

Show HN: My weekend project, written on Friday and Today - mootothemax
http://fasterdev.com

======
Homunculiheaded
I have what feels like a stupid question: Most of the weekend projects I see
here on HN look surprisingly polished, this one included. Any quick projects I
make just don't have that polished look and feel. Is it just a matter of have
enough design experience that you can just make it happen, are you using
templates or a library of some sort? Any advice on how to get my projects to
look nicer faster would be greatly appreciated!

~~~
mootothemax
Template from ThemeForest are what I use to add some polish; plenty of people
will criticise for using themes, but in my opinion, and coming from someone
with _zero_ design skills, they get you in a better place right from the start
:)

So, most of my sites are written using Kohana and a couple of themes from
ThemeForest - one for the sales side, and one for the admin area itself.

Edit: and really, that's nowhere near to being a stupid question - I only
found out about options like TF when a friend told me a few months ago :)

~~~
utops
Just a question about the theme from ThemeForest - which I didn't know about
until now. Looks like you're using this theme:

[http://themeforest.net/item/freemium-saas-wordpress-cms-
blog...](http://themeforest.net/item/freemium-saas-wordpress-cms-blog-theme-
ii/114695)

$30 is a great deal if the license covers a single commercial app (I assume
you need to buy it each time you use it in an app?) but when do you need to
pay for the "Extended License" which is $1500?

~~~
akavlie
From my cursory reading of the licensing, the key difference is that the
Extended License allows you to distribute the theme with your app (the regular
license would be limited to a hosted app).

[http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-
te...](http://themeforest.net/wiki/support/legal-terms/licensing-terms/)

------
d0m
Quote:

"What is FasterDev?

This is the initial release of FasterDev, written by Thomas Buck, a developer
originally from London, UK. It was only launched on February 20th 2011, and if
you have any questions or comments, please ..."

That doesn't really answer the question.

~~~
mootothemax
Thanks, you're right - really need to tighten up the copy :)

------
mootothemax
I wrote this tool after seeing a number of beginner Facebook developers
complaining about how difficult it is to set up test users. The plan is to
keep on adding more helper tasks (e.g. banning users from apps - and I'm open
to other ideas!) as time goes on.

Right now, it asks for the Offline Access permission purely because managing
access token expiry dates is a low priority - I want to see if anyone will use
it first :) Once a few people do, I'll sit down and write the session
management properly :)

------
tszming
Error? Database_Exception [ 0 ]: [1062] Duplicate entry '' for key
'uniq_email' ( INSERT INTO `users` (`username`, `password`) VALUES ('xxx',
'yyy') )

~~~
mootothemax
Damn, that's two bugs - one that the production site's showing real errors,
and that there's a db bug. I think I've now fixed this - can you try again? :)

Oh, and thanks for letting me know :)

~~~
tszming
Thanks, now working.

------
jwomers
Your two days worth is looking like a great site! Well done! :) Two points: On
the tour page, there are two "tour" headers right under each other, which is
strange. I recommend the tour bar in the header section just leaving the tour
header in the main section. Secondly, on homepage, under "why do you ask for
offline access" typo anyony=>anyone. Also, no-body really reads the lots of
text in footers (or anywhere really!) so if you have something important to
say (like why you want offline access), somewhere physically closer to the
facebook login step would make more sense. And lastly, who did you design? If
you did it in just 2 days, that's amazing, well done!

~~~
mootothemax
Thanks for the typo catch, and point about the header, I'll get started on
fixing these :)

 _And lastly, who did you design?_

I cheated and used a couple of templates from ThemeForest :)

------
dstorrs
"For a limited time during this soft launch, we're making our amazing service
available for $19.99 per year. This offer won't last forever, so get in
early."

This is good, but it would work better if I knew what the price would
eventually be and when it would change. Right now, I'm sitting here saying
"well, maybe I don't need this right now, but I might in a few weeks. If the
price is going to go from $20 to $25, I don't care about getting in now. If
the price is going from $20 to $200, I might throw the money at it right now
just to lock it in.

Alternatively, at least tell me when the price change will happen.

------
MichaelStubbs
My suggestion for the homepage would be to make the screenshots
expandable/zoomable. They're so small I can't really make any detail out apart
from a few pieces of bolded text.

Moving on from that, I'd be willing to give this a try but currently I'm
getting a MySQL error after trying to login with my Facebook account.

"Database_Exception [ 0 ]: [1062] Duplicate entry '' for key 'uniq_email' (
INSERT INTO `users` (`username`, `password`) VALUES ('<removed for privacy's
sake>', '<removed for privacy's sake>') )"

~~~
mootothemax
Ooh, great suggestion about the screenshots, I'll see what I can do about that
with the time I have left today :)

Can you try logging in again? I think that I've fixed that bug now - although
need to generate some more test users to make sure ;)

~~~
MichaelStubbs
Just tried again and I am able to login now. Will be testing this shortly!

~~~
mootothemax
Brilliant, and thanks again - I really appreciate having someone that isn't me
testing it :)

------
jayzee
Looks great, especially for a weekend's work. But I think that is a classical
example of going too far with the _minimum viable product_ concept.

I would never let you have offline access. I think that quite a few others
might not as well. So you might have a great idea but without that feature you
might not have a mvp and your trial run will give you misleading data.

~~~
mootothemax
Thanks, and you have a good point about offline access; I'm honestly not sure
about how big a gamble this is. The thing is, I've noticed that whilst a lot
of people who work in IT are completely against the idea (myself included, to
be perfectly honest), it seems that there are also lots of people who plainly
- for want of a better term - don't give a damn.

My rough plan is to give it a week, and if I don't get even a couple of sign
ins by then, spend the weekend sorting out session fun. If you like, I can
reply to your comment with an update? :)

------
perssontm
Whatever eases the massive pain and frustration involved in developing things
for facebook, is imho a good thing.

------
Elepsis
That's incredibly polished for a weekend project. That said, I'm quite
confused by the choice of icons on the right of the "Tour" page. The calendar
doesn't scream "Test Users" to me, nor do any of the other icons seem to be
tied to what they're meant to be describing.

~~~
mootothemax
Thanks! Because it's a weekend project, I basically threw together the icons
as a last-minute "text goes here" kinda thing. I'm hoping to sort this out
later on this week :)

------
LiveTheDream
I'm not clear on what this gives me that I can't already do. Is it somehow
easier to preview dialogs or create test users?

------
mattmanser
Looks really good, nice work.

Btw, typo in point 1 on home page, launced = launched. Also hovering over the
feature set links in /public/tour looks like you've left the default title
tags on them.

~~~
mootothemax
Fantastic, thanks for the typo catches - now fixed :)

