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Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

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21–30 of 98 posts

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#21
Pretty slick.

What advantages does this have over me hopping over to Yahoo Finance and plugging in a ticker?

Also, I get live news feeds in my trading platform for any security.

I know you've probably done competitive analysis, but here are some other sites that do pretty cool stuff too:

theflyonthewall.com (fastest news out there) stocktwits.com (twitter + stock mashup)

Good Luck.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#22
- Scrolling is too slow, - Page loads are too slow

If your going to target the investment banking community, you'll find we want our information fast. You'll notice the old stock tickers had symbols whizzing bye, not slowly scrolling.

If I detect even the slightest lag I'll go somewhere else, probably an rss reader.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#25
post #6

Overall a nice, simple interface. The scrolling, vertical, ticker-like lists tripped me up for a second, though. I thought the left-hand arrow, pointing to the left, would scroll the list in left, that it would kind of pull the list in that direction like a ticker.

The wrap-around scrolling made it unusable for me, but I'm assuming that will be fixed somehow. Looks great, and I'm going to forward it to some of my friends once the wrap-around is working.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#26
Scrolling is seriously broken. (ff3/OSX)

You display some articles, then I scrollwheel, and things go bezerk. I scrollwheel down and it jumps up and down like a kid with hyperactivity disorder. There's no scrollbar - I have no idea where I am in the list of stories. Trying to match up where I was with where I am now is pretty hard. You've put up/down/top/bottom buttons at the very top and called them "Navigate".

So you've reimplemented a scrollbar (Standard browser UI component), but very very badly.

Up and down keys don't scroll properly either. If I hold down a key, it should keep repeating. Pressing a key should scroll the amount I am used to. You seem to be scrolling by a lot, on keyup - not what people expect.

Sorry, but I just hate it when people reinvent something that already exists, is standard, and works. Especially when their implementation is completely unusable.

Why not just use a scrollbar like people expect?

Also when I click on an article to read it, I expect to click [back], to go back, instead of clicking on [return to the reader]. Once again, ignoring standard browser usability.

Also if you try to open an article link in a new window, or copy it to send to a friend etc, it breaks, and you land at the homepage (I assume you're using onclick etc). Another usability flaw.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#27
Incompatible Browser. As someone who is in your target audience (I work for a well-known Wall Street Firm), this seems to miss the point.

Also, it seems to me that you are going against Reuters, Bloomberg, finance.google, and finance.yahoo. What is your value added there?

Good Luck!

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#28
post #25
post #6

Overall a nice, simple interface. The scrolling, vertical, ticker-like lists tripped me up for a second, though. I thought the left-hand arrow, pointing to the left, would scroll the list in left, that it would kind of pull the list in that direction like a ticker.

The wrap-around scrolling made it unusable for me, but I'm assuming that will be fixed somehow. Looks great, and I'm going to forward it to some of my friends once the wrap-around is working.

There isn't anything wrong with the wrap-around. If you're at the top of the list you shouldn't scroll up, you should be scrolling down towards the bottom.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#29
post #24

Looks nice. The only thing I found is if you scroll up in the news list area it doesn't stop at today's news , it loops back to a couple days ago. Which is rather unintuitive.

As I said earlier, if you're at the top, you shouldn't scroll up, you should scroll down.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my webapp (Streetread)

#30
post #28
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wrap-around scrolling made it unusable for me, but I'm assuming that will be fixed somehow. Looks great, and I'm going to forward it to some of my friends once the wrap-around is working.

There isn't anything wrong with the wrap-around. If you're at the top of the list you shouldn't scroll up, you should be scrolling down towards the bottom.

Have you watched someone actually use your app? Here's how it went for me: start at the top, scroll down a few days, scroll back up to the top, somehow end up scrolled back weeks. It's arbitrary to loop after a few days -- if you could collect data going back to the beginning of each company's history, that might be more sensible.

I don't see any real-world analogue to going forward from the present and ending up several weeks in the past, and having to embrace a brand-new paradigm in order to use the interface is perhaps not what you need to do to your users.

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