

HN on StoryLine – historic news browser - antulik
http://www.storyline.im/

======
antulik
StoryLine is my pet project. If you have any questions I'm happy to answer
them. It's still in early stages and I'm keen to hear your feedback.

~~~
bajsejohannes
Cool project.

For the "tutorial", I read through maybe the first 3 boxes, then got tired and
clicked until I could explore it myself. I bet it's the same for most users
(feel free to measure to get real data). If you can, defer teaching to
mouseovers and other hints in the UI.

~~~
bhaile
Same here. Another option is to offer an option to end/cancel the tutorial
next to the "Next" button.

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ekianjo
Pretty nice. I had a similar idea a while ago but not using "spheres", and
this works well, well done.

UI wise, the lines crossing each other when you select a sphere is not very
elegant. WHy dont you make the news you select appear on the left, while
keeping the suggested news on the right ? That would look so much better, and
be less confusing for the user.

And the tutorial was a bit too long. I would rather have in-line help than a
mandatory tutorial.

one more thing, there is little to no value of providing a pre-visualisation
of the web page. It would be so much more useful to provide the first few
lines of the articles. There are libraries to scrap articles that do that very
well.

~~~
antulik
I like the idea of showing selected items on the left, will need to think how
it would work with narrow 1024px browsers. Perhaps selected news could float
on top of the graph.

and I agree article preview or abstract would be definitely more useful, will
look into it. Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
ekianjo
You're welcome. I may have more suggestions about overall design. Let me know
if you want to reconnect offline.

~~~
antulik
that would be great, I still don't have any designers involved in the project
so the current version is very simplistic, pretty much the best I could do.

you can find me on twitter @antulik

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seferphier
Instead of clicking each individual bubble, I wish there was a line which u
can drag on top that will show the articles on the right as it passes the
bubbles

~~~
antulik
that's a good idea, probably will do it in the nearest future. Thanks for the
feedback

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frankacter
Great Job. Some questions, in no particular order:

1\. What was your inspiration for the project?

2\. You mentioned it was your pet project, how long did it take to develop
once you got started?

3\. What is the tech stack it is built on?

4\. How much data do you have in it now that it is visualizing from, and can
you talk about the process of how it determines what to display, refreshes
view, etc.

5\. I notice that there is a "login" option, and the ability for users to
create "calendars". Can you give a brief summary / pitch of where you would
like to see this go?

6\. What is your favorite flavor of cupcake?

~~~
antulik
I'll answer only the first and the last questions (:

Inspiration
[http://s23.photobucket.com/user/NRGrush/media/ZX-10R%20Custo...](http://s23.photobucket.com/user/NRGrush/media/ZX-10R%20Custom%20Seats/green-
lights-background-1.jpg.html)

not sure about cupcakes, but blueberry muffins would be my choice, I just
assume you are a cupcake manufacturer and perform customer analysis.

As for the rest I should probably write a small blog post to sum up all of
that. In short server is ruby on rails, client is mostly emberjs + d3js. I
also post updates on StoryLine blog, so check it out, it should give you an
idea on progress of things.
[http://blog.storyline.im/](http://blog.storyline.im/)

~~~
frankacter
Thanks for the reply, despite your choice of muffin over cupcake ;-)

Looking forward to following the storyline progress.

~~~
karczoh
"Some people like cupcakes better. I,for one, care less for them."

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ArekDymalski
Very nice project. Are you planning to add any other sites?

~~~
antulik
Yes, is there any sites you would like to see there first?

I've started with Google Calendar, then Twitter, then Reddit and now
HackerNews. HackerNews so far is the best dataset to start with. Reddit
integration is half done, but still not sure on subreddits because there are
too many of them.

~~~
ArekDymalski
I was thinking about Reddit - because it's so big that I never find enough
motivation to browse it. Your interface is much more pleasant and encouraging
so I'll be looking forward to try Storyline with Reddit. Thanks!

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dantheman
It doesn't appear that you can sign up?

~~~
antulik
not at the moment, I should probably be more explicit about that. I removed
registration to simplify the process for new visitors. And you still can keep
track of news you've read.

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gprasant
this needs to work with the leap. Cool idea.

