ssong

(I'm working with OP on this)

Thanks for the feedback! We are using a setup similar to http://www.diybookscanner.org/ for this and the scan quality is very high. The sample PDF was scaled down and compressed to reduce file size. I'll put up a high-res version in a bit.

For the actual service, you can download each individual high-res page scans.

OP here. I started TestElf over a year ago. Our initial service was pay-per-use iOS testing and we launched the MVP here on HN. After working with hundreds of developers, we realized that there were still many aspects of manual testing that our initial service did not solve. Today, we are launching our first new service: pay-per-month dedicated testing aimed at larger development teams. Being a solo founder and bootstrapping since the beginning has definitely been tough. I wouldn't have gotten this far without our first trial users (many of them HN readers). Thanks everyone!

When looking at the screenshot slides, clicking on the top right corner of the image (near where the 'x' is in most of the screenshots) actually closes the slideshow. This is a nice little usability detail.

Thanks for sharing. Adding to the list, I built HN Showcase a while back with a similar goal:

http://www.hnshowcase.com/

OP here. I started Testelf a year ago to make testing easier for mobile development teams. Many of our early adopters came from HN and we wouldn't have gotten this far without the support from this community. Thanks everyone!

While cloud services have made product development faster and easier, testing is still a bottleneck. Black box testing is essential in ensuring major issues are caught before an app reaches the end user. Testelf currently provides black box testing for iOS. My goal is to build a testing service that's not only affordable, but also very easy to use. We charge a flat price ($200) per test, have a two-day turnaround, require no documentation or spec from users, and provide a very comprehensive test report.

We launched a private beta with 30 companies around five months ago and have received very good feedback. Today, we are opening up the service to everyone. While we are iOS only for now, we are planning to add Android and Mac app testing in the near future.

I think you make a great point about perceived value of testing vs SEO/design. However, with the increased proliferation of downloading software through app stores, which favors apps with better reviews/ratings, the perceived value of testing should increase. For example, take a look at apps with mixed or low ratings on the AppStore and most of them will contain complaints about bugs in the app.

(random point + small shameless plug: I founded http://www.testelf.com as flat priced testing service for iOS apps)

Thanks for asking! We do test on common devices (retina/non-retina iPad, iOS 5/6), and we're going to carefully consider which devices to cover as we grow. I am also very aware of the importance of confidentiality, such as keeping test results private -- I think the service wouldn't make sense without it. Our exact terms will be available before we publicly launch.

Good point! There is an option to attach additional information (description, notes, link to website/app store) when uploading an individual build. We do ask for a little bit of information about the app in general when the first build is uploaded so that we have some context.

Thanks for the comment! Android is probably the next platform for us if all goes well. I started off with iOS because I'm more familiar with it and it has less device variations. Extending the offering won't be trivial though. Before we start support for a new platform, we'd need to build the testing tools, develop new training materials, and acquire new hardware.

OP here. I quit my full-time job almost a year ago to travel and work on startup ideas, and this is the fruit of my labor in the past six months that I hope you'll find useful. I wanted to make it easy for startups and indie devs to test their iOS applications. How does testelf work? You upload a build of your app without providing any additional instructions, and we'll test your app from a user's perspective, logging what we did or saw. The goal is to charge a flat price per test, provide good coverage and actionable feedback, and have a 36-hour turnaround time.

Over the past few months, I recruited and trained a small team of testers, developed internal testing tools, and worked with a handful of startups who are piloting our service. The service is now open for beta -- I would love to hear feedback from hackers and startups on HN who can give it a shot.

For those like me who wondered why this was posted since the book content was out of date: The Django Book project needs help updating the book to cover Django 1.4 and beyond. Send pull requests to https://github.com/jacobian/djangobook.com

I made http://www.hnshowcase.com that shows thumbnail/comment count/vote count of all "Show HN" posts. You can sort by comment and vote count but right now it doesn't let you filter by time range. I think I'll look into adding that to the next version.

Great to see the progress made since Startup Workaway! I was really blown away when I tried it out. Looking forward to the final version.

Thanks! The original darker theme was intended to make the thumbnails stand out, but I didn't know if people found it useful. Once I get some more feedback for this version, I may tone down the brightness for the next update.

Thanks! Here's a screenshot of the previous version: http://i.imgur.com/PeGXp.png

Last summer, I wrote HN Showcase to help the community browse "Show HN" posts. Over the past few months I've received a lot of awesome feedback. I spent the past few days polishing the project and added new features. Here are the big changes in v2: more polished look, infinite scrolling instead of paging, search, share individual projects, and performance improvements. Feedback welcome!

For what it's worth, English is a mandatory subject for students in China. It's hard to predict what the political and economic climate will be like a few decades from now, but I'm pretty sure the number of Mandarin speakers will increase and Asia will still be a major influence on global economics.

I'm not sure if I agree with this decision given the circumstances of this particular school district, but I won't be surprised if we start to see other schools strongly encouraging Mandarin studies.

Let's not jump too quickly to politics. Mandarin is a language, and will be spoken by the Chinese regardless of politics. It is also spoken in many places outside of mainland China.

It is interesting to see Microsoft Research as the top institution for best papers, beating all universities and 11 ranks higher than the next company (IBM Research).

There isn't a way right now, but I may add it in the next update. Having a perma link to a project is tricky as the projects shift back when new projects get posted.

I don't have the bandwidth right now to manually curate. However, this sounds like a good idea for someone to do as a dedicated tumblr/posterous blog.

It uses the search API (http://www.hnsearch.com/api) and does a little bit of sanitizing to remove "Show HN" from the title and find the URL in the post.

It seems like the site isn't returning any new results right now, and I'll investigate when I get a chance. Usually things are up there realtime.

Thanks for the feedback! When I wrote this, I only tested it on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. For the next version, I'm planning to use twitter bootstrap, so hopefully the compatibility will be better.

Nope. It's using PhantomJS (http://phantomjs.org/).

Not yet. I'll try to include that in the next update.

Thanks for posting this :) I wrote HN Showcase as a weekend project last summer. Glad to see this being used. I'm going to try to push an update in the near future.

Thanks for the feedback!

Not yet. I'll try to add that as part of next batch of updates.

I built http://www.hnshowcase.com for this purpose. It finds all Show HN posts via the search API and displays a thumbnail of each project page.

I had similar concerns when I first started noticing bootstrap used on random websites I encountered. However, I think bootstrap will probably help increase the lower bound quality of sites while designers pushing the envelope will continue to do so, without or without bootstrap as a starting point.

hnsearch is certainly a great way to find the same information, and in fact we use it underneath to get our data. However, going through hnsearch requires a few steps and many casual readers might not bother to go there. Since most "Show HN" posts link to the project homepage, we hope that displaying a thumbnail of each page in a visual gallery can help views discover interesting content faster.