Ask HN: Review my app: Wappr
wappr.com
wappr.com
It's a simple app with the purpose of providing entrepreneurs/hackers/developers ideas & inspirations on what app to create, based on feedback from the public.
I would love to hear your feedback.
Your app looks great.
A lot of the popular questions actually have products which solve the problem. A feature to comment and say this app already exists might prevent someone from trying to reinvent the wheel. Of course, this would inevitably lead to spam.
This is a massive betrayal of trust, and, in my opinion is something you should disable immediately, or atleast give people the option to post if they choose _after_ voting it up.
I don't think there's any book that covers everything. Server/hosting wise, I leave everything to Heroku.
Heroku is great in that it commoditizes the hosting. It's nice for a first side project but if you're planning on doing multiple side projects I would recommend Linode.com (or some other VPS). For just $20/month you can host as many apps as you want (which is a lot if your side projects don't get much traffic). For Heroku, it's $36 per month per app, isn't it? I have a side project on their free version but it seems that if it gets two web requests at the same time it's too much traffic and an error page is displayed for the user.
Using a VPS like Linode.com is a lot more work but it's actually a plus because you get to increase your skills while having fun. :)
In Chrome 4.0, there seems to be white "vote now" text running down the left side of the page, barely visible against the gray background, after I maximize the page. It might be a bug that only shows up upon resizing the browser?
Ok, got it fixed (text-indent problem). You must have a really big screen.
I have 1.4 billion data points that say plenty of people maximize the window at least sometimes :)
I'm sure you're right though, most users (especially Windows users) maximize their windows... What I meant was most people here.
I'd disagree, but I know I'm in a small minority. I've never entirely understood the desire that people apparently have to bring their real-world identity onto the Net; I've always felt that going in the opposite direction (trivially changeable pseudonymous identities or just straight-up anonymity) would be more interesting[1]. Ignoring the oft-cited benefits for political dissidents, etc., I sometimes feel like we're losing the whole "on the Internet, no-one knows your a dog" thing, which I find a little saddening.
[1] Though "interesting" (my word) and "useful" (your word) are somewhat different criteria, I guess.
Idea nursery
Inspire developers
Make your dreams real
Some time ago I was thinking about creating something similar. I am one of those developers that finds figuring out what people want extremely difficult. But I did not think about it in terms of twitter, so it appears you implemented it better than I would have done.
A possible way to expand it could be the possibility to tell people when something already exists or if you are developing it. It could become a good promotion channel.
Do things automatically get voted up on Wappr if someone retweets a tweet on Twitter?
It’d be cool if you could subscribe to a particular want or desire; for example, I’d want to subscribe to anything related to personal finance because that’s the business I’m in. You could probably even monetize it by offering more advanced features like that.
* "What is Wappr?" -- the font size and style should be the same for the whole phrase.
* The slidedown should be much smaller. Wrap it in a differently colored box with rounded corners (perhaps a background darker than the page background).
* Add another color besides the light blue.
* Increase the contrast on your Wappr logo (either black letters or darker blue background).
* You have too many font sizes. I would pick three font sizes and stick with them (and make sure the font sizes aren't too close to each other).
* The "sign in with twitter" animation when you click "vote this" is really cool.
* Make the previous/next/page links more prominent (or change them into image links).
* The twitter icon at the bottom of the page needs to breathe (it touches the fat footer).
* I really like the light, simple, zen-like feel of the design.
* Your fat footer spans the whole width of the screen. If your header did the same it wouldn't feel like the page is completely squished into the middle of the screen with unused space on the edges.
* I like the subtlety of the divider separating the list from the header.
Very nice and simple idea, I've been working with some similar stuff and believe there's a bunch of work to do with what people say. Given that it's free what people say on Twitter, etc, I'd say thinkers should start finding interesting stuff there, even on the most simple 140 characters.
Also, since it's your first app: good work!
If you had groups for people to join it might make sorting easier; we still have to sort through people with ideas that cannot type URLs in a browser: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1119184
Also, allow me to unvote. I accidentally clicked on voting for some top app to see how test how voting worked.
Please don't have me default post to Twitter when I vote for an idea after logging in with Twitter; that is sort of annoying.
Consider how search engines are going to index the ideas from your users. Create a URL object for each post and have the relevant content there. ( such as other users' comments about how to improve the app idea )
How do I submit ideas from the Wappr site?
The default post to Twitter settings has already changed.
You could submit your ideas by starting your tweet with the any one of the following phrases:
“I wish there was an app ...” “I need an app to ...” “I want an app that ...”
Ideally, you could also group similar requests together for developers to approach jointly to raise funds using a note they place below, that also sends a tweet out once inserted, or, these people can be informed of a suitable app once launched.
So, you'd be building a directory (eg http://twittown.com/) of existing and proposed apps, tied to the tweets you've recovered, each with user responses as submitted on the site.
However, there's potential for a lot of "abuse". The top suggestion now is:
I wish there was an app where you could report a car whose alarm has been going on for hours, and car thieves will read it and steal the car
I hope you don't try to ban that sort of thing, though.
The essential trait in a startup founder is the ability to find workable solutions to problems people want solved. This is the public doing their part, now founders have to do theirs.
Nice work!
Also, of course I don't know your long term intentions, but something like this would seem difficult to monetize.
There's no long term intention or any intention to monetize from this. I just started on programming and wanted something to code for (instead of just banging on the books).
He could fence it so it shows a user pic and the display name, but not the twitter handle and without a link to their twitter profile. So for any idea he knows who submitted it and who voted it up, and can offer their twitter handles as lead information to someone building that app..
My JavaScript was turned off... When I clicked "what is wappr" nothing happened. Could it be a nonJavaScript friendlier (just a little :)
Nice work!
EDIT: JavaScript in my browser...
The extra "N" hours it takes to support something that a fraction of a percent of your users will need (which is only a handful of people for a small startup) could be better used on adding new features, marketing, adding polish, etc.
I've done a lot of the works-without-Javascript polishing for google.com, and it's very far from being our most expensive feature. It's mostly just a matter of remembering that you have HTML + CSS under all that JavaScript, and that the HTML does what you intend.
Otherwise, great design!