30 Days Review from Concept to Beta – SnapReplay.com
It’s been a long road of late nights, early mornings, and quite a bit of learning and coding. When I came up with the idea, I selected node.js and socket.io to develop the project. Shortly thereafter, I started working on the Android App, testing my mettle with Java, a language I hadn’t used in 9+ years. Seventeen days after the concept, we had our first test, resulting in an archive of Roger Waters ‘The Wall’.
The Android app was refined from a usability standpoint, the site UX lagging behind the infrastructure and databases being built to support the site, but, always moving forward, pushing 133 commits, sometimes massive rewrites to change functionality to work much differently than originally anticipated. Iteration sometimes led to massive backend changes while maintaining the site functioning and live as more people poked and prodded and were generally impressed with the idea.
Reminding myself that this is an app that was built ‘in my spare time’, I’m still somewhat amused that 1k+ lines of Javascript, 1.2k+ lines of Java, 100+ lines of PHP and a few dozen lines of Python were written and I have a workable site. I have started to write some Objective C, but, nothing more than a few tests and demo scripts to dive into writing the IPhone app.
With that said, I’m looking for people to beta test the Android App and give feedback. Extra Bonus points if you’re willing to go to a concert or event and use the app. Even more bonus points if you have the ability to recruit a second (or third) person to take pictures at the same concert. If you have an IPhone and are willing to Beta Test, get in contact with me. I don’t have that app completed, but, it is based very heavily on the Android App’s flow as we have spent a lot of time working out the interface. It is ugly, but, we believe it flows well and is very usable. Still have a minor lag bug that appears to be related to JSON parsing.
I’m still happy with Node.js and socket.io. There are some things I will probably change with expressjs which I might handle with my own middleware, or, might do a fork/pull as it is functionality others may find valuable. I’ve reworked a lot of functionality to help the User Experience and have gotten a lot of good feedback.
I’m unsure whether I would write it entirely in node.js again, but, it was still a great learning experience. I might rewrite it later, but, for now, it seems to do just fine.
So, if you can help me out and try the app or find a few of your friends to help out, it would be appreciated.
Thank you.
Tags: snapreplay