Show HN: My weekend project - a baby naming app

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6119985

by iamds • 13 years ago

12 6 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We were finding it hard to come up with a name for our soon to be born daughter so I decided to make an app to help us find one. Let me know what you think!

www.namemeababy.com

Ecio78• 13 years ago

You should use case insensitive matching for filtering, if I put "K" on the "begins with" it shows nothing

iamds3• 13 years ago

This has been fixed!

jayrobin• 13 years ago

A bit of feedback:

* Nice and simple design

* I can't select the "Contains" or "Ends with" fields (this may be intentional)

* I'm pretty sure it should be Boys' and Girls' rather than Boy's and Girl's

* As Ecio78 mentioned: needs to be case-insensitive

* If I type too quickly in the "Begins with" field, it only matches the first one or two letters (e.g. Begins with bor returns Byson, Byrum, Byron...)

* I could eventually select the "Contains" and "Ends with" fields after messing around with it, but then couldn't sort by "Popularity" until reloading (at which point I couldn't select the text fields again)

* It turns out that I can only select all the buttons and text fields if the browser is maximised. Looks like div#myModal is covering a number of interactive elements and preventing clicks at a certain screen height and below

* Popularity graphs are a nice touch and make it far more interesting to play around with, but I didn't realise I could view them for quite a while (thought I could only see the tooltip)

* Disappointed with the lack of "Bort"

iamds3• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback, the lack of Bort is due to (for privacy reasons) not having any names in the database for which fewer than 5 children have been given that name in any one year.

iamds3• 13 years ago

The technical problems have now been fixed

wikwocket• 13 years ago

This is technically a neat app, congrats for launching it.

However, I don't think many parents look to browse names based on prefix/suffix/infix. You may wish to add additional filters (based on what sort of census data you have).

Some ideas:

* Show only popular or only unique names

* Show modern names (recently popular)

* Show traditional names (long history)

* Show names with recent rising popularity

* Show names with historical popularity (that may have fallen out of use)

* Show names with similar histories (this would allow you to add a very important feature: "I like this name, show me related names!")

Finally, your graph feature is very nice; some of my favorite baby-naming books show this. But it's not very discoverable. You could make the name look more like a link, or show some graphics in your header as a demo.

Show HN: My weekend project - a baby naming app

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