basil's comments

basil | 5 years ago | on: Vimflowy

Some of the most complete Vim keybindings I've experienced in something that isn't Vim.

I love that visual character/line/block selection works. It's the first thing I test in any kind of Vim emulation.

basil | 12 years ago | on: anam.io: Free unlimited GitHub backup

GitHub isn't a 'single point of failure' due to the distributed nature of Git. I.e. it's pretty easy to push your codebase to another server anytime you want.

If this service backs up submodules for 3rd party dependancies this might be useful but as it stands the landing page doesn't give any further information. I don't feel incentivised to login with GitHub OAuth.

basil | 12 years ago | on: Marketing beats quality

Sorry to hear about this, but don't let it dishearten you from making games and open sourcing them.

Someone stealing your code doesn't take away from the fact that you accomplished your goal of making a complete game. And from what you just wrote - that was your intention.

Regarding your blog title, I'd add 'timing' as well as 'marketing'. Titles of both submissions were remarkably similar ("Flappy Bird in HTML5" vs "Flappy Birdy html5 clone created using the Phaser framework"). Maybe the timing of your submission was off.

Also you can now state that you're the original creator of all the HTML5 Flappy Bird clones that have been popping up recently.

basil | 12 years ago | on: Scaling Asana.com

Well you'd be surprised. I've also tried to solve this problem.

You can create your own lists inside of Bee which filter issues based on your own rules (http://neat.io/bee/docs/smart-lists.html). It's helpful because you just define the rules one-time and then flick to it whenever you need to.

Bee also has a menubar helper which tracks your short-term tasks and queues up your next issue so you always know what you're working on (http://neat.io/bee/docs/the-short-list.html).

Also you can add your own Notes list which is just a series of text files (easily synced via Dropbox) if you want to track your own local tasks.

I'm constantly iterating based on user feedback so if you have time, please let me know how it works out for you :)

basil | 12 years ago | on: Scaling Asana.com

I used to be in that situation which is why I wrote Bee (http://neat.io/bee/). Its a Mac client for JIRA (amongst other services) and makes JIRA much more pleasant to use.

JIRA's UI tends to be geared towards project management types. I wanted to bring the focus back onto the engineer.

basil | 12 years ago | on: Stay on top of Github pull requests with Trailer.app

This is awesome, well done!

I just wanted to chime in and say I like your approach of just focusing on pull requests. There's another app I know of that just focuses on creating issues (http://issuepostapp.com).

I happen to be the author of another GitHub Issues client (http://neat.io/bee/github-issues-client.html) which is aimed at the other end of the spectrum: to be full-featured.

Great to see all these different approaches for different workflows.

basil | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you launch your product?

I initially launched the site promoting my app as just 1 page. In hindsight knowing what I know now that was ludicrous. (You need more pages, more content and more targeted content.) I went into it here: http://neat.io/blog/the-bee-website-redesign.html

I still don't really understand SEO and my site is still not ranking for the keywords I want but I'm trying to learn.

I did get one-off semi-professional help from experts that emailed me as a result of my blog post blowing up on HN but end of the day, you're going to have to dig deep and learn about it yourself. This is frustrating because looking for quality content about SEO is ridiculous. Everything out there is so dubious and I don't know what is credible and what isn't.

Today for instance I just got a tip about content placement and how it can be effective for SEO. I Googled around and found this list: http://www.mywebschool.com/blog/seo/seo-tips-for-keyword-pla... so I'm going to try and apply it later tonight. No idea if it will work or if its a waste of time or if the tips in there are good...

--

Oh and another thing I forgot to mention is that a lot of people asked me to make a video showcasing the app because they wanted to watch something rather than scroll through a list of features. This was a good idea, no idea if its helped with people downloading the trial but I get good feedback on the video and at least it educates people about what my app does. Video blog post here: http://neat.io/blog/creating-the-bee-video.html

basil | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: How did you launch your product?

I'm in the situation you describe right now. I blogged about it a couple months ago: http://neat.io/blog/diary-of-a-programmer-with-no-clue-about.... The resulting HN discussion has a lot of good tips: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686290

My launch didn't go 'well' to the standards that I constantly see on HN. I got < 10 users and a lot of those were existing beta testers.

Now I'm 2 months in and I have been getting a fairly consistent number of new users each day, however its dropped in the past couple of weeks (I'm blaming the holiday season).

Here's what I've learnt so far:

- SEO is very important for discovery

- Keep your product evolving to fit the needs of your current users

- Keep current users happy

- Be ultra responsive to support enquiries - this is key to keeping happy users

- Adjust your pricing model based on feedback

- Get your site linked to on other sites even if seemingly unrelated - I get a bit of traffic from a design site that has my site in a list of 'beautiful, flat landing pages'

It would have been nice to get a whole slew of users on day 1 but realistically this doesn't happen unless you have an existing captive audience. It does dampen the expected meritocracy that comes with developing your own product.

basil | 12 years ago | on: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

Yes.

I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. I also wanted quick access to all my tasks, past and present without going through a slower web UI.

Also the app comes in handy when I need to jot down a quick note or remember something.

Maybe I should incorporate some of that ^ on the site.

basil | 12 years ago

Thanks, there shouldn't be a price difference between the FastSpring store and the MAS. The FastSpring store is for people who want to make volume purchases. Or people who want a faster update track rather than waiting for the MAS approval times.

basil | 12 years ago | on: Ask HN: What would you do to improve this landing page?

I would drop the blurred image background. It adds too much visual noise and makes it hard to scan the page to see what the app is about.

The black text is too small and not contrasty enough so I don't even feel like reading it.

The primary focus is the Facebook button but is that what you want? Don't you want people to download the app above all else? I think the primary focus be given to the App Store button which means it should be given more weight and prominence on the page.

basil | 13 years ago | on: Steam for Linux Beta is now open to the public

I've seen this quite a bit recently. It's a hack but it's a quick way to get a public-facing issue tracker out there.

Are there any better solutions for getting a tracker set up easily where non-contributors can raise bugs and discuss feature requests?

basil | 13 years ago | on: The eero programming language

The examples struck me as looking a lot like Go and I found a few similarities:

- Local type inferencing (i := 100) is identical.

- No parentheses for control structures.

- Lack of semicolons.

- Ranges in array enumeration (albeit with different syntax).

basil | 14 years ago | on: Vector based UI design tool that generates ObjC

Really cool. This reminds me of Bret Victor's talk where he stresses the importance of seeing the effect of your code immediately (http://vimeo.com/36579366).

It's not clear from the description but it would be great if it could immediately render whatever Core Graphics code I was writing, as I was writing it, much like this in-development tool (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JupqhcT4ONY) which popped up in my Twitter stream a couple days ago.

page 1