

Show HN: Stock Bubbles app, advices? - antirez

A few weeks ago I got an idea for a more interesting interface to check the
stock market. The huge list of symbols in a table view that are either green
or red (the same red and green whatever the gain is 0.1% or 10%) is not really
cool for fast scanning, nor fun to use.<p>Since I happen to be involved with an iPhone and iPad devleopment company here
in Sicily since a few years, as share holder and "advisor", I suggested the
idea to this friends of mine. As there was no really development bandwidth to
do things like this, as they mostly work for other companies creating
applications for the editorial market, I suggested to do this in the spare
time, and check how this could work as an alternative to just providing 
services to other companies.<p>So one of the developers, and my girlfriend that is the graphic designer in
the company, started working at this, and after just a few days the app was
ready.<p>http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stock-bubbles/id417945202?mt=8&#38;ls=1<p>This guys read hacker news every day (this was one of my first advices), but never participate with actual comments. I think it's a shame that they don'ttry to directly sell things on the app store most of the times, so please can you provide some suggestion to this guys? What's ok and what's wrong with Stock Bubbles, is it too much a small market to create a viable business model? Does it makes sense to create such side projects with just a few days of work of a few poeple, or it's better to invest months developing an application even if it could not be a success at all? (while doing work for customers will pay less but will pay for sure).<p>Thanks for any feedback, the developer of the app is 'artix' here and will reply to all your questions. The app is free, but with an optional in-app purcahse to unblock the configuration screen, but there is no need to buy it to check how it works and to provide useful suggestions of course.
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tdok
It is interesting, but (at least to me) it does not seem to add any benefit.
It basically is a list of stocks (I assume a watch list) sorted by % change
which happens to be shown in colored bubbles. At first I thought that the size
of the bubbles will play in help showing the data, allowing the trader to
analyze the watch list or holdings, but it doesn't. Sorry man. It's
interesting, but not beneficial to the average traders. Keep going at it
though.

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antirez
Since I'm the one proposing this visualization, this is the reasoning:
basically the idea is that you can check how the market is going in very
little time. I guess the value is much more for casual users interested in the
stock market then for traders that will study every single stock with greater
detail.

So indeed there is no real added value, but just a faster to read UI I hope.
Btw I also concur that the developers should invest more time in providing
also some added value that is not just an UI, but I guess this will hardly be
a metter of a few days of efforts. Btw I must admit my "benchmark" was the
iPhone built-in app that was what I used before.

Thanks for the feedback!

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earle
Here's something similiar I did a couple years back in Raphael:

<http://80concepts.com/graph>

~~~
artix
Cool! We could have done something similar for our website as a marketing
idea!

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skilesare
Here is our tech(presented at nVidia's ECS):
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGrXPTShuqM>

Getting it to work on iPad/iPhone is tough due to the limited memory. We're
hoping that some of the newer tablets give developers more memory to work
with.

More at: <http://www.aqumin.com>

