Ask HN: Please review my new project: almost.at

by davidcann • 17 years ago

164 81 17 years ago

davidcann20• 17 years ago

I used Cappuccino to build the front-end, so thanks go to the 280 North guys!

ashleyw• 17 years ago

May I ask, how much work went into it? (compared to what you'd imagine it'd have taken you to do from scratch, using jQuery or something?) Because it's the slickest web-app I've seen in…well, ever!

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Well, quite a bit, I guess... but not THAT much. I'm a full time freelance developer and I made this in my spare time over the past 3-4 months. I had the idea a year ago, but you know how that goes!

messel4• 17 years ago

I like that it grabs events out, instead of just trending words. How did you manage that if you don't mind sharing? I'm a big fan of tools, especially cool ones so thanks for showing great ideas can be made real in ones spare time if they keep plugging!

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Events are suggested by users (the little + button in the lower left). Currently, I approve/reject them by hand to keep it focused. Eventually, I'll have a public voting system.

messel4• 17 years ago

Just finished bouncing to all my favorite social sights and bumped almost.at When I'm jealous of a developers work, I actively promote said dev :D Great job, please keep on cookin' How many services can you pull in and grab info from? in the future google waves? Whatever you're using to identify events from the data deluge should be applicable to all real time web services. I'm very interested in the code used, and if you need any volunteers for specific APIs or problems give a hollar (my background is algorithm development + monte carlo analysis simulations/modeling mostly c++)

aditya• 17 years ago

Fascinating. Would be nice if you labeled the three columns, (The first is twitter mentions, the second flickr and the third everything else?)

But it looks like a great way of visualizing developing stories, with the downside being that you can only really track one thing at a time.

How are you dealing with reducing noise from stuff that you pull from twitter or the web?

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Thanks!

The "Followees" feature is going to be key in avoiding the twitter hashtag spam. Basically, you add people on twitter who are actually attending the event... and their posts are highlighted in yellow. You can also see only followee posts with the button at the top.

I was testing Google I/O last week with 50-60 followees and it really cut through the spam and all the "I wish I were at Google I/O!!!!" posts.

I'll be at WWDC next week and I'm hoping that the big Keynote will be a good test for the system.

jack7890• 17 years ago

Very cool. Easy quick improvement: add "cursor: pointer" to the CSS of the event links on the left-hand side. That will make it easier for the user to tell he should click on them.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Thanks, good point.

paul9290• 17 years ago

Cool that you list tweet links from major news sources!

When a user clicks on CNN, BBC or others could you not on the left most side bring up the article they clicked so they dont go to another site? Would be a UI thing, but I would never leave the page and I could click and read all the news stories about X, while staying within your site.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Interesting... I was thinking an embedded viewer for photos would be good, but articles could work too. I could make that an option, so people could jump out to a new window if they prefer. Thanks!

geuis• 17 years ago

Man, I love what Cappuccino can do. It looks really slick. However, on a top-end Mac Pro with 6gb of RAM in Safari 4 beta and Firefox 3.5 beta, its sloooooow. Everything is just really jerky and non-responsive while trying to navigate around.

All that aside, its a really great interface. Soon as you enable some additional functionality (like search) and speed up the interface, this will be something I want to come to.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Yea, I am definitely working to speed up the interface responsiveness.

There's a standalone app OS X that you can keep open for hours, so it won't bog down your main browser:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/almostatapps/almost.at.dmg

Caged• 17 years ago

Great Stuff, although when I fire up this app all I get is a blank white screen. Didn't get any useful information on the console. I assume this is just a wrapper around a WebView? I'm running the latest Safari 4 beta and the web version works fine.

kqr2• 17 years ago

Since you used Cappuccino, were you able to compile this from the same source as the web site?

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Surprisingly, it runs quite smoothly on this crappy little Athlon 64 (about 5 years old, 1gb RAM) here at work, in FF 3.0.1.0. Not as smoothly as on my home machine, but not enough to be annoying either.

Excellent work. I am not sure about the name, I presume you are trying to say 'almost like being there?'. It probably doesn't help that today's top story is the sad news about that missing plane :-/ ...one feature request would be some kind of feed/download option for the stats window at the bottom...though for the few who'd be interested in doing math on it, I suppose it wouldn't be much more effort to just go to Twitter directly. I found myself wondering about the absolute numbers represented by the graph, though.

redorb• 17 years ago

You must be getting hammered by traffic; I just gave ya 30 seconds to load.. I'll try again later.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

The initial load might take a minute, but once it loads, 99% of the traffic is served from Amazon S3 via JSONP, so that part should hopefully scale well. If you're on OS X, there's a standalone browser app you can download (has the code embedded, so no loading time). I'm still working on a Mozilla Prism or custom WebKit standalone browser for Windows.

I welcome the traffic rush, though, because I want to figure out how to scale it!

jeroen• 17 years ago

The initial load might take a minute

You might want to mention that on the initial page. Yesterday I also gave up after 30 seconds, and I only came back today because this is still on the HN frontpage.

kwamenum86• 17 years ago

uuuh...guys? I think Bing might be better than Google....what do I do?

wooster• 17 years ago

This is fantastic! I could see myself paying for the ability to set up feeds to share with other people during an event.

It's also nice to see Cappuccino being used for something outside of 280 North. :)

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

I hadn't even thought of that, but you're right - I would definitely pay to have one of my conferences included / featured, which would encourage attendees to communicate about them more - I win all round.

messel4• 17 years ago

automagic revenue stream, sounds brilliant

alexkearns3• 17 years ago

Beautiful, beautiful interface. Worked perfectly smoothly on my MacBook 2.2Ghz with 2GB ram. Am very jealous. Makes the interface of my AJAXified web app - www.gambolio.com - look a tad amateurish. Mine was done using jQuery, btw.

whacked_new2• 17 years ago

Nice interface, but jerky animation, which isn't surprising for jQuery, but a bit unfortunate.

alexkearns3• 17 years ago

Whacked, what library is best for animations, in your opinions> I heard mootools was pretty good.

mahmud3• 17 years ago

Well done there on the site, alex; UI, usability, content, mission, usefulness .. nailed.

crux• 17 years ago

I think it's pretty cool looking. One question, one concern: 1) Are events added manually? They certainly seem well-enough targeted that I could see them being so. But the flip side of that is that there's a lot of other events of a similar nature, but with less of a geeky focus, that I'm afraid I wouldn't see. If they're not manually added, how are you ensuring that all events that could be potentially targeted are included?

2) It might be nice to include a throttle for the refresh speed. 5 seconds, for a high-volume item like the BEA, was total information overload.

EDIT: I should be more precise about #2. I'm seeing that even though it's been constantly refreshing every 5 sec for a couple minutes, it's still up to May 29. So maybe it's not actually that high-volume, but there's still something going on where I'm seeing a hard-to-follow stream of text.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

1) Yes, users suggest events and the moderator (me) approves them, if they're relevant. I'm trying to keep it to a short curated list of what's happening in the world (also, there's rate limits on most APIs!). Eventually, I'll add a system for users to publicly vote for "upcoming" events.

2) There isn't currently a throttle, but if you mouse-over a column, it will pause so you can read something interesting that you see. Mouse out and it un-pauses. Also, it's like an IM conversation... if you scroll up, it will stop auto-scrolling to the bottom.

mahmud3• 17 years ago

I am not sure what it does, but it looks fucking gorgeous.

chops• 17 years ago

I had the same thought. It's a very impressive interface, but I couldn't find an "About" link that really says what it is, and it wasn't terribly obvious (at least to me). I see what looks like twitter stuff, I see comments, and I see links to news stuff.

But perhaps an "About" clicky would be helpful.

But overall nice job with the interface. Very slick.

astine• 17 years ago

Or even a video would be helpful.

markm• 17 years ago

It looks like a real-time news aggregation service.

Very good, would benefit from a search bar on the homepage and integration of real time comments from social sites such as digg, reddit and even Facebook public profiles.

buugs• 17 years ago

To be fair it does say: "Following People at Real-World Events in Real-Time" on the front page and then lists the services it uses to find the information.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

I played around with it for a bit and thought it was quite cool. Then just as I was about to click close I saw the wierd slider thing at the bottom and though - ah that would be so awesome if I could slide it and.... OH COOL!

Kudos.

username• 17 years ago

I read this and slided to an earlier time. Now it's difficult to get back to the current time. Dragging the slider to a future time or clicking to the right brings me back to the earliest simulated time. Using Chrome 2 and it isn't slow.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

Same issue here (using Chrome 2 as well :D). However for me the slider stayed at the earliest time but the updates appeared correctly in real time.

messel4• 17 years ago

Hacker ;)

halo• 17 years ago

Neat idea, but this is unusably slow on my PC (Firefox 3, Core 2 Duo 2ghz).

bradlane• 17 years ago

hate to add a "works for me" post, but try it in the firefox 3.5 beta - it has the new javascript engine, which makes this run very nicely.

It was speedy in google chrome too.

papaf• 17 years ago

All I see is a timer and then just a black screen. I'm using Opera 9.64 on x86_64 Linux. I'm sad because the other comments make it sound awesome.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

hm. I tested it on Opera 9.64 on OS X and it seems to work fine. I haven't tested the linux version, though. Sorry, you must hate that Opera is always neglected by web sites!

kingnothing• 17 years ago

For what it's worth, it loads fine for me with Opera 10 build 4345, but it didn't work with the first Opera 10 alpha.

Here's a link if you're interested: http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4345/

ilyak• 17 years ago

Of course it doesn't work in my Konqueror :)

endtime2• 17 years ago

Looks really nice, but perhaps a little buggy? I'm using Opera 9.64 on XP and when trying to view the stream about the missing France flight, I was only able to get two of three streams at a time. The third would show a paused icon in the top right. First, the Twitter stream was paused; after I clicked around the timeline, the Twitter stream started working but the pictures frame emptied and stopped working.

Great stuff overall.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Hm, did you see a little pause icon in the top right of the column? If so, you probably had your mouse hovering over that column. It pauses on mouse-over so you can read something that you see is interesting.

Edit: Having said that... yes, I'm sure there are bugs!

endtime2• 17 years ago

I did have the pause icon, but it didn't go away as I moved my mouse around the screen.

ochiba• 17 years ago

Very cool! When I watched the Air France stream, many of the items were in foreign languages. You could offload language detection to the Google Languages AJAX API to allow filtering by language, or even better, automatic translation on-the-fly ;)

rythie2• 17 years ago

It looks good! I had a few problems though:

It appears you can pause individual columns but clicking on the pause button doesn't work (in Firefox at least)

The columns should have titles

The last column (Links) keeps the background title over the text (in Firefox at least)

Selecting different stories on the left seems not to work some of the time and there is no pointer icon when hovering over them (in Firefox at least)

I think you need a page explaining what is going on and how the site works because it seems to assume you already know.

vaksel• 17 years ago

congrats on getting techcrunch covered

rythie2• 17 years ago

here is the link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/almostat-real-time-even...

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Thanks! That's pretty funny because I only told people about this site 2 and a half hours ago!

mrduncan• 17 years ago

Looks great! This is definitely one of those first apps which will help give people an idea of what Cappuccino can do.

One bug I noticed: Expanding the left column seems to have some issues. More specifically, the content doesn't seem to expand with it until you click on another event. (In Safari 4 on a Mac)

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Yea :/ I've been trying to solve that bug, though it has been elusive, thus far.

moe• 17 years ago

Hm. Doesn't work on linux in Firefox Minefield , Opera 9.63 or in Konqueror 3.5.8. I only get a spinner for a few seconds - followed by a blank screen.

In windows firefox it works (a bit sluggish, though).

Anyways, apart from that problem and a few minor bugs it's a really nice tech-demo. I don't see myself using such a service, but you might find some followers in the twitter crowd.

palish2• 17 years ago

I am not sure it's working correctly on Chrome. Here's what I see: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/almost.at.jpg

I gave up trying to figure out what to do after about a minute.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Hm... that's not good. It should have a sidebar on the left. Looks like it's Chrome on Windows, right? I'll have a look and see if I can reproduce it.

palish2• 17 years ago

Yep, Chrome on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

alain94040• 17 years ago

It looks gorgeous, but I have one question about web pages that look like applications: what happens when I leave the page and later want to come back? Is there a "save" button?

On my computer, I can come back to my data very easily. The next time I open an app, everything is where I left it. Does Capuccino work the same way?

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Not really, but there's not much "personalized" data on almost.at to save. If there were (or is in the future), then yea, your data could definitely be saved and displayed when you return. Check out 280 Slides from the creators of Cappuccino: http://280slides.com

wmeredith• 17 years ago

I gave it about 30 seconds to load and then left. I saw it was just TC'd so maybe I'll try back in a few days.

vindi• 17 years ago

nice job. let me guess, you own a Mac? :) Beautiful UI. mouse cursor over items on left remained as arrow for me. Maybe hover color or hand cursor?

khandekars• 17 years ago

Beautiful! Rocks on FireFox 3.0.10 on Fedora 10. I expected it to be slow, but was pleasantly surprised to see the overall speed after initial loading was over. The '5 seconds remaining' idea is elegant.

smokinn• 17 years ago

I'm not sure if this is intentional or a browser bug (I'm using Chrome so anything Webkit/Safari should be the same) but at the bottom of the menu panel on the left I see a resize button (bottom right of left panel). If I resize the panel, the menu itself doesn't resize, only the right side menus shrink.

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Definitely a bug... thanks for the report.

zitterbewegung• 17 years ago

It looks pretty professional. Sort of interesting too. If there was a way to automatically get hashtags or news stories or submit possible stories that might be a way to improve the service.

asmosoinio• 17 years ago

Font aliasing in the bottom timeline is not working for me. Running Google Chrome on Vista. Screenshot:

http://screencast.com/t/zhoSHkz1Q

davidcann20• 17 years ago

Thanks for the report. That looks awful! I'm going to try to reproduce it.

HouseTrip• 17 years ago

Love the interface and the real-time aggregation thing. However I think it would be even better if one could submit the topic to be searched and aggregated for --> not limited to events chosen by you. For instance I'd like to find mention of my company at specific times (during a viral campaign, etc.)

Ravir• 17 years ago

very nice interface. thanks for adding #cricket. :)

c00p3r• 17 years ago

Eye candy sells, especially for toys. iPhone is an icon because of an eye candy, visual effects and primitiveness - the stuff for masses.

This is really very good toy - just sit and watch and sometimes read, but not much (140 chars of very simple language) - that is exactly what a people wants from time waster.

arihelgason• 17 years ago

Amazing interface.

Favicon maybe a bit too reminiscent of Alexa.

Ask HN: Please review my new project: almost.at

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