207 karma · joined March 24, 2009
Oh and re codex, I believe we're using opus.
We're currently in private beta and I'd be interested to get your input on what we're building. We've got a quick walkthrough here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV7HBXuhT7Q and you can signup for the private beta at http://speak.io
We definitely resonate with the general privacy concerns and are working on a mode which will allow you to turn the camera off, which we'll have completed very soon.
If you end up giving it another try, please let me know if you run into any issues or have any further feedback. Thanks!
Great that you're trying out Sqwiggle. I'm actually one of the co-founders so please let me know if there's anything we can do to improve your experience. Also any feedback you have is super helpful!
In either case there's no harm in sending the email. Of course your conversion rate is going to be low. But if you can send 10 well written emails and get 1 valuable response, that certainly seems worth it to me!
We actually got quite a few responses from very influential people, not just Naval. The reality is, a lot of them spend hours on email a day. If you give them something worth responding to, they will respond!
Regarding away status, in the future Sqwiggle will automatically know when you are away or at your computer by monitoring input... good point about the status message though.. I bet there's a cool way to work that in ;)
We'll also be building in some privacy options very soon that will make using the app a bit more comfortable :)
As long as you do your research, you can increase your certainty that your coder is legit and not out to steal ideas.
To be honest, I would recommend learning a bit more about MVC and OOP and just creating it yourself. Most applications are pretty rough when first launched. Just make sure you plan the project out to the best of your ability and keep scalability in mind. It is inevitable that you hand the project over to a more experienced coder so you would need to prepare for that as well. Hope this helps.