Ask HN: My first time developing a rails app. What do you think?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4554346

by peachananr • 14 years ago

13 30 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I came from a PHP background, and I've decided to jump ship to rails.

https://www.bucketlistly.com is the result of 2 months of learning by doing.

What do you think of the app? Would love to hear all of your feedback.

Feel free to sign up for beta, I'll send an invite to all of you.

holgersindbaek• 14 years ago

Looks really hot. Seems like you've done a lot of work on it.

I can't use it though, since I need an invitation for it. A big turnoff for me.

You should also make your title into a link, otherwise nobody is gonna upvote your post.

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion mate. Really appreciate it. :) I might open up registration very soon.

meta8609• 14 years ago

How are you implementing the real-time refresh?

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Which part? The landing page? Those are simply a cached result displaying as a ticker to make it looks real time but it actually loops through the result.

OriginalSyn2• 14 years ago

Why is Facebook always the first auth system implemented in start up apps, OpenID is so much more simple to get running and will open you up to many different providers with very little coding. Is it just for the data mining?

cmaxwe• 14 years ago

For my app it was being able to post to the timeline that made Facebook attractive as an auth system. Get more exposure quickly.

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Yes, this is mainly the point. :)

dickeytk• 14 years ago

I think being 'easier' in a Rails app is debatable. Facebook authentication certainly isn't 'hard'.

IMO OpenID is an awful user experience, I much prefer using Facebook. But that point is certainly debatable as well.

OriginalSyn2• 14 years ago

It has similar Allow/Deny UX as Facebook and opens you up to major email providers like Google and Yahoo as well as the plethora of other providers and ones such StackExchange if you're creating a technical site/app. Having only Facebook as an auth alienates 1/3rd of the US population.

peachananr13• 14 years ago

It's mainly because of the data and open graphs yes. :) Facebook really provides a viral way of exposing my app to other potential users. The app is initially designed to evolve around Facebook but during the process, I decided to step away from that.

runjake• 14 years ago

I wish I had even 10% the design talent you (or whoever did the site design) had.

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Thanks mate! I did everything my self. I don't usually do this kind of design so for this project, I went all in with skeuomorphism and this is the result of that experiment. :)

thiagodotfm• 14 years ago

Make the "sign in with facebook text" be "facebook sign in". The text is too big and it seems that both the facebook and the "get an invitation buttons" have to be of the same size in order to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Anyways, you did a pretty good job. Awesome.

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Thanks for a great suggestion! I'll definitely adjust the button sizes. :)

geekam• 14 years ago

Great design!

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Thanks! I'm quite happy about the design as well. Trying to create a unique personality with skeuomorphism. :)

lowboy• 14 years ago

It's got a very strong design which you executed well. It's quite polished. The rails part is hard to comment on because we can't see your code - but from the url structure, it looks like it worked well for you.

Having said that, I'm not really a fan of the design overall because I find it distracting from the actual content. IMO, effective design should help to focus the user's attention on the content, not be part of the focus in and of itself. I'm just not a fan of overly skeuomorphic designs in general for that reason.

The Tips & Tricks animation on the sidebar is also very distracting.

That scripty font renders very thin and isn't very readable for me on chome-stable Win7: http://i.imgur.com/FC5oE.jpg

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Thanks for your suggestion mate! I'll definitely try to fix the font rendering on Windows. It's a shame that PC can't render the same way as mac. It's so much more pleasing to look at the design on a mac. :)

craze3• 14 years ago

What benefits have you noticed from coding this in rails instead of PHP? Does it run faster or more efficiently?

peachananr13• 14 years ago

The app seems to run fine right now, but I'll have to see how it goes. It is quite expensive though using Heroku but it is a lot easier to scale than using dedicated vitial machines like I did with MyColorscreen.com (my previous project).

For me personally, developing on rails made my life so much easier. There's a gem for everything. Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare can be integrated by just a few lines of codes.

Also in terms of resources like tutorials, rails community is by far the largest I've seen. Railscast.com really helped a lot in this project.

japhyr• 14 years ago

Do you mind sharing a bit more about cost? Heroku has a free tier; has the project already outgrown that?

dbm44• 14 years ago

Did you mean Railscasts.com, with the extra s? Railscast.com does not look anything like so helpful!

danicted• 14 years ago

just tested if there is any restrictions in forms but sounds there is none.

tectonic• 14 years ago

https://www.bucketlistly.com

logical42• 14 years ago

i like the site design and the javascript scroller is pretty neat.. i think your images load a bit slowly however, which i think means you could probably benefit from serving your assets, i.e. images and such, via a cdn (like cloudfront). all in all, good work, it looks like something to be proud of, which is always great!

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Thanks for the suggestion mate. I'll definitely try cloudfront!

peachananr13• 14 years ago

Just switched to Cloudfront. It's running extremely fast! Thanks for the suggestion mate. :)

Ask HN: My first time developing a rails app. What do you think?

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