversion funnel?

I don't know. I know apps requiring login as step zero have a higher rate of "installdeletes" (I myself do that usually). Not sure if the users who actually decide to stay (so, to login) are then "better users". It could be. It actually makes sense. But I have no data about that tbf.

Hah, I don't have any data either. This was a debate at the last startup I worked.

Really clean design.

This reminds me of the Heineken Star Player app from a couple of years ago.

http://www.akqa.com/approach/social/case-studies/heineken-st...

I work for a pro sporting league and have need for the same experience.

Thinking about an Android version?

Is there any good way to port a RubyMotion app to Android? Or would you have to rewrite it?

I don't believe that is possible. I think the closest thing would be http://ruboto.org/ which allows you to code native Android apps in ruby.

Yes definately.

For a first project, design looks pretty great. It it works like it looks, nice work!

Here's a bug:

I signed up via email, I was told my username had already been taken but then it let me go to the next screen and create polls with that username.

I like it though, nice design & well executed.

Just installed it, seems to run great and it looks good too. Selfishly, I would LOVE if you wrote an article about implementing signup with facebook/twitter via rubymotion. What did you write your server using?

Happy to write an article on that. I initially built the website using Ruby on Rails and had twitter/facebook omniauth implemented.

It was then a simple case of displaying a web view in the app with login similar to how you would on the web, then diverting back to the app upon login.

awesome, what's your twitter handle or website? I was thinking the webview might be the simplest way to go. I wonder if you get any extra functionality by tying into iOS's facebook/twitter stuff? Might be easier for things like "post to facebook" and the like.

Yeh I think it would be easier eventually. I struggled trying to implement it though looking at objective-c. Its on my to-do list

I've found stuff like this https://github.com/aaronfeng/facebook-auth-ruby-motion-examp... but I haven't actually tried implementing anything yet.

Looks awesome man. I presume there are no plans for Android at this time? :)

There are definitely plans, I would like to get round to it asap really....

This question might be a bit naive. I'm developing a similar app and I have not developed full mobile apps earlier - I started with Phonegap. Was there a reason why you did not consider that?

I came from a zero programming background and built the website in Ruby on Rails whilst learning Ruby.

I wanted to build a fully native app for the best user experience and really enjoyed learning ruby, Rubymotion seemed like the perfect fit and it didn't disappoint.

I still have the limitation with Android of course...

Great work! Where/How did you learn Ruby (and programming)?

This looks great! I'm in the process of building my first iOS app with Rubymotion. May I ask where you got all the awesome looking icons and whether you used RMQ? Awesome work!

Thanks! I'm using RMQ for the front end and CDQ (also created from infinitered) for the Models and backend syncing.

The icons are from https://flaticons.co/

awesome. I loved RMQ. I can't imagine the level of detail in your cell stylesheets though :) looks fantastic.

Offtopic question: I created RMQ, what specifically do you love, what do you think needs improvement?

Just to chime in, I've been using rubymotion for a couple weeks and used RMQ for some toy apps. I now have switched to Promotion. I may come back to RMQ but my goal is the quickest path to an MVP on iOS. It seems Promotion is a bit easier (as I have no prior iOS experience) but I could be wrong.

I think RMQ seemed really great, and I do think I could get where I'm going using it (but maybe a little slower). If I recall, working with tableviews is where I switched to Promotion. Tableviews are dead simple for Promotion. I saw your video on the more complex view (the name is escaping me at the moment) but I am generally going to be using the tableview.

At the end of the day, none of the offerings have solid documentation (with examples!). For my needs, Promotion (so far) happened to have the documentation and examples in the places I needed it. I would definitely switch to a framework if it had easier to use docs and examples, but that's just me. I'm not a typical developer (computational physicist and musician turned web/mobile dev).

I'm also trying out rubymotion. :) I'm trying out promotion. I gave RMQ a try but I think promotion will get me up and running faster which is really important to me. And if you guys wanna help a fellow rubymotion noob out, take a look at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23233485/add-uiimage-from... :)

PS. I'll download the app and take a look. Did you see that the top paid app in the app store right now is a rubymotion app??!

I'll take a look at the question in a bit but from my experience, the support for rubymotion on SO isn't great. You are better off asking something in the mailing list or in #rubymotion room in irc.freenode.net especially if colinta or mark rickert are present. They are great and extremely helpful.

OK, cool, I'll checkout #rubymotion. I've ran into this with other frameworks, where they didn't use SO. I always am a bit dissapointed just because SO tends to really be a good format for me. Anywhoo, i'll hit up #rubymotion. gracias.

Yeah I really don't keep up with stack overflow; if I could get emails from SO that I could reply to, I would have a much easier time helping out there. See you in #rubymotion! :-D

Thanks for the SO reply, btw.

Thanks! :P

I've been using icons from http://www.glyphish.com/. They let you use them for free but I think they ask you to credit them somehow. I'm still hacking around, so I haven't found out exactly what that means but I'd be happy to add a link to my "about" page pointing to them if that's what they are asking.

Great app. I have tried. Registred as MANUTD fan. your app gives me some Norwich polls I don't care. Maybe that is something this fabulous app can improve. thanks!

When you log in initially you are following 'Footpoll'. The main page is similar to twitter dependent on who you are following. You can go to the categories section to view Man Utd polls.

I'm learning Rubymotion myself. Can you list out the different technologies/gems used in this? RMQ, teacup, etc...?

This looks really nice, btw.

Thank you.

I bought Rubymotion in November and it took me a month or two testing out different gems etc.

I ended up using RMQ, CDQ, Restkit, formotion, bits of bubblewrap

Did you try promotion at all? I've made a few toy apps with RMQ and now have been trying Promotion. I think I'm going to stick with Promotion but would love to hear anyone's experience with the various frameworks.

I've not got round to Promotion yet. I'm really enjoying RMQ though and would be hard to move away from it!

Definitely stay with what works and obviously RMQ is working for you!

I feel there needs to be an expiry date on polls. I'm still getting questions on who's going to win in past football games.

Hey this looks impressive. Something I can use to end arguments as well where can I deliver feedback once I start using it? Cheers

Yes thanks, any feedback is very much welcome!

I've been debating about learning code for a while. Really like what you did. How long did it take you to learn and develop?

Did you find help to translate it to portuguese yet? Brazil will love this.

Does this exist for general opinions? Looks awesome overall.

I think a few have tried but nothing major I don't think. I recall a site called Opinsy a year or so back.

My initial thoughts we're creating it on a subject I was passionate about, as I personally wouldn't go on a generalist site to argue my opinion's about chalk then about cheese.

But the concept can be applied to anything of course.

Is that a volleyball in the logo though?

It is a very old football one: https://icfut.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/files_37988_201003...

But I agree he should have gone with the traditional one: http://donosdacopa.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/bola-mexico-1...

Volleyballs generally have 3 parallel panels, while the older style footballs have 2.

Still trying to figure out how to add a piechart/barchart into the logo...

You could have a line-chart with the ball at the end? Like this(ish) http://imgur.com/FGFGjI8

+1 for the old school ball

too bad only for ios, furthermore the SDK that you use can only be deployed to ios as well

Well if the app is successful I plan on releasing it for Android and on the web

Just in time for the world cup!

Love the site design too

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