Ask HN: Review my startup, camonduty.com
Cam On Duty is a service that allows you to transform ordinary webcam for example into a home monitoring center. To do it you don’t need to have complicated IT knowledge (everything is done automatically), additional hardware to store recordings or even a PC computer. Video live stream and recording are available from any part of the world thanks to cloud storage. This also makes recordings safe and available at any time. Our distinctive feature is support of PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) cameras. This allows you to control remotely where the camera is directed and track objects in real time.
We are looking for feedback about the functionality and general usability of our web (camonduty.com) and iPhone app. Also every tip describing a way to improve our service would be much appreciated.
11 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 31.0 ms ] threadI do notice a few small problems:
1) when you go to demo page and actually view the demo cam streaming the user information menu up top (Login/Register etc.) looks fine. But going from demo page to the home page once more somehow shows the menu as "logged in"--the menu says Logout, even though you shouldn't be logged in to see demo. In any case, it must be something to do with session or the simple loggedin/out logic.
2) In the demo page, dialog box on deleting cam or adding cam will actually be covered by flash. This is a pretty common issue and I believe the solution is to set the flash w-mode: opacity or something of that sort. It has been a while since I worked with drop down menu and flash :)
A suggestion: instead of control buttons of up/down/left/right-- you can definitely add immediate improvements to the experience in 2 levels: 1) bound the keyboard shortcut which should be quite simple. Just trigger the click even on the appropriate button. Don't forget to have a small delay so you don't crash the darn device
2) enable dragging of the video: I'm "thinking"... when the video is loaded, cover the video with a low opacity div (1px gif of 0 opacity?) then bound a mouse listener to the box. Again, you can move the cam according to the mouse movement by checking mousemove and then on delay trigger the click even on your already bound control button. In fact, the easiest would probably have 9 div arranged in this manner:
[1][2][3]
[4][5][6]
[7][8][9]
if mouseenter 5 do nothing... if mouse enters 1 trigger left+up button click, 9-down+right, 8-down and so on.
I hope this makes sense. I'm simply looking at the demo and assume the real experience is probably the same and could be improved.
Other than that, things look great. Best of luck to the team!
-V.
Ad 1 & 2: we are working on it.
Ad PTZ control: we actually implemented "touch to rotate" feature in iPhone app (it should be available in App Store soon, we are waiting for review). Basically you tap the screen and camera centers itself to the point you tapped. It seems to be more intuitive than the click solution you proposed, but we would like to see iPhone users opinions first. Keyboard controllers seems to be a must have :)
How are you planning on competing with those?
About the software that comes with your camera; is it cloud based software? If not than you have to configure your router manually so you could access the camera when you are outside your network. For many non-technical people it could be the problem and Cam on Duty aims to solve that, enabling camera monitoring here is as easy as few iPhone taps :)
After all enabling PC built-in (or USB) cameras would be a nice to have feature and we're thinking about supporting standard webcams in the future.