

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

I came from a PHP background, and I've decided to jump ship to rails.<p>https://www.bucketlistly.com is the result of 2 months of learning by doing.<p>What do you think of the app? Would love to hear all of your feedback.<p>Feel free to sign up for beta, I'll send an invite to all of you.
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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>

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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. :)

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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. :)

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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.

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peachananr
Thanks for the suggestion mate. Really appreciate it. :) I might open up
registration very soon.

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tectonic
<https://www.bucketlistly.com>

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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?

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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.

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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.

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runjake
I wish I had even 10% the design talent you (or whoever did the site design)
had.

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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. :)

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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!

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peachananr
Just switched to Cloudfront. It's running extremely fast! Thanks for the
suggestion mate. :)

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craze3
What benefits have you noticed from coding this in rails instead of PHP? Does
it run faster or more efficiently?

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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.

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japhyr
Do you mind sharing a bit more about cost? Heroku has a free tier; has the
project already outgrown that?

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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.

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meta8609
How are you implementing the real-time refresh?

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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.

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danicted
just tested if there is any restrictions in forms but sounds there is none.

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geekam
Great design!

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peachananr
Thanks! I'm quite happy about the design as well. Trying to create a unique
personality with skeuomorphism. :)

