ChrisNorstrom

Sorry but there's a reason why the comments here are negative. I'm a temp designer and even I stay away from transitions, they are almost always inappropriate, slow down the experience, distract attention, delay response. Especially as users get better and more familiar with using the app and use it more and more. These transitions start to become obnoxious.

Just look at the mess caused by CSS3 transitions over the last 4 years. Especially those stupid Parallax backgrounds. No longer can you simply scroll down and have the page and images go up... Oh no, now the images fade in as you scroll down, pop in off screen, backgrounds move at a different rate than the rest of the page. And for what? To impress someone? It's annoying, not impressive.

On the other hand, with the examples Craig Dehner gave in this article, motion design is great for tutorials so you can see what elements changed, where it went, etc... It would be nice for an app to have transitions only for the first 3 times you perform an action, after that they disable.

From stress, to car insurance, to gas. All the bad things in my life have decreased. I have more time, feel healthier, and get more sleep. I haven't paid for gas or filled up my car in months. All from this seemingly small change. A 1 minute jog to work. I decided if I ever got a different job I would move to be as close as possible to it. The benefits are too enormous to overlook.

- 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads.

- Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords.

- Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading.

- Video ads that start playing automatically.

- The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch.

- Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it.

- Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer.

Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.

Government is great at creating incentives and opportunities through laws and letting the business, creators, investors compete for the top stop. But choosing winners, artificially jump-starting pilot projects that would under normal market conditions not be created, is not what governments are meant for. We've talked about this on HN before during the Solyndra bankruptcy.

If they really want to help, give a tax cut for companies doing research, and sit down with all the parties interested in self-driving cars and ask them what laws or regulations are holding them back.

Plus we don't want this to turn into another Solyndra. http://www.dailytech.com/500+Million+Wasted+on+Bankrupt+Sola...

There's nothing to do. That's why some meetups fail. Whereas video game / exercise / yoga based meetups, from what I've heard, are much more successful and long lasting. People need something to do together. Not just sitting around talking to people without a purpose. That works temporarily but after 2 successive meetups without a purpose it's boring.

In the still-early days of internet at least 3 companies had Free Dial-Up Internet service suplimented with ads. They gave you access to ALL of the internet and simply put an ad banner on the bottom of the screen at all times you were connected. We had Net-Zero (FREE dialup internet with Ads), K-mart Blue-Light (FREE dialup with ads), and Juno (FREE dial up with ads). All three of them went off of the FREE ad based model eventually because it was unsustainable (downloads and Napster required larger and larger amounts of bandwidth). This wouldn't work today due to ad blockers and torrents. Internet.org doesn't even give you access to the whole internet. So the only way for this to pay off is for Facebook and Co to become a monopoly in India.

You might not care because it's an American company expanding its influence abroad, but how would you feel if China did the same to us in the USA? And we had no chance of ever developing Facebook?

Microsoft had Instant IMAGE Search over 10 years ago when they launched the live.com product (if anyone remembers). Much much before google had instant web search. Start typing and images would instantly fill the screen. This was at a time when AJAX was getting popular. Like a lot of cool Microsoft tech, they didn't invest in it for the long run and just killed it along with EXPO, the craigslist competitor.

I love NewsLines.org by the way.

- Office parks are usually built away from people and this creates a "long drive to work". Americans are tired of driving and traffic. Office parks are not usually built near busy residential areas, they're built farther out on empty or industrial or rezoned land. No one is going to pay $30-75 million dollars to buy up 120-300 homes (average going price is $250,000 offered per every $190,000 home to get the owners out), then pay millions to bulldoze the homes, then pay millions to build the office park. No. They will go out in the middle of no-where and offer $5-10 million to a farmer and build on his land instead. It's cheaper but this creates quite a drive.

I also used to work as a courier and I -> HATED <- industrial/office park runs. They used up a ton of gas, a lot of cul de sacs, endless stop signs, and made me drive out in the middle of no-where. Most industrial/office parks of them are like that. It can't be helped due to regulations and zoning. Office parks aren't as bad and usually closer to civilization.

- The cost, how does $7,000 a month sound for an office space smaller than a 2 bedroom house?

- The US recession shut down a lot of businesses in premium locations and this opens up opportunities for new tenants to replace them and start their business closer to their homes, instead of paying exuberant prices to rent space in an office park.

- They are soulless. Bland. Grey. Corporate. You will feel like a drone working in one. They do not allow the type of customization and construction that people take on when they own a building.

===== Office parks are great if... =====

- The city expands and engulfs the office park, surrounding it with residential areas, apartments, and hotels.

- They're located near a highway AND near a residential area. This makes them accessible to both local residents and distant workers..

Perfect Example: Orlando International Airport, is a jail. It has no sidewalks leading in or out of the airport. It's about 1 mile of 60mph road and ramps leading in and out of the airport with NO shoulders and NO sidewalks. Look it up on Google Maps. It's impossible to leave. After 11pm I arrive and the buses are not working, friend can't pick me up. A 6 mile taxi ride is $55 dollars! Uber ride is about $12. I try to hop on the Parking Spot / Rental car shuttles to get just outside the airport ban radius but they've caught on and no one will let me on. I'm not paying $55.

So I just grabbed a taxi and had him drop me off just outside the airport at a Denny's. Cost: $13 for 1 mile. Grabbed an Uber for the remainder of the trip which was $11. Paid $24 instead of $55.

Just look at today's HTML5 transitions and animations. It's not enough to have a normal webpage. Now when you scroll down things have to fade in and out of visibility, images have to rotate and come into view, videos start to autoplay when they come into visibility, parallax diarrhea slows down your computer.

I can't wait till "parallax scroll blocker" and "visual diarrhea disabler" are released as chrome plugins.

● If a business isn't diversifying its risks and assets it can lose them all. Similar to family trees, too few kids and a single war or natural disaster can wipe out the whole family and permanently end their branch of their family tree.

● Don't be afraid to pivot. Nintendo was originally a playing card company. Samsung was originally a trading company. Squaresoft was originally a power line construction company.

● Be your own competition. If a new product in the company destroys the old products, that's a good thing. The company still wins. When you are your own competitor weather you win or lose, you still win.

- Chalk is on it's way out. It's a rapidly shrinking market. Each year there will be less customers and less profit world wide.

- He could have sold the machine to another entreprenuer? Their company makes 45 MILLION sticks of chalk. They're getting their materials at a high bulk discount. Another company can never match the price point. They'll end up selling the same chalk at double the price.

- And expansion into the USA is laughable. Try expanding into an existing market with well established players (crayola) that is shrinking and on its way out.

- And this is the USA we're talking about, we prefer cheap products to quality ones. The only time it seems we invest in premium products is when they are an American brand, made in America.

Asymmetrical passenger quantity. (usually rush hour)

Which the really nice demo doesn't show (because it wants to show the delay with the passengers as a control). Both bustops have the same number of passengers each in relation to each other. That's just not realistic. In the real world, the asymmetrical passenger quantity causes the delays, not traffic.

Entrepreneur: "Hey YC, what do I have to tell you in order for me to get in? You know, so I can practice it and avoid being weeded out by your process. So I can tell you all the things you want to hear during the interview. I promise I won't lie during my interview."

I saw most results within 24 hours, others after only 4 days.

Oh how true. How true. I invented ToDoCal, the large format todo list / calender hybrid. My customers loved it. It sold like crap. I could never sell more than 300 a year. It was on blogs, amazon, ebay, etsy, my own store. It would not sell more than 300 units a year.

Loving a product and wanting a product are 2 different things.

Since August of 2014 I had been losing my hair. More and more of it was showing up in the sink drain. Earlier this year I got worried because it increased. I wasn't sure if it was a temporary thing due to stress or illness so I started saving up the little clumps of hair between paper towels and date stamping them. It just kept getting worse and worse. I got a blood test to check hormone levels and find out if everything's ok. I'm waiting on the results.

Last month I got tired of it all, and decided to experiment as a last ditch effort to prevent baldness in my late 20s. I started short but high intensity exersizes every 1 hour, for about 2-3 minutes. After only 1 week new hair has started sprouting up on my scalp. And the amount I've seen in the sink drain has gone down drastically. This is very odd because there's a huge delay in when hair grows and falls (often months) not 1 week. So I'm convinced it's the exersize that's increased circulation, jump started cell growth, and maintained healthy hormone levels. I need to test this out in the long term and try to get other guys to participate. I doubt it's a coincidence because 1 week I skipped my exercises and my hair growth decreased a bit and hair loss increased a tiny bit.

tl;dr The right dose of exersize for a healthy head of hair. Possibly.

My uncivilized hooligan former neighbors had a young tree in their yard which they purposely allowed to grow for years right in the foundation of our brick wall. It started casting a shadow in our garden as well. There were no nests in the 20 foot young tree and the property was abandoned and now owned by the bank. So I ran over and cut it down. It was big enough to start cracking the foundation.

Big mistake, I should have worn a disguise. The crows who live in the tree above the one I cut took saw this as vandalism (well it technically was). For 2 weeks they would poop on my car non-stop. Only my car. They knew the PT Cruiser was mine, they shat all over that car. They specifically aimed for the door handle on the driver's side. I have never seen such vengeful birds and such nasty bird crap. It was discussing. They'd carpet bomb it all day, every day, for 2 weeks. I would have about 14 bird crap splatters on the car on any given day. They finally stopped after about 2 weeks.

I should have had a neighbor do it or worn a disguise.

● Committing to one means you have to let go of committing to others. So you fear commitment to one.

● As soon as you find "the one" you become afraid that you'll find another "better one" that will make you happier. So you fear commitment to one.

● If you're attractive/talented you've got a line of [women/ideas] out the door and around the building wanting to be with you. So you fear commitment to one.

● If something goes wrong with a relationship/idea you can abandon it and run off with another instead of fixing and mending the original. So you let go of commitment to one.

● I've noticed that men/women who are [attractive, desired, popular] live a "player" lifestyle and don't settle down because they don't have to. There are too many options. Then a decade later when they lose muscle, gain weight, lose hair, their options in mates are more limited and they finally settle down.

TLDR: Maybe you're too young, too free, and have too many options, and not ready to settle down to one idea and should instead spend your time exploring and finding out what you're not good at. That way you can limit your options. Sounds strange but it worked for me. Now I have a profitable business and next year I may be able to live off of it entirely.

Why are they painful? Because every time you "conveniently" take them off to "eat or brush your teeth" your teeth are loose and moving them around hurts like hell when brushing or eating. Snapping the braces back on and they'll hurt like hell again for about an hour until the braces stabilize them and they start settling again.

It was a huge waste of money, and now I'm saving up to get traditional braces. My teeth aren't even all that crooked, traditional braces can straighten mine out in less than a year.

Feedback:

● It's hard to buy because there aren't any full screenshots or product pictures of the actual calendar. I can't see exactly what I'm buying. I know you don't want people to rip off your design and re-create it in excel, but a lack of screenshots is what really made me doubt purchasing N-AC.

● Your call to action button isn't at the top, instead it's somewhere in the middle and end of the page. This just adds purchase "friction". It should always be at the top above the fold, and even in the top menu for single product sites.

● Instead of a blog format, you should stick to a traditional webpage design for selling products and services: [Anchor links menu] at the top, then above the fold right where the reader can see it [screenshot] on left [description and call to action button] on the right, with [testimonials] underneath and further info below that.

● You use way too much text to explain your product. If you use more images customers will be able to see what you mean instead of reading what you're trying to say.

● Use pictures of your testimonial authors next to their testimonials. A/B testing has shown time and time again that people trust pictures of faces over text and descriptions.

● Change "Get it now!" button to "Instant Download"

● Change the purchase button color to the same color red as the word "calendar" at the top.

● You may want to switch to GumRoad or at least A/B test it. People not only trust it more but its checkout process is a lot more smooth and doesn't take your customers away from your site.

● Include American currency in the price: From: [4€] to [4€ | $4.50], You'd be surprised by how many people get scared off when they see a Euro sign.

● Include your full name, your email, and the name of the country next to your flag (Sweden?). I don't know who you are. Your picture looks very professional and I feel like I'm getting a high quality product designed somewhere in Europe but there's too much information left blank. More information about you builds trustworthiness.

● After printing it out I just realized, it's not really a calendar. It's a planner. A calendar tells you what day of the week a date falls on. It's no big deal but it doesn't really need to be re-designed every year to be updated. So you could just leave the "2015" spot blank and people can write in whatever year they want.