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Show HN: Stock Bubbles app, advices?

13 points by antirez ↗ HN
A few weeks ago I got an idea for a more interesting interface to check the stock market. The huge list of symbols in a table view that are either green or red (the same red and green whatever the gain is 0.1% or 10%) is not really cool for fast scanning, nor fun to use.

Since I happen to be involved with an iPhone and iPad devleopment company here in Sicily since a few years, as share holder and "advisor", I suggested the idea to this friends of mine. As there was no really development bandwidth to do things like this, as they mostly work for other companies creating applications for the editorial market, I suggested to do this in the spare time, and check how this could work as an alternative to just providing services to other companies.

So one of the developers, and my girlfriend that is the graphic designer in the company, started working at this, and after just a few days the app was ready.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stock-bubbles/id417945202?mt=8&ls=1

This guys read hacker news every day (this was one of my first advices), but never participate with actual comments. I think it's a shame that they don'ttry to directly sell things on the app store most of the times, so please can you provide some suggestion to this guys? What's ok and what's wrong with Stock Bubbles, is it too much a small market to create a viable business model? Does it makes sense to create such side projects with just a few days of work of a few poeple, or it's better to invest months developing an application even if it could not be a success at all? (while doing work for customers will pay less but will pay for sure).

Thanks for any feedback, the developer of the app is 'artix' here and will reply to all your questions. The app is free, but with an optional in-app purcahse to unblock the configuration screen, but there is no need to buy it to check how it works and to provide useful suggestions of course.

7 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 12.0 ms ] thread
earle
Here's something similiar I did a couple years back in Raphael:

http://80concepts.com/graph

artix
Cool! We could have done something similar for our website as a marketing idea!
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
tdok
It is interesting, but (at least to me) it does not seem to add any benefit. It basically is a list of stocks (I assume a watch list) sorted by % change which happens to be shown in colored bubbles. At first I thought that the size of the bubbles will play in help showing the data, allowing the trader to analyze the watch list or holdings, but it doesn't. Sorry man. It's interesting, but not beneficial to the average traders. Keep going at it though.
antirez
Since I'm the one proposing this visualization, this is the reasoning: basically the idea is that you can check how the market is going in very little time. I guess the value is much more for casual users interested in the stock market then for traders that will study every single stock with greater detail.

So indeed there is no real added value, but just a faster to read UI I hope. Btw I also concur that the developers should invest more time in providing also some added value that is not just an UI, but I guess this will hardly be a metter of a few days of efforts. Btw I must admit my "benchmark" was the iPhone built-in app that was what I used before.

Thanks for the feedback!

artix
This is just the first release and all ideas are warmly welcomed. Our efforts will go in the direction of improving the user experience of Stock Bubbles for future releases. As antirez said, the goal of this app is not about giving more data than all the other apps. The basic idea of the app is to give users an original and less tedious interface to quickly monitor stock exchange fluctuations, but we'll work to improve other features too if we realize that they really add value to the app.