

Show HN: Blanqd – Gamifying the News - bayonetz
http://www.blanqd.com/

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valarauca1
Installed the App. Honestly love it, its a fun game :)

The color scheme is almost too vibrant. It feels like it should be slightly
toned down/masked a touch. I feel like I'm stuck in the barbie toy isle if
anyone remembers physical toy stores from the 90's.

The UI is very nice and clean other then the color complaint. The fact that
there are tips also seems slightly amiss. I found myself annoyed by the tips
since I could just pick up and run with the app. But I understand why they are
there.

The fact the name is dead center and always un-click-able seems to be a waste.
Put all the icons in a single bar at the top or bottom (piggy bank, x, stats,
etc.) Saves more screen real estate.

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bayonetz
Thanks for checking it out. Good points you make and I'll add 'em to the
queue. This has been a good exercise in shipping something despite my tendency
to want to tweak it endlessly before launch. Yes, the color scheme is
risky...I guess I just went for it! I get bored with many of the color themes
I see out there, especially for news related apps.

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bayonetz
Author here. Would love to get some feedback.

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wrangular
This if sort of cool. I am guessing you are generating the questions via some
kind of smart substitution?

One thing that would be good is a way to skip or dismiss the tutorial pop-ups
tips you get when you first open the app. I didn't need them; it was pretty
obvious what to do.

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bayonetz
Correct. Hand creating the questions would be quite a task! I'll have to wait
until the investment comes through...that's how QuizUp works I believe, they
unscalably pay people to curate the questions. Probably why they are trying to
go the crowd sourcing route now as paid minions can't create them fast enough.

About the tutorials, in user testing there was always something any given
person couldn't figure out without the tutorials. However, when I added the
tutorials with an option to skip, Nobody would bother to read them. I'll need
more time to make it perfectly intuitive - in the meantime I wanted to ship so
forced tutorial is what I went with. Thoughts on that?

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Mandatum
Unavailable outside of the US? Am in NZ..

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bayonetz
It should be available. My dev phones are U.S. based and I didn't know how to
test/verify it running on a non U.S phone. Any ideas out there?

