Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

Comment by k-mcgrady | Hacker News Reader

Really nice design. Playing around with it now and want to offer some minor feedback:

1. Onboarding screens seem unnecessary. I've already read the description and decided to download the app. Unless you're teaching me something I don't need to be sold again.

2. The images in the tables seem slow to load for me. Are these being fetched from a server and if so would you not be able to keep the images for at least the first screen local? Also you need to implement some sort of cache as when I scroll and the cell is reused and I scroll back it has to reload the image (slowly, I'm guessing from the server).

3. When I click through to a category (e.g. South America) your table has an activity indicator and loading text plus there is a HUD with activity indicator. Only seems to happen when going form top level to next level. Doesn't happen on the third level.

Overall really nicely designed app with some good information. I'll be keeping it installed. Do you plan on making money from it?

Thanks so much for the feedback. This is why I love HN <3

To reply to your thoughts: 1) Good point. I'll consider removing it for the next release, but from my beta testing, some users felt that an onboarding flow would be nicer. I figured making it short and sweet wouldn't hurt.

2) The images are fetched from the server, because the entire app is very API-driven. You're right though - I could architect it so that the images for the initial page are stored locally and I could use some special category-key to fetch the right image.

3) Yeah, I realized that pretty late when Apple had already approved the app. Fix coming in v1.0.1!

Thanks so much for giving it a try. I do plan on monetizing it later. I replied below on how I plan to do that, but the most important thing for me is to make a quality product that people like using. That's what I'm tracking right now.

I recommend this project for image caching: https://github.com/rs/SDWebImage

It creates a cache keyed on the URL and deals with processing the image off of the main thread.

Re #2: Subclass UIImageView, add a -setImageURL: method, hash the URL and use it to lookup/store images in the documents directory. https://gist.github.com/cloudwalking/74a364e168b641e44482

https://gist.github.com/cloudwalking/66990a244b249c57f443

I'm using AFNetworking + UIImageView. I believe it does something similar, doesn't it? https://github.com/AFNetworking/AFNetworking/blob/master/UIK...

Some more feedback, in the Australia section you've put New Zealand as well. Maybe you should name it Australasia to be a little more accurate?

Good point! Done. :) That's the benefit of being API-Driven.

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