I finished my web app | Hacker News Reader

I finished my web app

www.listeninghall.com

Ya ya, it's kinda like turntable.fm, but with Youtube. Wasn't the easiest thing for me to build, but I learned a lot. Would love some feedback.

View on HN

Gave it a try. Some feedback:

Signed up then landed on the main screen, but wasn't instantly sure what to do there. Then I clicked the +, searched, and added a couple of videos that immediately started playing, but they were obscured by the "Add Videos" window, and no "Close" or "Hide" link anywhere. Clicking off to the side hid the window.

At that point, it was me watching a queue of youtube videos alone. I could share the room, but there was no interaction possible with the other client I had in the room.

Also, the second client I had started the video from 0:00 vs where I was at. While it would probably be too complex to make it exactly sync'd, starting a newly joined user at approximately the same place in the currently playing song as the others would help.

There was no way to change the size of the video. Since there was no social interaction, I thought I'd just watch my queue full screen, but that wasn't possible.

Keep at it!

Thx for the feedback, a lot of the stuff you mentioned are definite problems. Many people have mentioned not really being sure on what to do on the site. As for the syncing, everything is synced within reason (the app accounts for a 10 second buffer delay, in which case it resyncs, otherwise it tolerates the delay).

I like it a lot! I would love to learn a bit more about your technology stack (NodeJS I assume?).

Obviously you're polishing it, but I'll give some feedback and hope it helps you:

1) Landing page, the enter key event isn't submitting the login form, right?

2) Time stamp on chat

3) Close button on the search dialog

4) I like cursor: pointer;cursor: hand; on my action buttons

5) Maximize video option?

6) Vote up/down by user to sort queue?

I love the [# of un-viewed messages] in title bar.

You definitely have to use another computer for it to work. Browsers on the same computer isn't working--which it shouldn't anyway. Perhaps you could just detect if it's the same computer and put up an alert ("hey, you're a phoney! you're on the same computer!") then you won't waste a lot of resources to process that request.

The music synched on my 2 computer. Very cool. Please keep up the good work.

-V.

I used Prosody (XMPP Server), with a custom module. The whole site is built around XMPP multi-user chat. Front-end is primarily Backbone/Strophe(xmpp library)/Jquery.

1-5) Yea, lot of little stuff I'm gonna need to handle.

6) Since there can be many people in the room, skipping, rearranging, repeating, looping, all of these things are going to have to be voted on.

Lastly, I think it may well be a failure on my part, but the title bar # indicates messages received while you are tabbed away from the window. I detected this by checking to see if the chat input box was in focus (from my understanding that's how gtalk does it). It's clunky, and I should probably figure out a better way to do this.

Thank you for your feedback :)

Also, I've made the Javascript code available on my github (Since I need to find a job): https://github.com/ahaque/lh

There's a chat input box? Are you sure?

Firefox 3.6 shows no such thing.

Ya, just checked 3.6. Might be a knock against the design, but its the gray box, across the bottom of the right column/side.

Sorry.. last one... "Finished" isn't really a mindset I'd recommend when developing anything (especially web apps). Definitely pat yourself on the back for hitting a milestone and releasing this version, but unless you won't be updating or improving the service, you're not finished. =)

Oh definitely, I guess I just wanted to say something about it's current state. Come see my site, its finished, but not really (not the most captivating title ;p).

Gotcha... just don't fall into the "i'm done!" mindset

Looks pretty good. One thing is when you go to add a video and click in the search box it would be nice if the placeholder text automatically cleared instead of having to clear it manually.

Yea, there's a lot of little stuff I have to iron out. I really wanted to get some kind of working version up, but there are a lot of nitty gritty stuff that needs to be ironed out.

One more - Clicking share should pre-highlight the share link so I have to do a little less work to get the url.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com