Making of April Zero: Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

Making of April Zero: Part 2

aprilzero.com

111 pointsaprilzero19 comments

It doesn't matter how long you practices the art of design, there are few people that can pull this off by themselves. I believe this guy has natural design talent coupled with years of practice.

I see talent. This is a nifty display of technical prowess. I don't see discipline or any concern for the experience of the user.

Having spent some time in the explorer section, what I see is something pretty, but unreadable. After the novelty of the interface choices fades, it's about as engaging as an XML document. There's no story here, no human element. I am seeing some interesting ideas and uses of space wasted displaying useless data. The experience is disjointed, the navigation is not intuitive, the page does weird things on scroll, and it doesn't work in IE11 (which is more offensive to me than it likely is to most of his audience - I switched to chrome to play with this).

If I were looking through this as a portfolio piece, I would be impressed with the technical elements of the design, a bit put-off by the usability problems, and confused (and a little upset) as to why a record of travel to 72 cities is presented in such a dehumanized manner.

In his defense it was a personal project; not a product for paying customers. I find it impossible to get "upset" at someone's personal project.

But haters gonna hate.

EDIT: Count all the haters above coming out of the woodwork. We can't see the points so we'll never know the real number.

Let me clarify. None of that was an insult. He has talent. It takes a lot of experience to harness and balance it properly. As he matures he'll figure it out. He's 24.

Building something pretty is one talent. Building something novel yet still intuitively usable is another. Building something engaging is yet another. They (and more) are all linked. If he gets them all (or even just a few) down and balanced he'll be someone to look out for.

The uncritical worship of data is probably the most irritating aspect of contemporary technology intelligentsia culture.

Knowing my own pulse every second is boring and misleading, but knowing someone else's pulse is just plain boring.

People obsessing over statistics is not a new phenomenon, but it used to be that the people who memorized World War II logistics details (or whatever) at least knew that their fixation is ultimately meaningless. Nowadays statistics geeks are convinced that they're contributing something important to the world by analyzing and curating their endless log streams.

> Knowing my own pulse every second is boring and misleading

It's important that people realise that hyper-awareness of your body could be harmful. Doctors tell healthy people to avoid full body MRI scans. The reasons are the same. You become aware of stuff which is meaningless noise, but which then triggers action. Even "watchful waiting" is for some people stressful and distracting.

It's not even the user experience I'm talking about. It's just that his design has an unspoken quality to it. Look at the way he presents the "making of" article. Everything just looks so right.

http://aprilzero.com/journal/making-of-aprilzero/

I like at the end of part 1 where his buddy texts him and asks him if he wants to go to Hong Kong and to meet in 5 hours at SFO.

Must be nice. . .

This is some hugely impressive amount of highest quality work done by a single person. I cannot recall seeing anything more astonishing than this.

This is cool. I want this to be an app.

And I just realized he's releasing it as one - http://gyrosco.pe/

He should put some text on that website.

yeah actually can someone verify that this is related to his app? I can't really come to terms with entering my email into a blank third-party website.

Sorry. It's real but pretty rough, I put that page together really quickly. Working on an upgraded version now that should feel less shady

It's linked to at the bottom of the article.

It's in the CTA at the end of his post.

Would be nice to have some sort of link back to the article just to confirm the two.

Also weird I put in my email and the page just scrolled down and revealed some aviation manuals. No indication if it "worked" or not.

It sends a GET to createsend

    http://gyroscope.createsend.com/t/d/s/jiltlj/?callback=jQuery2110046029964007594404_1407447875319&cm-jiltlj-jiltlj=test%40example.com&_=1407447875320

If you use NoScript or the like you get a nice notification that you triggered something

I thought so too, but - for myself - I know I'm not tracking enough aspects or varying my location enough for all the gauges that his lifestyle accommodates. I will, however, take this inspiration to my own projects, where I've been more apt to use canvas than svn.

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