

Show HN: My first coding project ever (unnamed) - schnabler

HN, I would appreciate some feedback on my first coding project ever. It's a visual instant search for iTunes (using Apple's API) I consider it MVP at this point, some features are still missing. I've tested the site in Safari, IE, and Firefox, and it seems to work in all of them.<p>http://38069.vs.webtropia.com/tester/test/ (not too fancy of a URL)<p>My background is nowhere near coding or designing (English major in the making, quite sure my code shows) and I only knew some basic PHP going into this last week, so don't be too harsh.<p>Why this idea? I strongly believe visual search will be something to look at in the future.<p>Thanks for your feedback!
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diiq
Hey, neat! My biggest frustration is with your use of autocomplete. It will
NOT LET me search for anything that the autocomplete doesn't recognize. Try
searching for "feet of steel" --- there is no way to see what (probably
bizarre) results that search would return, because it's unavoidably corrected
to "Stevie Wonder" (who is interesting, but not very much like the phrase
"feet of steel").

For a first go, it's fantastic. Keep it up.

EDIT:

Ah, now I see that I must not press enter, and then I can see the desired
results. That's pretty counter-intuitive. It also shows that there _are_
results for "feet of steel", and they make more sense than "Stevie Wonder".
I'd let the user _choose_ to accept the autocomplete, rather than forcing it
upon them.

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schnabler
agreed. for now, autocomplete only supports artists. or well, is supposed to
support artists. no songs, no movies, no shows. that's something i need to fix
later.

thanks for the feedback!

answer to your edit: the ajax is supposed to grab the first suggestion and
start searching for it while you type. this is a bit buggy though.

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autalpha
It's neat. I do recommend you make some rules about when to fire off the ajax
request. On every keypress/keyup/focus is a bit much because you're making
necessary requests even if the value didn't change. Maybe make a cache that
remembers the last search term.

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simonista
Great job, I think it looks really good as an MVP. Keep tweaking things, and
keep learning!

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schnabler
(project offline for now, link will 404 - sorry)

