

Ask HN: Review my app: Hacker Weekend - stagas

Here's the URL: http://hwknd.com<p>It tracks tweets for new github.com repositories created this week, and posts them in a nice searchable list. It also displays languages used, collaborators and you can view readmes inline by clicking on the project's void.<p>There's also a search landing page for bookmarking purposes at: http://hwknd.com/search<p>Searching is word separated OR, and also indexes readmes and language names.<p>And a Language Wars chart (total lines of code this week): http://hwknd.com/languagewars<p>Also, if you sit on the home page, it will automatically inform you for any changes and display a (!) in the title, and then auto-refresh on window/tab focus.<p>It is written in node.js and runs completely stand-alone, with only a few modules dependencies (no extra processes).<p>Source code is at: http://github.com/stagas/hwknd.com (might be a bit behind in features) and is MIT licenced so you can fork it or clone it and run your own version.<p>I apologize for double posting this earlier this week, but there have been so many additions and features since then (it was just a blank page back then, all of the above was missing) that I felt I should repost: http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=1955488<p>Feedback and suggestions are welcome.
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bigohms
Positives:

\- Dig the concept overall, I need a way to track new additions to Git.

\- It's fast

\- Adds more items as I scroll down, however it would be great to know when
I've gotten to ones I've already read.

Some suggestions: \- RSS?

\- The dropdown readme functionality is awkward and not intuitive. Confusion
as to where the hit area is and the expected interaction/net effort result.

\- Simplify and ease opportunities to engage, add the add a repo to the
homepage, maybe sidebar it.

\- Repos should open up to new window?

\- Allow someone to create a cart of things to research or auto-watch items
without clicking through to each repo.

\- Spend a little more time on the UI. Alternating row colors, maybe reduce
the contrast of a white background against the creme background data set.

\- The most significant data point on the page is the descriptions of what
each package is, not the package name. I'd consider making that the title
line.

~~~
stagas
First of all, thanks for taking the time to review. Your observations are
really helpful.

I should add a thicker border separating pages. Also to notice is that
infinite scroll is entirely client-side, so no Javascript enabled browsers
will just get the pagination as normally.

RSS, yeah, it needs one.

The dropdown moving into view is an experiment, and I'm just testing to see
how it goes. My thinking was to scroll the readme into view, and scroll up a
bit more to put the next element right under the mouse pointer. So if you try
clicking somewhere below the middle of the screen (depending on the size of
your screen), you can browse the entire list without using mousewheel or
moving your mouse from position, and every readme will scroll to the position
you are looking. This is especially helpful if you do a search for something
and want to view all of this week's items. But if it turns out to be confusing
I'll remove it.

Links with target _new and _blank isn't something I like too much, so I leave
it to user choice if they want to middle click or normal click, which is what
they're used to already.

The cart idea is interesting, and has some potential. I think it should be
made to watch the repo on your account on github, so it'll probably require
you to login with your github credentials. Also something for the future as
I'm not ready to do logins yet.

The UI needs work.

You're probably right about the description as title I'll try that.

~~~
stagas
Update: I tried description on top and didn't look as good. Maybe our mind
isn't used of thinking so big paragraphs as titles and it was strange. If
descriptions where short it would make sense, but now it's just random text
which isn't easy on the eyes.

Also tried removing the autoscroll, and it wasn't as good either. The reason
is I catch mousewheel over readmes because it was annoying when scrolling
through a readme, to have the page scrolling when it ended. So now, if there
was no scrolling to the next element, you wouldn't be able to scroll down
unless you moved your mouse away from the readme. I hope that makes sense.

------
unignorant
clickable: <http://hwknd.com>

