mmilo

This is pretty much what http://bugherd.com does. It has accompanying browser extensions that embed reporting functionality directly into a live website and automatically capture browser data and even screenshots when an issue is reported.

Anyone notice hitting the escape key sends you to a squarespace login screen? Seems like an odd thing to have turned on by default.

Yeah valid criticism. The biggest issue is that the HTML for HN is almost devoid of any semantic markup. This means I’m reliant on a little bit of JS to differentiate between different pages in order to achieve the desired look.

Hey grey-area, yeah I’m yet to fix all these up. Truth be told my karma count is a little low so I wasn’t even aware of the down vote links. Will amend.

Yeah was meant to be Helvetica, will fix this :)

Hey that looks awesome! Loads of great features :)

Hey Kelly, no problem. Thanks for building Designer News in the first place, it’s awesome!

Hmmm, no wonder I missed it, my karma is too low to have seen it :\

I can’t really claim any credit for the design. I simply wanted to recreate the look of https://news.layervault.com/ which I really like so all credit for that should go to @Allan

As for the zooming, that should technically work as is, unless there’s something I missed. Let me know if there any particular pages that are looking wonky.

No reason it couldn’t be. I’ll do some code-tidying and put up a git repo for it.

I fixed this up now, really sorry about that

Yeah it’s one of the things I intend on fixing up. I literally spent two evenings on this so there’s a bunch of things that need work but I thought it was good enough for other folks to try out.

Yeah a few friends have mentioned they like the density, which is very reasonable. I personally find it easier to scan when content is more spaced out, but I may just include a settings page that will let you change layout density to your taste.

Also apologies for the things that are still broken, my original post on DesignerNews mentioned that it’s still a work in progress and I didn’t expect this many folks to take notice of it so quickly.

The link appears to be broken. Happy to check it out, also I have just fixed up commenting, sorry about that.

Hey folks, apologies for the commenting issue. I have updated and resolved this now. You can update your extension to 0.4 in the extension manager and comments should work now.

Hey guys, thanks for the feedback. I put this together over a couple of evenings so it’s still a work in progress. I’ll try and address any feedback you guys have so I appreciate you taking the time to share it with me.

- Only in Chrome for now as their extensions framework seemed the easiest to get up and running with. Happy to add others if there’s actual demand for it.

- Clicking on the HN logo should take you to the HN root and not the YC root. I’ll have to look into why this is occurring. In the interim try updating your extension, it should be v.0.3

- Will address the button hiding issue ASAP * this is now fixed

I think this article is great and the first point is absolutely spot on. What I dont’t really agree with is that teaching end-users and clients to report issues the way developers want is the solution.

I think the communication gap between developers and non-developers can better be resolved with intelligent software. Ideally I think this would be something along the lines of: • automatically detect when an error happens, • provide a list of all the actions leading up the error, • capture all the information it can about the user that experienced the error, • take a screenshot automatically • provide a simple way for them to communicate with devs, and vice versa

There’s no reason why a customer should need to know about milestones, assignment, error verification, etc... They should instead get a chance to say they have a problem, and then be notified sometime later when that issue is resolved.

We’re working towards this with http://www.bugherd.com from the bottom point up to the first. For instance when an issue is reported in BugHerd we capture as much user data as you can throw at us, information about the page they’re on and optionally an automatic screenshot. Other startups like https://www.getsentry.com are tackling this same thing from the other end by focusing on the error detection side of things and working their way down.

All in all I think bug trackers that pay as much attention to end-users as they do devs are doing it right, because as you say those are the people that are going to be reporting the bulk of the issues and the ones devs ultimately care about.

Or about the tracks that beat the shit out of you :)

The reason it takes hours to verify whether an issue is even an issue is because people that consume tech describe problems like this "My shit just broke, help!" while people that build tech need something like "I was logged in as an admin user on the dashboard interface using Firefox v.18 and I clicked on the submit button and validation didn’t work".

Most bug trackers worry about how best to show you a list of issues, the thing is if most of those issues aren’t reported correctly they’re useless.

We’re currently trying to resolve this problem for web devs specifically by creating an embedded tracker, where you integrate the bug reporting directly into a site or web app. Meaning people can report issues in the way that’s natural for them e.g. "this is broken" and the tracker handles capturing all the other data a dev needs to verify and fix the problem. Our app can be found at http://www.bugherd.com if it’s of any interest to anyone.

His example might be a page header, but there is nothing that explicitly states that this needs to be for a page headings. In fact this particular project doesn't seem to be intended for that purpose at all, more for long list of grouped items.

While I think your opinion is valid, I'm not convinced addressing it at this particular project is warranted. Just sayin' :)

The basic gist from what I can tell is that it's a way of invoking styles, scripts and images that are screen size dependant in a way that reduces the amount of work required.

Also ms-win has a rails installer app currently serving that platform: http://railsinstaller.org/

Perhaps I read into it, but your statement definitely came across as loaded and seemed to imply that an open source project aimed at a closed platform somehow had less merit than one aimed at an open source platform (I interpret that as dogmatic).

The video merely points out that one should try and understand the motivations and rationale of others before arguing the merits of your point of view. That someone would try and make the lives of developers on any platform easier, I think, is a good thing. I would have hoped that it would encourage other developers to try and do the same on other platforms.

It's really tough to persuade people to try something different by hammering away at them with dogma. Neil deGrasse Tyson sums this up very well: http://youtu.be/-_2xGIwQfik

Even if it only worked in webkit I'd still style native elements and let them fall back to their default look. Creating fake inputs using a bunch of nested divs gives me flashbacks of days when tables were used for layout.

Personally I find this to be very inelegant. There is an incredible amount of HTML cruft and Javascript with a bunch of CSS hard-coded into it.

http://lab.simurai.com/css/umbrui/ has some awesome examples of how this sort of thing should be done, using nothing but native HTML 5 form inputs and CSS.

Also apologies for the double post, was intended to be a text post, but posted as a link accidentally :(

Could we get some indication of what gateways are supported during the beta?

someone's done their homework :)

Not so sure if we fall into the software dev category so much as the web dev category as we're really only supporting tracking on websites and web apps.

Yeah we really badly wanted to move away from using screenshots as a means of capturing bug data for a few different reasons (different browser renderings, needing to constantly capture new screens when layouts change, etc...)

Also we wanted to ensure that there were no dependencies on a particular browser or operating system so we decided the best route for us would be an embeddable widget.