primigenus

I created this two months ago as an experiment to see if I could improve the readability of the site. Every month someone creates one of these but I've never been happy with them so I wanted to see if I could do better myself.

I then applied it and let it sit for two months to give myself some time to try it out. I decided I like it, so I've kept it, and now it's time to share it and see if you like it and what improvements you'd want to see.

Why do you have to assume that? Can't it just be that PG was talking to someone, this came up, he wondered what the results would be, did the search, and thought it was interesting enough to share? You know, like any hacker probably would?

I used to start sentences with "No offense, but..." when I felt I was going to say something controversial until a coworker pointed out that the only reason what I was saying was controversial was because I prefaced it with "No offense, but...".

So now I don't say that anymore. I just say what I mean and people aren't as likely to be offended.

I was talking about continuous deployment with some colleagues earlier and we were wondering whether we'd be able to deploy a version of the app to only a subset of our users on app engine.

We didn't think it would be possible, but it looks like this Traffic Splitting feature could be (ab)used to make it happen after all.

Wait, so this "article" makes a bunch of claims against Twitter based on zero authoritative links and a bunch of unsourced quotes from ... the Daily Mail?

And we're supposed to take this seriously? Come on, doesn't it take more than a bunch of unsubstantiated claims for the HN community to jump on something and just take it at face value?

This is most likely 550 community and customer support people and 50 internationalisation developers. Blizzard is doing really well and has multiple games coming down the pipe.

WoW's fluctuating subscriber numbers reflect the natural state of a 7 year old game that is in a down period between expansions, so I'm not worried about that. Instead what I think is going on is that they've spent so much time growing their staff to accommodate WoW, the new Battle.net and new projects like Diablo 3 and the unannounced MMO project that they've come to a point where they've decided to take a good hard look at who's working for them, how they can optimise their workforce, and how they can cut down on the bloat.

It's likely a matter of reducing overhead and improving internal communications as opposed to any "bad news" that they need to get rid of people in order to keep the ship afloat.

As the CEO says, this is something that happens when you grow a lot: you need to make some changes every now and then. Instead of viewing this as a cutback, I'd view this as a fundamental step towards stabilising themselves as a developer that handles multiple projects simultaneously, whereas before they really operated in serial.

Taking 600 off the top of 4700 employees still leaves them with over 4000 people working for them, which is about as many as Nintendo employs, to give you an idea of what kind of sizes we're talking about in the games industry.

You can still access The Pirate Bay from behind Ziggo and XS4all by using depiratebay.nl or any of the other proxies listed here: http://www.ikwilthepiratebay.nl/#!proxy

Your homepage is quite confusing indeed:

- The "Connect with artists" banner looks like an input field. The first thing I did was try to type in it, which didn't work.

- What's the point of the list of stats? When I mouse over them they react, so it implies I might be able to interact with them, but I can't... so why put them there?

- The list of fans, touring artists and news is confusing. If I click on fans, it shows me some numbers, which turns out to be screenshots if I click on them. Why not bring those screenshots out and show them when I load the site to help me understand what this is? If I click on touring artists it shows me what appears to be a list of buttons, but which upon further inspection appears to be a list of items which I can mouseover to see more information about (the arrows at the bottom further my confusion - they seem to suggest I can reorder the list, but really it just toggles between items). If I click on "news", I get what appears to be 3 tweets, 2 of which are you talking about how excited you are about launching.

I haven't tried signing up or using it because the homepage prevents me from understanding what this is or why I would use it. The layout breaks many UI conventions that could be fixed by involving an interaction designer or doing some usability tests and observing how people react to the homepage.

Hope that helps!

Not only do they have a devoted fan base, but nearly all of the comments are by women. There's got to be some interesting data there in how they ended up attracting that audience.

The advent of Native Client combined with this move means the Chrome Web Store is going to end up positioned as a direct competitor to Steam.

That's pretty interesting, honestly. It'll mean great things for consumers: I bet playing a game in your browser could be really convenient compared to downloading and installing Steam and then going through the motions for that platform. But Steam has 7 years on the Web Store with all kinds of great platform features like Steam Play, Cloud, Wallet, etc.

An exciting time to be a web and game developer, to be sure!

That won't work, because Pages can't add people to their circles until they've added the page. It'd be pretty hard to maintain a social network that way.

These are the promotions: http://automagical.posterous.com/three-promotions-for-better... - I think it's important to note that these three banners offer a much better idea of what you're installing than just the icon by itself.

That may also be the case for Handcraft, as our banners show the code editor. Before last week we got some people signing up and asking "What is this?" as if they weren't aware it was a HTML prototyping tool. Now the questions are of a different nature. I wonder if that's because the banner is more upfront about what the app is.

Last year here on HN, Nathaniel said this:

"The ridiculously huge mistake I think Chargify made here was something I thought was just a given these days: they should've unilaterally grandfathered all of their existing clients, and quietly given the grandfathered plan to anyone who was already integrating but not yet launched as well." (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781104)

It's one thing to trash your competitor publically. It's another to then do the exact same thing you were complaining about one year later.

This isn't about the numbers - $30 is jack squat. This is about principles. With this decision, Spreedly shows that they can say one thing and then do the exact opposite. And that's troubling.

"Your sensitive stuff is safe with us. Whether it's your email address, or usernames or passwords, your dedicated Zirtual Assistant would rather fall on their sword than divulge any of your sensitive information to internet creepers!" Hmm. Creepy!

Have a look at this series of posts we wrote on our blog: http://blog.handcraft.com/2011/01/looking-back-on-the-quest-... - we looked at Fastspring, Chargify and Spreedly and ultimately settled on Spreedly and Ogone (and a merchant account with AmEx). Spreedly is the processor most like Stripe of the above list.

We're in the Netherlands (like you?). Hit me up on twitter or our blog if you need any more info.

Define "Stripe-like". The point here is a developer-friendly, full-stack service with a simple payment setup (2.9%+30c is a great start). It feels... modern. The websites you link to feel similar to every other service we trudged through trying to find something good. Sure, they might work. But are they how you'd design them yourself?

Because when we looked for payment processors that supported Europe, most of them only supported the UK, not mainland Europe. So I assumed it would therefore be easier to get set up if you're in the UK. I'm not saying it's easy in the UK, just that it's probably significantly more troublesome elsewhere.

You should let me send the first card for free, but make sure I make an account and then follow up with it. Check out Touchnote, which is an iOS app that lets you send people cards using photos you take with your phone. They have a good startup experience that converts you into a return user pretty effectively.

It might be interesting to put a note in the card that tells mom that she can send a card back to me by emailing a special address as well. It would be nice if I could pick something for her that she feels is familiar, for instance myname@sendwrite.com, as opposed to the anonymous mail@sendwrite.com, which feels like I'm emailing a company.

The right-hand bar feels very "app" like. I wonder if their intention is to transition, through many iterations, Facebook into more of an "app-like" design and less of a "website"?

My interpretation is that Facebook is more valuable if the content you see when you interact with it is more useful to you. Facebook is about connecting you with family and friends, and that's easier to do if you see valuable content more frequently than low-value content (which might pop up in a simple chronological stream).

I think this way they're trying to improve the "keep-alive" of relationships between you and people on your friend lists by showing you more valuable content, which in turn will lead to higher engagement (eg. likes/comments/etc), which in turns keeps relationships going through interactions, which in turn keeps you coming back to Facebook. And that obviously is a good thing for Facebook.

Not much overall change? Midway through the movie the complete design for the entire thing changes from a colourful, pastel shaded page to black/white with large fonts and a focus on copy. That's a pretty huge change and definitely not inspired by marginal A/B tests. They just changed their minds, tried something different, and stuck with it.

This is really similar to the "getting started" feature in our product, Handcraft.com. It's a HTML prototyping tool so you have to write code, but we're aiming it at interaction designers so we've taken care to address the fact that some designers aren't too familiar with writing HTML to do prototyping.

We ended up initially putting you into an introductory prototype when you first start an account where we bring you up to speed on what our tool can do in terms of writing HTML before we go further and show you more about how our tool is special.

Strangely, after launching in the Chrome Web Store, we started getting a lot of feedback from people who had stumbled into it and were discovering HTML for the first time through our getting started guide. They don't have a clue what "HTML prototyping" or "interaction design" is, but they love learning about "how to make websites" with Handcraft.

Just thought I'd share. Great work with Codecademy! I'll be keeping my eye on it and might start forwarding people over if they get stuck with what we have on offer.

"Some engineer came up with the Wii Remote and they changed everything in the last second."

Where do you get that from? That's not what happened at all. The Wii was a result of a coordinated effort to redefine the user interface and had been in planning stages for years. They spent months refining and iterating on how they wanted their control to work, but the vision of motion control and a pointer were a fundamental part of the Revolution project.

The Wii was certainly luck to some extent, but it was also a calculated move based on a belief that there was a new way to excite ("delight" as Iwata calls it) players in motion/pointer controls and that they should follow that path, despite the competition going with HD graphics over controller innovation.

Not when we made this, you couldn't ;-)

Here's what one of the designers of Instant thinks about the UX (they tested it): http://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/1416/is-google-instant...

Most important part of this announcement? The unannounced part: http://www.youtube.com/movie/zalman-kings-red-shoe-diaries-3

The first thing that happened when I started typing was a big pop up balloon appearing at the top of the screen telling me to follow them on Twitter and requiring me to click a small cross in order to close it. I'm confused, how is this in line with "focus on writing" and "chrome fades away"? It seems like there are some conflicting priorities here.

I also find the crossfading chrome to be jarring, but that might just be me.

We're considering that kind of functionality, eg. a button or something similar allowing you to publish the prototype to your own site. But that's different from hosting a live site within Handcraft.

Some background on this: our prototyping tool allows you to write code in the browser, and the way maney people use it is they open a prototype on one monitor and then have the editor on the other one. So you save, alt-tab, refresh, just like you would if you were writing code offline.

After seeing LiveCSS (https://github.com/ooyala/livecss) we figured we could take the idea a step further and get rid of the need to alt-tab and refresh in the first place. It's a simple gimmick, but in combination with our prototyping app, it suddenly (in our eyes) becomes a lot more interesting. Why? Because your client can watch changes happen as you make them. You don't have to sit there on the phone/IM saying "refresh it now. Ok, how about now?" - they just see things change. Especially if they use a browser that supports transitions - it's way cool to see your design morph back and forth as you consider various options.

There's some potential for gamification here. Here's a Gumroad URL which, when paid for, unlocks some kind of challenge that you must solve in order to find a new Gumroad URL. Which unlocks another challenge that leads to another Gumroad URL, continuing for n steps until you unlock the final reward. Each step costs less than a dollar.

How would this have played out if eg. Dropbox had run their challenge on top of Gumroad?