
Ask HN: Please review my new project: almost.at - davidcann
http://almost.at
======
mahmud
I am not sure what it does, but it looks fucking gorgeous.

~~~
chops
I had the same thought. It's a very impressive interface, but I couldn't find
an "About" link that really says what it is, and it wasn't terribly obvious
(at least to me). I see what looks like twitter stuff, I see comments, and I
see links to news stuff.

But perhaps an "About" clicky would be helpful.

But overall nice job with the interface. Very slick.

~~~
astine
Or even a video would be helpful.

~~~
mahmud
As someone trying to make a video for "the product" with zero video editing
experience, let me say that I no longer expect it from others. It's enough
programmers are even making the UI useable.

------
wooster
This is fantastic! I could see myself paying for the ability to set up feeds
to share with other people during an event.

It's also nice to see Cappuccino being used for something outside of 280
North. :)

~~~
JacobAldridge
I hadn't even thought of that, but you're right - I would definitely pay to
have one of my conferences included / featured, which would encourage
attendees to communicate about them more - I win all round.

------
davidcann
I used Cappuccino to build the front-end, so thanks go to the 280 North guys!

~~~
messel
I like that it grabs events out, instead of just trending words. How did you
manage that if you don't mind sharing? I'm a big fan of tools, especially cool
ones so thanks for showing great ideas can be made real in ones spare time if
they keep plugging!

~~~
davidcann
Events are suggested by users (the little + button in the lower left).
Currently, I approve/reject them by hand to keep it focused. Eventually, I'll
have a public voting system.

------
geuis
Man, I love what Cappuccino can do. It looks really slick. However, on a top-
end Mac Pro with 6gb of RAM in Safari 4 beta and Firefox 3.5 beta, its
sloooooow. Everything is just really jerky and non-responsive while trying to
navigate around.

All that aside, its a really great interface. Soon as you enable some
additional functionality (like search) and speed up the interface, this will
be something I want to come to.

~~~
davidcann
Yea, I am definitely working to speed up the interface responsiveness.

There's a standalone app OS X that you can keep open for hours, so it won't
bog down your main browser:

<https://s3.amazonaws.com/almostatapps/almost.at.dmg>

~~~
kqr2
Since you used Cappuccino, were you able to compile this from the same source
as the web site?

~~~
davidcann
Yea, though technically it's not "compiled" ... only the browser wrapper is
compiled objective-c code. It's still just html/javascript running inside.

------
alexkearns
Beautiful, beautiful interface. Worked perfectly smoothly on my MacBook 2.2Ghz
with 2GB ram. Am very jealous. Makes the interface of my AJAXified web app -
www.gambolio.com - look a tad amateurish. Mine was done using jQuery, btw.

~~~
whacked_new
Nice interface, but jerky animation, which isn't surprising for jQuery, but a
bit unfortunate.

~~~
alexkearns
Whacked, what library is best for animations, in your opinions> I heard
mootools was pretty good.

~~~
whacked_new
6 months ago I could easy find a jQuery animated effect somewhere that got
sluggish if you start generating many simultaneous effects. There is an
article by Dave Shea on A List Apart that would visibly choke if you moved
your cursor around the links quickly; someone wrote one in Mootools and it was
smooth. But I just revisited the article and it wasn't choking anymore.

My hunch is Mootools will still give you an edge. But it might not last long.

~~~
ahoyhere
You guys are both oversimplifying the animation performance issue.

Alex will probably write slow animations with whatever framework he's using,
because it depends way more on how you program than with what.

You have to be cognizant of your DOM, your scripting practices, your loops,
etc., etc.

I'm gonna be a total whore and probably get downmodded but, hey, I wrote a
book on this exact topic: <http://jsrocks.com/> with Thomas Fuchs, the creator
of Scriptaculous. (Wait til you see Scripty2.)

~~~
alexkearns
Please don't dis other people's code before you have had a chance to look at
it, especially when your sole aim is to promote your own product. I am very
"cognizant" of my DOM, scripting practices and loops. The reason my animations
are slow is the sheer amount I am trying to do with this app, not because I
write slow animatations whatever framework I use.

------
jack7890
Very cool. Easy quick improvement: add "cursor: pointer" to the CSS of the
event links on the left-hand side. That will make it easier for the user to
tell he should click on them.

~~~
davidcann
Thanks, good point.

------
moe
Hm. Doesn't work on linux in Firefox Minefield , Opera 9.63 or in Konqueror
3.5.8. I only get a spinner for a few seconds - followed by a blank screen.

In windows firefox it works (a bit sluggish, though).

Anyways, apart from that problem and a few minor bugs it's a really nice tech-
demo. I don't see myself using such a service, but you might find some
followers in the twitter crowd.

------
ErrantX
I played around with it for a bit and thought it was quite cool. Then just as
I was about to click close I saw the wierd slider thing at the bottom and
though - ah that would be so awesome if I could slide it and.... OH COOL!

Kudos.

~~~
username
I read this and slided to an earlier time. Now it's difficult to get back to
the current time. Dragging the slider to a future time or clicking to the
right brings me back to the earliest simulated time. Using Chrome 2 and it
isn't slow.

~~~
ErrantX
Same issue here (using Chrome 2 as well :D). However for me the slider stayed
at the earliest time but the updates appeared correctly in real time.

------
redorb
You must be getting hammered by traffic; I just gave ya 30 seconds to load..
I'll try again later.

~~~
davidcann
The initial load might take a minute, but once it loads, 99% of the traffic is
served from Amazon S3 via JSONP, so that part should hopefully scale well. If
you're on OS X, there's a standalone browser app you can download (has the
code embedded, so no loading time). I'm still working on a Mozilla Prism or
custom WebKit standalone browser for Windows.

I welcome the traffic rush, though, because I want to figure out how to scale
it!

~~~
jeroen
_The initial load might take a minute_

You might want to mention that on the initial page. Yesterday I also gave up
after 30 seconds, and I only came back today because this is still on the HN
frontpage.

------
ochiba
Very cool! When I watched the Air France stream, many of the items were in
foreign languages. You could offload language detection to the Google
Languages AJAX API to allow filtering by language, or even better, automatic
translation on-the-fly ;)

------
aditya
Fascinating. Would be nice if you labeled the three columns, (The first is
twitter mentions, the second flickr and the third everything else?)

But it looks like a great way of visualizing developing stories, with the
downside being that you can only really track one thing at a time.

How are you dealing with reducing noise from stuff that you pull from twitter
or the web?

~~~
davidcann
Thanks!

The "Followees" feature is going to be key in avoiding the twitter hashtag
spam. Basically, you add people on twitter who are actually attending the
event... and their posts are highlighted in yellow. You can also see only
followee posts with the button at the top.

I was testing Google I/O last week with 50-60 followees and it really cut
through the spam and all the "I wish I were at Google I/O!!!!" posts.

I'll be at WWDC next week and I'm hoping that the big Keynote will be a good
test for the system.

------
crux
I think it's pretty cool looking. One question, one concern: 1) Are events
added manually? They certainly seem well-enough targeted that I could see them
being so. But the flip side of that is that there's a lot of other events of a
similar nature, but with less of a geeky focus, that I'm afraid I wouldn't
see. If they're not manually added, how are you ensuring that all events that
could be potentially targeted are included?

2) It might be nice to include a throttle for the refresh speed. 5 seconds,
for a high-volume item like the BEA, was total information overload.

EDIT: I should be more precise about #2. I'm seeing that even though it's been
constantly refreshing every 5 sec for a couple minutes, it's still up to May
29. So maybe it's not actually that high-volume, but there's still something
going on where I'm seeing a hard-to-follow stream of text.

~~~
davidcann
1) Yes, users suggest events and the moderator (me) approves them, if they're
relevant. I'm trying to keep it to a short curated list of what's happening in
the world (also, there's rate limits on most APIs!). Eventually, I'll add a
system for users to publicly vote for "upcoming" events.

2) There isn't currently a throttle, but if you mouse-over a column, it will
pause so you can read something interesting that you see. Mouse out and it un-
pauses. Also, it's like an IM conversation... if you scroll up, it will stop
auto-scrolling to the bottom.

------
mrduncan
Looks great! This is definitely one of those first apps which will help give
people an idea of what Cappuccino can do.

One bug I noticed: Expanding the left column seems to have some issues. More
specifically, the content doesn't seem to expand with it until you click on
another event. (In Safari 4 on a Mac)

~~~
davidcann
Yea :/ I've been trying to solve that bug, though it has been elusive, thus
far.

------
halo
Neat idea, but this is unusably slow on my PC (Firefox 3, Core 2 Duo 2ghz).

~~~
bradlane
hate to add a "works for me" post, but try it in the firefox 3.5 beta - it has
the new javascript engine, which makes this run very nicely.

It was speedy in google chrome too.

------
rythie
It looks good! I had a few problems though:

It appears you can pause individual columns but clicking on the pause button
doesn't work (in Firefox at least)

The columns should have titles

The last column (Links) keeps the background title over the text (in Firefox
at least)

Selecting different stories on the left seems not to work some of the time and
there is no pointer icon when hovering over them (in Firefox at least)

I think you need a page explaining what is going on and how the site works
because it seems to assume you already know.

------
endtime
Looks really nice, but perhaps a little buggy? I'm using Opera 9.64 on XP and
when trying to view the stream about the missing France flight, I was only
able to get two of three streams at a time. The third would show a paused icon
in the top right. First, the Twitter stream was paused; after I clicked around
the timeline, the Twitter stream started working but the pictures frame
emptied and stopped working.

Great stuff overall.

~~~
davidcann
Hm, did you see a little pause icon in the top right of the column? If so, you
probably had your mouse hovering over that column. It pauses on mouse-over so
you can read something that you see is interesting.

Edit: Having said that... yes, I'm sure there are bugs!

~~~
endtime
I did have the pause icon, but it didn't go away as I moved my mouse around
the screen.

------
papaf
All I see is a timer and then just a black screen. I'm using Opera 9.64 on
x86_64 Linux. I'm sad because the other comments make it sound awesome.

~~~
kingnothing
For what it's worth, it loads fine for me with Opera 10 build 4345, but it
didn't work with the first Opera 10 alpha.

Here's a link if you're interested:
<http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4345/>

------
paul9290
Cool that you list tweet links from major news sources!

When a user clicks on CNN, BBC or others could you not on the left most side
bring up the article they clicked so they dont go to another site? Would be a
UI thing, but I would never leave the page and I could click and read all the
news stories about X, while staying within your site.

~~~
davidcann
Interesting... I was thinking an embedded viewer for photos would be good, but
articles could work too. I could make that an option, so people could jump out
to a new window if they prefer. Thanks!

------
alain94040
It looks gorgeous, but I have one question about web pages that look like
applications: what happens when I leave the page and later want to come back?
Is there a "save" button?

On my computer, I can come back to my data very easily. The next time I open
an app, everything is where I left it. Does Capuccino work the same way?

~~~
davidcann
Not really, but there's not much "personalized" data on almost.at to save. If
there were (or is in the future), then yea, your data could definitely be
saved and displayed when you return. Check out 280 Slides from the creators of
Cappuccino: <http://280slides.com>

------
HouseTrip
Love the interface and the real-time aggregation thing. However I think it
would be even better if one could submit the topic to be searched and
aggregated for --> not limited to events chosen by you. For instance I'd like
to find mention of my company at specific times (during a viral campaign,
etc.)

------
smokinn
I'm not sure if this is intentional or a browser bug (I'm using Chrome so
anything Webkit/Safari should be the same) but at the bottom of the menu panel
on the left I see a resize button (bottom right of left panel). If I resize
the panel, the menu itself doesn't resize, only the right side menus shrink.

~~~
davidcann
Definitely a bug... thanks for the report.

------
palish
I am not sure it's working correctly on Chrome. Here's what I see:
<http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/almost.at.jpg>

I gave up trying to figure out what to do after about a minute.

~~~
davidcann
Hm... that's not good. It should have a sidebar on the left. Looks like it's
Chrome on Windows, right? I'll have a look and see if I can reproduce it.

~~~
palish
Yep, Chrome on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

------
khandekars
Beautiful! Rocks on FireFox 3.0.10 on Fedora 10. I expected it to be slow, but
was pleasantly surprised to see the overall speed after initial loading was
over. The '5 seconds remaining' idea is elegant.

------
zitterbewegung
It looks pretty professional. Sort of interesting too. If there was a way to
automatically get hashtags or news stories or submit possible stories that
might be a way to improve the service.

------
vaksel
congrats on getting techcrunch covered

~~~
davidcann
Thanks! That's pretty funny because I only told people about this site 2 and a
half hours ago!

------
asmosoinio
Font aliasing in the bottom timeline is not working for me. Running Google
Chrome on Vista. Screenshot:

<http://screencast.com/t/zhoSHkz1Q>

~~~
davidcann
Thanks for the report. That looks awful! I'm going to try to reproduce it.

------
vindi
nice job. let me guess, you own a Mac? :) Beautiful UI. mouse cursor over
items on left remained as arrow for me. Maybe hover color or hand cursor?

------
wmeredith
I gave it about 30 seconds to load and then left. I saw it was just TC'd so
maybe I'll try back in a few days.

------
arihelgason
Amazing interface.

Favicon maybe a bit too reminiscent of Alexa.

------
Ravir
very nice interface. thanks for adding #cricket. :)

------
c00p3r
Eye candy sells, especially for toys. iPhone is an icon because of an eye
candy, visual effects and primitiveness - the stuff for masses.

This is really very good toy - just sit and watch and sometimes read, but not
much (140 chars of very simple language) - that is exactly what a people wants
from time waster.

------
ilyak
Of course it doesn't work in my Konqueror :)

------
kwamenum86
uuuh...guys? I think Bing might be better than Google....what do I do?

