janekk

Here's a primer on survey data outfiling [1]. A good target would be to import a survey into SPSS (or you can use the open source PSPP for free) or - shameless plug - datacracker.com (my saas survey analysis app).

Contact me at support at datacracker.com if you want to chat, you'll just get me.

[1] http://mktresearch.org/wiki/Getting_a_Data_File

I don't think so. It failed with Silverlight, and was nasty with ASP.NET webforms. Microsoft now champions ASP.NET MVC on the server and TypeScript on the client. They also use TypeScript to write huge JavaScript apps for consumers.

I'm worried this does not put usability first. In the example Edit form, I noticed two problems: 1) the radio button labels have not been linked using 'for' to the buttons, so clicking on them does nothing. 2) Hovering my mouse over the first address line text box causes it to move down away from my mouse! Errors like these will cause a lot of entry mistakes.

If you want to use it now and get full browser support, you can use the TypeScript compiler, which will compile into ES3 or ES5 targets. It also supports ECMAScript 6's classes syntax.

It's pretty neat to use this tech now on production sites and not having to worry about browser support.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TypeScript#ECMAScript_6_support

Braintree did not do AMEX in USD, last I talked to them a couple of months ago. How did you get this working? I'm very interested!

Thanks thairu, patrick has sent me an invite.

USD charging is definitely essential for SaaS selling to the US.

D'oh, I had no idea, and here I am already having spent months talking to NAB in order to charge USD and support AMEX. Stripe seems a lot cheaper too in terms of fees.

Stripe AU supports AMEX and USD charges, right?

Ian, I agree that's the right mind frame to be in, but I notice they (DevExpress) didn't address it in their demo or docs.

They have a 'wait' function that waits for a period of time, but this is just a sign of bad test writing and something sure to break when testing against different browsers or environments (localhost v.s. staging).

I like the visual method of writing scripts, but having used Selenium + SauceLabs.com on a real app and dealing with functional browser tests every day, I'm concerned about:

* Timing issues; most of the time spent writing functional tests is knowing when to wait for the next click (e.g. waiting for AJAX response and change in a certain DOM element)... and doing this in a clean way (e.g. WebDriverWait conditions instead of putting Sleep(1000) everywhere).

* Ability to expand the tests to do other things; for example, Selenium can take screenshots of the browser window because it works at a lower level. We use this for regression testing our web pages.

I'm in the 'something similar' camp. This is functional testing. I use Selenium, an open source library for automating browsers via plugins.

Personally I find it much more useful than unit/integration tests because while those test the programmer's understanding of his own code, functional tests actually drive the app, perform normal user actions by driving the GUI. For example, you could have all of your unit tests passing but without functional tests, your OK button may appear off-screen and you wouldn't know.

It is annoying when you make changes to your app because test runs take much longer than unit tests, so I have one general test that I run after a refactor, and then a full suite that runs after commit.

I agree, I don't care about config files, just want to see them write a simple test and see it run.

We're running on Windows Azure - ASP.NET web roles (C#, TypeScript) talking to worker roles that do the statistical computation (C#).

Hi, we made this app based on the idea that there are a lot of people who look at their basic survey results (e.g. what SurveyMonkey and other platforms provide) and don't get any insights.

The only other competitor in this space that I know of is Statwing, and we're going for better ease of use and more features.

For example, DataCracker generates a report with charts or tables up front (optionally with profiling or break down questions), can export to PPT/PDF. We've got automatic significance testing (shown via arrows and colors next to data points) that indicate whether p-values are significant and arrow length according to statistical tests. Our Groups feature uses latent class analysis to discover segments within survey respondents.

Let me know what you think!

That's exactly what I've found. We ported all of our JavaScript code to TypeScript because of this, and are on a hunt to remove 'any' types.

We found a bunch of real and potential bugs due to JavaScript's dynamic nature, particularly with regards to the number of function arguments (JavaScript being happy to ignore extra parameters or replace missing parameters with undefined).

Yes, ~38,000 lines of TypeScript for my app (https://www.datacracker.com/).

The benefits of inferred typing is great. Mostly you just need to explicitly declare the types of your class properties, and then code that uses the properties or modifies them (like .map() or .forEach) doesn't need explicit types defined - so it still looks like JavaScript.

Refactoring is no longer a search and replace in files (and pray tests pass) affair.

Dealing with other programmer's code is no longer as mentally taxing.

This is executed very well. I love the natural language processing for diary entries.

However I think you need to change your pitch if you want more incoming traffic. At the moment this has an aura of creepiness and vainness to me and no chance of SEO (who googles for "track every moment of my glorious life in detail"?). You should configure this for whitelabelling and create a version for different markets.

This is just one idea because I knoe my wife would love it:

Dieters to track calories eaten each day and exercise done. Would be awesome to see energy counts of food eaten vs energy consumed by exercise done - maybe like a weekly comparison of energy in and out.

Have you ever crafted a sign-up form for a paid app though? Requiring users go and check their email before they can proceed is going to kill conversions. Mail providers (I use mandrill) also deliberately throttle outgoing email - I've seen them delayed by several minutes.

I see that as the only valuable part of this service, and I can instead use it statically via mailcheck JavaScript: https://github.com/Kicksend/mailcheck

Not to me. Perhaps a sign of a dodgy Chrome extension inserting content into the DOM.

It was down for an hour, seems to be intermittently up now. I tested from 2 different ISPs from Sydney Australia.

Exactly.

Relying on words conflicts with the popular concept "show, don't tell". So I think the author's point only applies to a subset of web pages. From my perspective, I want to see screenshots of your app (or preferably try it with a non-signup demo) - I don't want to read a bleeding heart story about your motivation for it. Give me a tagline at best for that.

App web pages need to be designed like HyperCards or PowerPoint presentations - where you aim to lower the number of points on the screen to retain attention.