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askaron Ask HN: What's the best way you've found to reach a niche audience online?

Other than Facebook Ads you can try hashtags on Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram to reach a few more of those audience.

askaron PushServer – Node.js server for sending iOS push notifications

Parse has become so unreliable and my users complain a lot about APNS not going through. It's working for some and not working for many in PROD. Hard to figure why it's not working as everything else you touch in Parse will ask for a paid service (straight to Enterprise Plan!). Will have to code something by myself.

askaron Rails & Nodejs Developer: 13" MBP or Air?

After a lot of back and forth I went with the late-2013 15" rMBP and I don't regret it for a minute. I know, it's expensive but if you can afford and as someone else said here, after you spend some time with the retina display it's hard to get back to a non-retina display, I can tell you that for sure, especially when you work on the high-resolution ratio...you can fit a lot more content at that resolution and is quite useful when you design.

askaron Ask HN: App of the Year?

If you ask me as a developer of my apps, of course, I'd say all my apps that I developed during 2013 with a special shout-out to my Quotegram iOS app (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quotegram/id705700846). It taught a bunch in terms of planning, marketing, interacting with bloggers and the whole 9-yard.

askaron Building a Web App From the Ground Up

That's a great advice. I would say, in this day and age, if you are starting to learn then learn it correct. Learn a JS framework like Angular and build your client as purely browser based and learn another framework such Ruby-on-Rails or Laravel or CodeIgniter to just serve JSON data for your JS client. I think that's the route to go as your data feeds can be leveraged on many different mobile clients as well.

askaron AngularJS Tutorial: now real-time with no backend using Firebase

Fantastic tut on Angular. I wish you wrote on a different blog engine.

askaron Show HN: Beautiful way to recharge yourself

Sure :) I love Seth and his talks and thought of having him on the first page. Can change it later. Thanks for that tip, any opinion about the app?

askaron Ask HN: What are you working on and why is it cool?

This day and age people tend to get easily low on their morale for every little reason. I wanted to help them quickly recharge themselves with some great quotes that inspires and boost them up, most of the time.

In that process I'm working on my iOS app Quotegram, which is now available in the AppStore. It's one of the best looking apps on the Quotes niche on the AppStore.

AppStore Link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quotegram/id705700846

It's cool because practically it has helped me recharge myself in a couple instances in the recent past and I'm sure it would help those in need of a quick recharge.

askaron Ask HN: Which MacBook Pro model is best for iOS app and web development?

I clearly get what you meant, been there and toggled panels enough to get away with it. I'm counting on the retina display and higher resolution to get around a portion of this overhead.

askaron Ask HN: Which MacBook Pro model is best for iOS app and web development?

Thanks for the great advice. Eventually that's what I did, maxed out the RAM to 16GB and upgraded the SSD to 256GB and compromised on the 13" screen size. Apple Live Chat person said try this and see how you feel and if not then upgrade to 15" and I thought that kind of make sense. I hope I find 13" comfortable; otherwise I have to shell out another $500 for the 15" similar spec.

askaron Ask HN: Which MacBook Pro model is best for iOS app and web development?

Yes, I do some design work as well and I used to live with a 13" MacBook hooked up to a 24" external monitor and it worked fine for me but wanted to get away from that monitor dependency.

askaron Ask HN: New MacBook Air or Windows laptop?

I think this make sense since I can always bootcamp it when I need to do something on the Windows side. And that brings a good point, the reason I don't bootcamp now on my 2008 MacBook Unibody is that it's not that responsive when I tried a while ago. That kind of tells me that the new Air is the best option if I can justify shelling out a few hundred more dollars but I think since I'm developing for iOS as well it might be just worth it.

askaron Ask HN: Is iOS 7 Beta reliable and stable enough to use on your primary phone?

Had it on my iPhone 4S and the installation was the smoothest so far. Running it on your primary phone could be a bit risky, depends on how you use it. I use Podcasts app a lot and having that completely broken is unacceptable to me. I'm going to revert back to iOS6 for now until Beta 3 or higher comes out. Also, I hate the Home screen and the icons...just so terrible of a job from Ive and his team.

askaron Ask HN: do you keep a stash of ideas?

I used to use Evernote to keep track of my ever growing ideas but ultimately found keep a moleskine fits me very well...the feeling of writing it down by myself, a chance to scribble, a chance to sketch etc. made it a better fit for me and I'l sticking to that. I greatly miss the fantastic Evernote search though ;-)

askaron Sell HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?

http://www.demogeek.com

It's a tech blog that was well maintained up until a year back but then I got focused on other projects and didn't get much time and energy to maintain it well.

It has good potential with a decent community vibe (one post itself has got more than 600 comments) if someone can keep it up with some good content. It generates a few thousand dollars a year in ads even though (a lot) more can be done to amp up that revenue in multitudes.

If someone is willing to take on a couple years old site with nice page ranks and keep up with it I'm open to sell it.

askaron Show HN: Laravel 4 - This framework is revolutionizing PHP.

I was heavy on CodeIgniter before and ever since I launched another website with Laravel I don't feel like going back to CI. In fact if I get time I wanted to relaunch my other sites with Laravel. If you closely follow the MVC frameworks and the way they are moving forward Laravel sounds like right on the track which CI lags big time. Give it a serious try and you will know. I got completely hooked with its robust Routing system.

askaron Show HN: I'm 36 years old and this iPhone app took me forever

Congratulations on the launch...5 months is a long time and as a few said here it's easy to give up during this time.

I would suggest give it a little categories grouping and let people filter things through their preference. A way to filter through the person who quoted this wouldn't hurt too. More power to the people and they feel good.

askaron Ask HN: What mobile app did you make and how much are you making from it?

Anyone else have any suggestions? Would appreciate your input.

askaron Ask HN: What mobile app did you make and how much are you making from it?

Don't know what exactly that means? Do you mean let those orgs buy bulk license and distribute to their groups? Can you please explain a little bit?

askaron Ask HN: What mobile app did you make and how much are you making from it?

PrayerTime iPhone app, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/prayerti.me/id555243169?ls=1...

The idea is to help Muslims know their obligatory prayer times and also to help them keep track of their prayers. Learned iOS and built it all by myself including the design work.

I launched it for $0.99, made $10 or so and then made it free and since then saw a significant increase in downloads but since it's a free app without any ads it's not making any money right now.

I would love to hear from you on how to possibly monetize this without compromising the good intentions of making this app.

askaron Ask HN: Half of YC company websites are SSL-only. Time for SSL-only internet?

Going full SSL might be a bit too extreme in most cases; best bet would be secure the ones that matter.

askaron Why most of the time hacker news shows "Unknown or expired link" error?

I agree, it's the worst part I hate about HN...especially if you are deep down on page 10+ and it shows this "unknown or expired link". Now even if you startover you have sift through 10 pages to get to where you were. Annoying but as samwillis said it's the nature of arc I guess. I sincerely hope there are some workarounds to this.

askaron Orchestra’s Mailbox app now reservable in the App Store

Wonder how Apple approved this app. It doesn't do anything (I mean, anything) if you forgot about the "get in the line" moment. I'm sure once you get access to it maybe it's the coolest but still wonder how Apple approved the app with this type of hack built-in. 274,000+ people in front...I might eventually forget about this.

askaron Ask HN: What have you launched this year?

http://www.IslamicEventFinder.com - launched late last year - would help Muslims easily find and make use of all those Islamic events that happen around them all the time.

So far, finding the audience to adapt to this new medium is the toughest part. They are so used to just emails and word of mouth that it's getting really harder get some traction. I know there is a need for this but still struggling through to get some traction.

Any thoughts/suggestions on how to get past this hurdle would be much appreciated.

askaron What kind of work do freelance RoR programmers get?

This happened exactly to me as well...fresh new idea with a few tweaks with a Bootstrap theme for a few internet projects and they were ecstatic.

askaron Ask HN: Anyone here have more than two revenue streams?

You should have listed all those products...another way to promote! Great to hear stories like this.

askaron Stripe Checkout

I was a bit shocked to see this behavior at first and spent some time debugging it thinking it could be an issue on my side. It turned out not. It's no big deal but could bring doubts on consumer's mind if they intentionally type wrong CVC (I used to do that before on other websites!). Glad to hear that Stripe is on it and can't wait for that tool to show up.

Can you please also answer a few of my other questions including the reliability seal thing? I'm sure that would be a simple change from your side and the developers may not even have to do a thing.

askaron Stripe Checkout

Stripe is pretty cool. We've been using it on http://www.IslamicEventFinder.com and was the best library experience to integrate. A few things we noticed, the CVC check is not as impressive, it charges the card even if the CVC is not correct, at least we've seen in a few instances. Other than that it looks solid.

Would prefer some sort of a seal or something on the popup to indicate that their payments are safe, a few clients asked. At least an option to customize displaying that seal would be great and also may be the type of credit cards Stripe accepts.

Is this Checkout thing same as Stripe.js? I didn't get a chance to checkout (lol) this fully yet!

askaron Ask HN: Solo startups? What have you built all on your own?

www.IslamicEventFinder.com - For the past few months I've spent my nights and a portion of my weekends to build what I think is a decent website that tries to unify all Islamic events into one central website and make it easy for the Muslims to make use of them. There is a small charge to publish events (there are few features that justifies the price) but it's completely free to use. It' s relatively new so there is nothing much I can tout about revenue. It's getting decent traction but what I've learnt is that the Islamic world is something really hard to reach out to for these online, tech stuff; many of the organizers don't get it. Would appreciate your feedback.

To your question, absolutely there are many bottlenecks and limitations. If you are married and have kids then intensify these 2 factors by a magnitude of 10 maybe, at least in my case, especially if you have a day job that consumes most of your time. Also, you might get stuck some simple stuff that would drain your energy and offset the timelines. Some of the mundane tasks would make you go crazy (imagine coming up with 26 different email templates for the emails that go out...that's mundane). A few ideas where I wasn't 100% sure and felt a cofounder would be someone who would have came in handy on those instances.

On top of all these hurdles, after you launch, you have to do product support along with marketing and getting the word out about your product. Mailchimp campaigns, analyzing Analytic points, testing to make sure things are not broken and a whole lot would keep you on your toes. I feel I can only for that far along but I'm determined to make it to the pole.

I believe the reward is after we sort through all of these hurdles...I can proudly say that "this is me, this is what I've built, all by myself" (Seth Godin's quote except the "all by myself" part).

askaron Ask HN: Is a 27" Screen Worth It?

To me screen resolution matters...with a higher resolution you can accommodate more into the screen real estate and don't have to switch things around. I used a super high resolution 15.4" laptop at work once and even having 2 dual 24" monitors didn't come closer to the productive experience that I had with that laptop...maybe it's just me but I would prefer super high screen resolutions.