

Show HN: I finally relased my first product - vColin

So, after many years of kicking about little apps and not putting the full effort in, I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it.<p>Very much inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I present Griddol (http://www.griddol.com) a tool to create and play word searches. Intended mainly for teachers, but encouraging those who like a word search too.<p>This been churning around in my head for over a year in various forms, and I used the concept to help learn CoffeeScript, CouchDB and node.js, so even if the product itself is a failure, the learning process has been valuable.<p>I'll be the first to admit that it's somewhat(!) unpolished and needs a lot of work and content, but it's out there now.<p>I appreciate any comments you might have.
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patio11
Congratulations. I strongly suggest a design which visually suggests what to
click on. At the moment everything looks buttonesque and virtually nothing
leads to you being happy if I click it.

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vColin
Noted. At the moment I am just happy if anyone even visits the page though.
But I realise that there is no clear direction to the new visitor. Another
thing to add to the never-ending list.

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petervandijck
You need to prioritize that never-ending list. Visitors having a bad
experience should be somewhere at the top of things to fix. Adding feature X
and Y should probably be somewhere at the bottom.

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gobr
It's cool, but needs a lot of design, it's very raw yet.

One other thing, the program should not allow me to click anywhere, like, if I
start to make a word in horizontal and them click 4 columns on the vertical he
shoul not compute that, or something like this... (I don't know if you can
understand this without some screenshot)

polish, polish and polish more. :D

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vColin
I think I know exactly what you mean - restrict the highlighted letters to be
in a single direction.

Something I was considering was changing the selection mechanics so that you
click at the first letter and then drag to the final letter before releasing.
I think that would be more intuitive.

Yes, I agree it's raw, almost embarrassingly so. Still, release early and
iterate!

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cambriar
Great job getting on with it. I look forward to seeing if/how you modify your
design and implementation.

As I was browsing through your JS code to figure out how you end up
positioning the words (vertical, horizontal or diagonal), I found the
"naughtyWords" list to be hilarious. It was immediately clear to me that the
developer inhabits the UK.

Congratulations on your success!

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vColin
Thanks for the encouragement!

That actually reminds me - that stuff shouldn't even be in the client-code.
And even if it should be there, methinks it ought to be scrambled somehow :)

Your deductions are indeed correct - I am in the UK - Cambridge in fact.

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gspyrou
First of all congratulations ! Some feedback : on IE9 at the registration page
the textboxes appear emtry (no username,password,confirm passwork text) , a
visitor would probably hit the back button !

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vColin
Thanks for pointing that out - my IE testing has been sporadic at best! I'll
definitely take a look at that.

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gspyrou
Also , as patio11 mentioned a better visual design would be helpful for your
site. You may find great templates for a low price at
<http://themeforest.net/>

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iambot
clickable: <http://www.griddol.com>

