allang

Hi everyone. A few months ago I left my gig as a product designer at Apple to work on Schema, a pocket-sized PostgreSQL and MySQL database client.

Like many (most?) of you, I build things regularly and often find myself wishing for a great db client for iOS. So... I’m shipping one. A couple things worth highlighting:

1. Schema has a simple but customizable interface designed for small screens. You can format raw data, mess with layouts, and use gestures to expand and collapse rows.

2. Supabase realtime API support is built right in.

3. The search works within and across tables.

4. You can enable notifications to subscribe to inserts on tables. Useful when you’re watching something like new signups like a hawk.

5. There’s a lightweight way to share a rows in emergencies (think gist for table rows) called expiring links.

But it’s early and we’re now a team of 4 working towards the next major release. There’s lots to build, and I hope you give it a try.

I've been using TaskTXT for a few weeks and it's a highly polished and very useful bit of software. Nice!

PSD.rb is also not intended for production use. Among other inadequacies, it's painfully slow.

That's what PSD Native is for: http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/82315160104/psd-rb-and-psd...

Of course we wouldn't.

If you're having tab problems I feel bad for you son...

There are a bunch more that we hope to share soon. Glad you like this stuff!

I'd imagine that it's a QA engineer's dream. Imagine never having to worry about spinning up some brach to test. That's kinda cool.

The concept itself is pretty great, though I'm not sure if something like this has ever been implemented before. It seems like such an "of course" product that you'd expect it to already exist (though perhaps not as a really simple API).

Aside from the concept, the page design could use a little work. Here are 3 suggestions that'll improve your landing page big time.

1. You're doing a good job by sticking to (what seems to be) a grid, but you need to tighten the grid up. The last row is just hanging there, and you could definitely benefit from bringing more attention to it.

2. Designers would refer to this kind of padding and spacing as claustrophobic. You should consider padding things out a little more and adding breathing room. In the header area, try padding out above and below the headline. In the lower section with each feature callout, give it some top-padding.

3. Try reducing the contrast of the body text in the features section, as well as lowering the font size by 1px and increasing the line-height by 2px. For example: http://imgur.com/tw8QT

4. Be sure to vertically center the icons with the h3 text. They're off a little. It's nitpicking, but it counts.

5. The 45deg line in the header background is working against you. Your product is dead simple, your landing page is stripped to the bone. Keep with it — don't add needless textures.

Hope this was helpful and constructive.

Not sure I agree that normal people need a ton of hand holding, but even that's true, those people will eventually disappear.

As for the image on our homepage — that's our app icon. Pretty funny that it's quite realistic (done by the talented folks at SoftFacade). We didn't think it was a huge contradiction, since it serves as more of a pretty picture than an interface.

That said, we probably will end up throwing it out when redesign our rather outdated external site :)

We actually ran a closed beta program for a month or so with an invite system. We released invites slowly while we got the product up to speed, and then launched.

And, yes — there's more to going fulltime than hitting X customers. How much cash do you need in the bank to avoid cash flow issues? What's your margin like — is it really X users, or is it X*2? What's your churn rate? If you don't know the avg. lifetime of a customer, you may be out in the cold.

It's not just for Photoshop, though it is what we're launching with.

The short answer is that it is indeed very much like iCloud for Photoshop, though we're rolling out support for more filetypes over time. If we were to stop in our tracks and cease development, it might be something to be concerned with. There's so much in the pipeline that we're not too focused on it at the moment.

Hi ollie,

The video is a bit blurry, yes. For the moment, might be best to head over to vimeo and watch it in HD. We'll likely take another pass at the demo and address the quality issue.

As for the timeline markers - if you hover over the timeline, you get a nice tooltip that indicates where you're scrubbing to in the file's history.

It's still a first iteration, so we're open to suggestions if you have some input on how we might do that better. Hope to get you into layervault soon — would love the feedback.

Thanks!

Agreed. The ascetic approach to features is what keeps me using it, even though there are other services with 20x as many features. Very simple, very useful.

Agreed. Looks like it has potential. Nice work!

This is a good start. You should do a better job of selling the idea of the service to developers. Come up with some pain points that Akshell relieves, and use that as the basis for the language on the homepage.

A directory of apps written with Akshell would be more powerful than a screencast or explanation. If you don't have very many users yet, write the applications yourself.

It might be wise to hire or find someone to narrate the screencast.

Great work!

Perhaps it's a lofty suggestion, but I would definitely bank at any bank partnered with a gold mint which allowed me to convert my savings to gold bullion with one-click. After the purchase, I would be allowed to visit my own safe with the physical bullion. That would be incredible.

Add a beautiful/easy online interface to manage your accounts, your gold, and foreign currencies.The bank would charge premiums for conversions in small quantities, or add a premium to the spot price.

Plus all the best aspects of current banks - as few or as low fees as possible, weekend hours, etc.

I'm in New York, but I posted it this afternoon from work. There are no guys, it's just me and a little bit of code I wrote in 30 minutes, or 40 minutes tops. I had never seen picfog or any other service - this was just something I wrote because I couldn't sleep.

I think it was. Twitpic emailed me asking to start caching. I may have killed twitpic.

I don't mean the design of the code, although that's a little bit of a mess as well. I mean - Your site and Stack Overflow share some functionality, but they do not serve the same purpose. You've basically taken the Stack Overflow design and layout and copied it. Your design cannot work unless it comes from a single purpose and central idea. This applies for everything, not just your design. Features and functionality, as well as design, cannot work unless they follow from your that single basic idea.

Perhaps you should focus your target on simply foodies, rather than foodies + computer geeks. Simplifying will pay off when making decisions in the future. Rather than thinking "what would a food-lover/computer geek want?", you should be asking "what would a food-lover want?"

It is a good idea, but there are issues with the execution. I'll outline them below.

The most critical problem is that your site has serious SEO issues. Stack Overflow was built with the goal of having crawlable questions and answers. That's how you build traffic and usage. Your questions are loaded with some AJAX, which means that the search engine will never see them. Even worse, your content will look stale to Google and be indexed very infrequently.

My suggestion: Even if you create a sitemap.xml file (which is one solution), your files will be indexed slowly. You will need to mess with the crawl frequency manually with Google Webmaster Tools. This is less than ideal. The ideal solution is to actually create a crawlable site. You should invest some time and money into learning about SEO and perhaps hiring someone to audit your site.

Next, a little harsh criticism: If you are targeting foodies, you should design your site as such. It's not a very attractive site, let alone designed correctly.

By the same reasoning, Friendfeed copied Facebook's older UI.

Jason, It may sound harsh, but I'm pretty sure that you didn't learn any lesson from your failed startup - or learned the wrong ones.

1. Your target audience was not small.

2. Your lack of marketing had nothing to do with your failure.

3. There is nothing wrong with your technology choice.

4. Shared hosting wasn't the cause - you just chose a bad host.

5. It's possible to gain people's trust if you position yourself correctly, if your product looks legitimate enough, if you have enough word of mouth or buzz, and if your product is just plain good.

6. Gmail didn't kill Waifmail. There is plenty of room for competition in mail.

I may be completely wrong, but from reading your post, my guess is that:

1. You gave up too quickly. 2. You weren't able to estimate what users would want correctly or at all. Or, you weren't dedicated to figuring it out. 3. You couldn't execute the idea correctly, either with design and/or code. 4. As a result of not understanding your user, you weren't able to keep innovating. 4. You weren't able to understand your user because your vision wasn't exactly right

Since when is competition something a business should foster? They should, in fact, do everything within their power to make competition as hard as possible. This typically happens with things like patents, trademarks, copyrights, exclusive agreements, etc.

But it doesn't really matter because this blog post is a statement, not an argument. It is equally as persuasive as an entry which says the exacty opposite ("37 Signals loves competition") since the blogger gives no reason for his position.

I don't buy it. Where are you getting your information, or is this just conjecture?

If you're the only person behind simplist, why are you referring to yourself as "we" throughout the site?

Along those same lines, I'm not sure how this qualifies as a start-up as such. It's nifty side project, but it would do you better to present the thing you've created in an honest way.

AJAX changes the CPM (cost-per-1000-impression) advertising model, so you'll need a different type of ad network. The more mainstream ad networks haven't really addressed the issue for smaller sites, despite the fact that AJAX's popularity is peaking.

There's something called CPI (cost-per-influence) advertising, which isn't based on pageviews. Only one network comes to mind (Coudal's "The Deck": http://coudal.com/deck/) but maybe some Googling may lead you to some others. The Deck will pay you with a predetermined sum that is not pageview based.

It seems like it might be an opportunity for one of us here. Definitely and interesting project idea.

This may be just for fun, but it's rather ominous and appropriate for the times. Daydreaming about VC and acquisition rather than profits and running actual businesses.

It actually looks like a nice take on feed aggregation - and sports is a great niche to start with.

If you're planning on taking the look & feel further in the direction of print news, check out sIFR and consider making it an interface option. You have a lot to gain by improving the quality of the page. (sIFR is here: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/sifr/)

In your place, I would also play with placement and formatting of certain stories with respect to the others. It would probably require backend work, but determining which of those stories is most important and then displaying them as such would be pretty cool.