mheap

I recently read https://julienrenaux.fr/2019/12/20/github-actions-security-r... which reminds us that depending on external GitHub Actions is risky as branch and tag refs are mutable

Using GitHub actions with branch names or tags is unsafe. Use commit hash instead.

Instead of updating to use a SHA everywhere, I wrote a tool to do it for you, making a note of the original version (e.g. @master).

This allows you to run the tool in the future and have the sha updated to the most recent version whilst still pinning to a specific commit.

There's a bit of an introduction at http://michaelheap.com/introducing-happy-clients/ if you're not sure what it's for. The site's pretty basic at the minute, but I think the idea has potential.

Por Favor's more than a phone call or a text though, it's also a set of reminders with an alarm to remind you to act on a task at a a specific point in time.

I'm obviously rubbish at the explaining what we do thing (though in my defence we're still working out the details)

I wasn't expecting to see many people on Hacker News saying that they'd adopt the system themselves, but I was hoping that some people would see the merit in it.

You hit the nail on the head about less optimised communication methods. Por Favor is primarily about asking people to do things, then reminding them when the time is right automatically. The time might be a specific time (e.g. 6pm), or when they're next in a certain area (geofencing) (or something else that we haven't thought of yet).

Based on feedback from HN, we're thinking about selling a "Family plan" or something like that, where it's a slightly higher fee, but you can share the service with X people. It's definitely about getting lots of people invested in the system, otherwise it's just another app on your home screen (or, hopefully on your home screen)

Sorry you feel that way :( Awesome that you were willing to give us a try though, thanks!

As for the data, it really is worth it for me. I don't have an iOS dev license, or know anything about mobile development particularly. If I'm going to dedicate weeks of my life to this, there needs to be at least enough interest for us to break even, or it's not worth it.

Can your partner get the hang of your Google doc? How about your mum? Por Favor is about making things easy for everyone. Your partner types in 'pick up some eggs when you go to the shop' and chooses you as the recipient. When you get to the shop, your phone buzzes to remind you (using geofencing).

It is another communication channel, but it's one that's reserved only for the most important people, and only when they need something. If you get a message on it, you know it needs acting on, right now.

The £1.99 pricing is a work in process. It shows a different price randomly. We're trying to use click through data to find the optimal price.

Everyone needing the app is an issue that we know about, and we're trying to work out a way to solve the issue so people can try it out and see how it's beneficial before having to cough up some cash.

Per family pricing is a decent idea. We'll have to take a look at that!

Someone else mentioned integrating with apps that they use every day, so we might take a look into the various other to do products and see of we can build on top of them

Thanks! :)

It takes away the hassle of remembering to do things. If you call me at 3pm asking me to put the oven on at 4pm, either I 'm busy working and forget or you have to call me at 3:50pm to remind me again. Por Favor automates the reminder step.

Thanks for the feedback. You actually landed on the most expensive price! There's a few different prices, displayed at random. We're trying to see what people will pay for the app.

69p is a little low, as we need to at least cover our costs and everything so far is pointing to the fact that it's a niche app, not widely adopted. If we could change that, 69p might work.

> Outdated in what sense?

Outdated in that it's not targeted. I get all kinds of things into my inbox (I use filters too, but filtered things generally get forgotten about), emails from family, friends, newsletters, alerts when people reply to me on HN. My inbox is like my in tray, a list of things to work on

> Why doesn't it get seen for 6 hours?

Email's distracting, I try and keep it closed as much as possible whilst I'm working.

> How are you reducing the noise?

We're not reducing the noise, we're just turning it into a very specific sound that you recognise. The idea is that if Por Favor pings, you should probably look at it. If a gaming app pings, you can ignore it and look at it later. We're trying to make sure you see things that you need to see, when you need to see them.

> ps - Hopefully, I'm not detracting you from your hard work. Trying to provide some honest feedback here that I'm hoping will help you.

Not at all! It's all very useful. We literally had the idea, threw a site online and posted it on here for feedback. We don't even know if the idea's gonna work yet. We (my partner and I) have a use case for it, but we were wondering if anyone else did too.

Ah, my mistake. I have no idea how that managed to sneak onto the site. I'll get it changed soon.

@ollysb, @nodata: Sorry about that. I was honestly confused why people thought it was about keeping track and kept bringing it up when I'd said it wasn't. Now it all makes much more sense

I explicitly said that it's not about keeping track of who's done whom a favour. I'd even say that each day, any old favours get reset and hidden from view.

Isn't email an outdated medium though? I get a lot of email, and messages from family and friends might not get seen for 6 hours (or more). The better comparison here is a text message, but they can still get lost in the noise too.

Por Favor is about making things easy. You say 'yes I can do that' and it reminds you when it's time to act. Nothing more, nothing less.

We're still working on the app idea. Maybe it'll just be a website to start and you pay to send favours. We're in the ideas stage at the minute, and nothing's set in stone.

Do you think it's worth following up on the idea (ignoring implementation details)? Or does the implementation make the idea?

For me, it depends how big the favour is. If it's to pick someone up from the airport, it should definitely be a phonecall.

Por Favor aims to fill the space where it's a small favour, like turning on the oven at a certain time or taking out the bins. Things that aren't too much of an inconvenience but are also easily forgotten.

You mention tracking favours, that's definitely not what it's about. It's about remembering to do things you said you would, not about keeping score.

The idea is that you get a notification when they ask you to do something, then again when it's time to do it. You can load the app and see everything you've agreed to do, but you don't need to open it to use the app.

Adding a layer to your current ecosystem's definitely an option. Making sure people see any incoming alerts no matter what they're doing is what we're aiming for.

Por Favor's a to do app with a bit of a difference. Instead of you adding tasks to it, it's populated by your friends + family.

A lot of the time, people ask for favours and I say "Yeah sure" and forget about it instantly. With Por Favor, I can say yes when they ask me, and it'll automatically remind me when the task needs doing.

You're well within your rights to send tweets to a folder but never read them :)

Things do happen! Unfortunately most of what we do is technical, and our (perceived) target market doesn't really care about that side of things. I'm sure we can find one thing a week to say though.

We don't filter anything out, as that's against Twitter's ToS. We do however facilitate sending all tweets from a user into a folder you define. You can of course decide not to read that folder :)

The UX on creating filters needs work, I agree. You can make filters as complicated as you like! e.g. "Any links tweeted by @tweetdigapp with the hashtag #opensource".

We have metric tracking for most user actions. Home rolled though, and I've not heard of Mixtab. Will take a look at them, thanks.

We have. My co-founder emailed each person individually and a large majority of them simply ignored the email. :(

Both of these points have been made elsewhere in the thread, so we should take a look at them. Unfortunately, machine learning isn't as good as users explicitly saying what they want to see (and not nearly as easy to implement either!)

As for pricing, our rationale is that a user shouldn't have to think about pricing unless they get to the stage that they need to pay, and are sufficiently invested in the product.

If we were to filter out any content, we would be breaking the agreement we made with Twitter when we started developing on top of their platform and they could revoke our access.

Thanks for the tip about pitching. The copy on the site needs work, so we'll be sure to make sure it explains exactly what Tweetdig is and what it does.

Our blog and twitter account is a bit neglected, but we feel that our time is better spent improving the product than writing blog posts. If anything, I'd say that shows that we're even more invested than if the blog + Twitter were very busy. If we were to spend more time on the social side of things, what would you like to see us do?

As far as I know using "Tweet" in your name isn't too big an issue (look at Tweetdeck pre-acquisition). Based on how Twitter have been tightening the rules on how we use their platform recently though, it might be something to look at.

Our target audience at the moment is power users who would give us constructive criticism. We thought that any businesses would be reluctant to give us a go whilst things are changing so rapidly. This thread is giving us a reason to rethink that decision though.

Thanks for the reassurance!

Social custom search folders is an angle that we hadn't considered. It's been mentioned somewhere else in this thread too, so it's definitely something to think about. Thanks!

We've been aiming at the power user market for now, trying to get people who can offer constructive criticism as a user. Everyone's saying to focus on the business market though, so we might have to change our focus on that one.

Thanks for the reassurance that we're doing the right thing! Hopefully we'll be able to sell it to the right people soon

We did actually consider prompting for an email address once they sign up with Twitter. However, whenever I've used an app that does that to me I just leave the site and don't go back and thought that if I didn't like it happening to me, it wouldn't be fair to do it to others.

Unforunately, the filter set up is something that we're struggling to simplify.

Hootsuite, Tweetbot etc offer searching and muting based on tweet content. Tweetdig offers the ability to filter based on a wide range of criteria (such as filtering out tweets from a specific user like you mentioned). That's our differentiating factor.

Thanks for the comments on hiding add/edit/manage under configuration. We'll take a look at where we could fit them into the interface.

We're very interested in the user experience, and we've improved it a lot over the last few weeks. It still needs a lot of work, but we're finding that the first thing new users see is the design. I think to get them past that, we need to take a look at the UI. People don't seem willing to give things a try if it doesn't look pretty, no matter how easy it is to use.

We could do that. As a user, would you personally find that useful or would you class it as spam?

It's free for 1 Twitter account and up to 8 filters. After that, there's an annual payment of $20 for 3 accounts and 15 filters, or a $10 monthly for 10 accounts and 40 filters.

Thanks for the feedback about the copy. We're both developers which makes implementing features easy, but explaining how they work quite hard. We definitely need to take a look at the copy + add a demo of how things work. Just got to find a way to do it properly on a budget :)

Unforunately, as we're a platform and not an addon we have to provide a separate interface for the app.

In reply to Twitter being a continuous stream, that is how some people (yourself included) use Twitter. Other people (such as myself) use it differently. I use it personally to keep up to date with tech developments (using a Github filter) and to get rid of things I don't want to see (e.g. filtering out #xfactor). Every person is different though, and unfortunately it seems like Tweetdig would be overkill for what you'd use it for.