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Ask HN: My first time developing a rails app. What do you think?

13 points by peachananr ↗ HN
I came from a PHP background, and I've decided to jump ship to rails.

https://www.bucketlistly.com is the result of 2 months of learning by doing.

What do you think of the app? Would love to hear all of your feedback.

Feel free to sign up for beta, I'll send an invite to all of you.

31 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 74.1 ms ] thread
holgersindbaek
Looks really hot. Seems like you've done a lot of work on it.

I can't use it though, since I need an invitation for it. A big turnoff for me.

You should also make your title into a link, otherwise nobody is gonna upvote your post.

peachananr
Thanks for the suggestion mate. Really appreciate it. :) I might open up registration very soon.
meta8609
How are you implementing the real-time refresh?
peachananr
Which part? The landing page? Those are simply a cached result displaying as a ticker to make it looks real time but it actually loops through the result.
OriginalSyn
Why is Facebook always the first auth system implemented in start up apps, OpenID is so much more simple to get running and will open you up to many different providers with very little coding. Is it just for the data mining?
cmaxwe
For my app it was being able to post to the timeline that made Facebook attractive as an auth system. Get more exposure quickly.
dickeytk
I think being 'easier' in a Rails app is debatable. Facebook authentication certainly isn't 'hard'.

IMO OpenID is an awful user experience, I much prefer using Facebook. But that point is certainly debatable as well.

OriginalSyn
It has similar Allow/Deny UX as Facebook and opens you up to major email providers like Google and Yahoo as well as the plethora of other providers and ones such StackExchange if you're creating a technical site/app. Having only Facebook as an auth alienates 1/3rd of the US population.
peachananr
It's mainly because of the data and open graphs yes. :) Facebook really provides a viral way of exposing my app to other potential users. The app is initially designed to evolve around Facebook but during the process, I decided to step away from that.
runjake
I wish I had even 10% the design talent you (or whoever did the site design) had.
peachananr
Thanks mate! I did everything my self. I don't usually do this kind of design so for this project, I went all in with skeuomorphism and this is the result of that experiment. :)
thiagodotfm
Make the "sign in with facebook text" be "facebook sign in". The text is too big and it seems that both the facebook and the "get an invitation buttons" have to be of the same size in order to be aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

Anyways, you did a pretty good job. Awesome.

peachananr
Thanks for a great suggestion! I'll definitely adjust the button sizes. :)
geekam
Great design!
peachananr
Thanks! I'm quite happy about the design as well. Trying to create a unique personality with skeuomorphism. :)
lowboy
It's got a very strong design which you executed well. It's quite polished. The rails part is hard to comment on because we can't see your code - but from the url structure, it looks like it worked well for you.

Having said that, I'm not really a fan of the design overall because I find it distracting from the actual content. IMO, effective design should help to focus the user's attention on the content, not be part of the focus in and of itself. I'm just not a fan of overly skeuomorphic designs in general for that reason.

The Tips & Tricks animation on the sidebar is also very distracting.

That scripty font renders very thin and isn't very readable for me on chome-stable Win7: http://i.imgur.com/FC5oE.jpg

peachananr
Thanks for your suggestion mate! I'll definitely try to fix the font rendering on Windows. It's a shame that PC can't render the same way as mac. It's so much more pleasing to look at the design on a mac. :)
craze3
What benefits have you noticed from coding this in rails instead of PHP? Does it run faster or more efficiently?
peachananr
The app seems to run fine right now, but I'll have to see how it goes. It is quite expensive though using Heroku but it is a lot easier to scale than using dedicated vitial machines like I did with MyColorscreen.com (my previous project).

For me personally, developing on rails made my life so much easier. There's a gem for everything. Facebook/Twitter/Foursquare can be integrated by just a few lines of codes.

Also in terms of resources like tutorials, rails community is by far the largest I've seen. Railscast.com really helped a lot in this project.

japhyr
Do you mind sharing a bit more about cost? Heroku has a free tier; has the project already outgrown that?
HugoMelo
It feels a bit slow now for me. Is it getting pummeled by HN?

By the way, cool project.

peachananr
Sure, I'm currently running on:

Heroku Postgres Crane: $50 (just in case) SSL Endpoint: $25 1 web dyno, 1 worker dyno: $34.50

I'm still using a free Sendgrid to send emails (200 emails per day) but I'm sure I'll have to pay more sooner or later.

I used to use DV provided by Media Temple and it only costs me $50/month.

dbm44
Did you mean Railscasts.com, with the extra s? Railscast.com does not look anything like so helpful!
peachananr
Yes, you are right. Sorry about that, I was typing that on my phone. :)
danicted
just tested if there is any restrictions in forms but sounds there is none.
logical42
i like the site design and the javascript scroller is pretty neat.. i think your images load a bit slowly however, which i think means you could probably benefit from serving your assets, i.e. images and such, via a cdn (like cloudfront). all in all, good work, it looks like something to be proud of, which is always great!
peachananr
Thanks for the suggestion mate. I'll definitely try cloudfront!
peachananr
Just switched to Cloudfront. It's running extremely fast! Thanks for the suggestion mate. :)