sgdesign

I think you're under the wrong impression. Meteor is somewhere between a platform like Node (which it runs on top off) and a full-fledged framework like Rails or Django.

So I feel your criticisms are a bit unfair. Meteor doesn't provide a solution for forms and internationalisation out of the box because it's not supposed to. That's where packages come in.

Now whether or not it should become a framework is another matter.

I listed a few here: http://www.telescopeapp.org/blog/telescope-vs/

As far as I know Telescope is the most active open-source project of this kind though.

I'm really not sure what you're talking about. Do you have a specific example in code?

Telescope is not the prettiest codebase in the world, but it uses relatively simple code. So I'm not sure which "unnecessary abstraction" you mean.

That's a fair point, and definitely something that needs to be fixed. We've been slowly refactoring the app into a better, more modular structure but there's still a lot to do.

I'm trying it out. As you might expect, it's very focused on US-centric journalism and news. Which might be great for some people, but until they add more personalization features or just get a bigger community it's probably not very relevant to my own interests.

It's difficult for you.

This means there are specific, identifiable factors in your life that make it harder for you to exercise. Maybe you live far from a gym, or you don't have time during the week, or you have back pain that prevents you from exercising.

My point is that you're not going to do any progress until you make concrete changes based on your own specific situation.

So I guess my answer would be that it's hard because most people think it's a matter of motivation and self-control, whereas small, practical changes to your environment (for example, buying a bike) are actually much more effective.

You can't wish for better advertising that this… "our deals are so great that airlines are trying to sue us out of existence!".

One thing I've started doing for Telescope (an open-source HN clone: http://telesc.pe) is holding weekly hangouts where people can come up and talk about what they've been doing with the app.

Here's the latest one: http://www.telesc.pe/blog/telescope-hangout-3/

I also try to showcase what people are doing with the app as much as I can: http://www.telesc.pe/showcase

Oh, and I blogged about the whole open-source experience in general here: http://www.telesc.pe/blog/open-source-lessons-learned/

I really like what GitBook is doing. We had to pretty much set up our own similar system for Discover Meteor, and it was clear a better way was needed.

You can still get the first eight chapters of our book about Meteor (Discover Meteor) for free for one more day here:

http://book.discovermeteor.com/starter

And if you want, you can also join us in the Meteor chatroom on Gitter:

https://gitter.im/meteor/meteor

There's a fine line between being opinionated and being plain rude. I think Matias Duarte is not the only person with his head too far up his…

Great write-up. A lot of people have asked us why we haven't made a print version of Discover Meteor yet. Next time, I'll just point them at your post!

And to be honest, although we do provide ePub/mobi versions, we've decided from the start to put our efforts into the online version and PDF. It's just so much easier to produce something that looks good for a lot less effort.

We fixed that. Thanks for pointing it out!

Thanks for the mention :) Speaking of sales graphs, here's a pretty detailed case study for our book's sales made by the Gumroad folks: http://blog.gumroad.com/post/97148570338/discover-meteor-cas...

They can replace some native apps. With Meteor, you can now use the same basic building blocks to build your web app, iOS app, and Android app.

Maybe you won't reach the same quality on iOS and Android as you would with native apps, but for smaller teams this can be a huge time saver, especially in the early stages of a project.

So in a lot of cases it's not so much "web app" vs "native app", as "web app" vs "no app".

Not sure if it's relevant here, but I want to point out that just because you received it in plaintext doesn't mean they store it in plaintext.

So if you change it immediately to something more secure, and it might not be a security risk after all.

> That is why I guess their main audience is rails developers who need some content management functionality in their apps. And those do not need hosting.

That's a great point, and another illustration that a business model that works for one product might not work for another, even if they appear similar on the surface.

I don't think it's debatable that there are people out there familiar with WordPress who don't like it much and are looking for something else.

Whether this is 90%, 50%, or 1% of WordPress developers doesn't matter much. Even in the worst-case scenario it's still going to be a big enough niche if you're able to reach them.

Shouldn't you put the course's price somewhere on that page? Otherwise people might be hesitant to actually click "buy the course".

The problem here is the size of the market, not the fact that people don't want to pay. I assume the market is fairly small (at least, I don't know that many people who live on a boat) so it might not be worth your time for that reason.

But I would be willing to bet that there are people ready to pay anywhere from $20 to $200 for a detailed guide or video course on how to live in a boat.

In fact you could replace "live in a boat" with pretty much any skill you can think of ("play the ukulele", "get better at gardening") and I believe that would still hold true.

Thanks for the plug :) Also relevant, a detailed case study about our sales by the Gumroad folks:

http://blog.gumroad.com/post/97148570338/discover-meteor-cas...

This could be a self-reinforcing problem, too. Apps with ugly UIs do well, so developers don't see the need to invest resources in better UIs, which means users don't have better alternatives and end up buying apps with ugly UIs, and so on…

I'm not offended, thanks for the extra feedback :)

Although I do want to point out that Telescope also comes with a minimally styled base theme that was specifically made to let people customize it however they want: http://telescope-base.meteor.com/

The creator of Bootstrappers.io managed to get 700 emails by launching "a website looking and behaving like a thousand other ones":

http://blog.bootstrappers.io/how-i-bootstrapped-bootstrapper...

I appreciate that you're trying to give feedback, but in this case I think you're extrapolating a bit too much from your own (perfectly valid) opinion. Just because you don't see the value doesn't mean plenty of other people won't :)

Telescope designer here. Curious to know how many people think the default theme is ugly? Just upvote this comment if you agree with kolev so I can find out.

I don't know if your assessment of the study is valid (it seems a little simplistic to think that they wouldn't account for this to be honest), but what you describe is classic Survivorship Bias.

Here's an entertaining video from Derren Brown that shows how to use this technique to convince people you have psychic powers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R5OWh7luL4

Edit: also see the comment about the Miracle Man scam in this thread.

There's also http://telesc.pe :)

For those like me who thought this was about the awesome Alfred app[1]: it's not.

[1] http://www.alfredapp.com/

Well, there are countless successful products that don't "solve a problem". What problem do Call of Duty or League of Legends solve? What "problem" would the hypothetical iWatch solve?

In other words, solving problems is great and all, but you can also make a great product that people just enjoy using, and let it grow organically.

Of course, you could argue that any good product does solve a problem. But my point is that despite what everybody says, the problem doesn't always have to be the starting point.

Something I see missing from a lot of these startup discussions are the ideas of identity and community.

Sure, "solving a problem" is important. But Nike isn't solving a problem that other shoe companies haven't solved a thousand times over. The reason they're successful is that buying into their brand makes you part of a bigger community, and that community has a positive identity attached to it.

Same thing with a startup like Exposure (https://exposure.co/). Sure, the product is great, but they're also fostering a community and projecting a very specific image. Without that special "something" they'd be no different from Flickr or the countless other photo sharing services out there.

This brings me to Dinnr. Did you try to grow a community of passionate members organically by writing a blog, hosting events, being active on forums like whatever the Hacker News for cooking is?

Or did you just try to "solve a problem"?