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Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

dailydo.it

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Re: Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

#31

Post by bdunn »

This is great! I hope you're planning on at least charging for the "Team" feature.

Project management / todos / time tracking / and so on are often chided as being oversaturated markets. The fact is: lots and lots of people need these things, they can help increase people's income and happiness, and there's no "right" way to do it. Todo list apps are one of those arena's that can do very well financially if you target the right kind of user.

(Even if this really never makes you any money, and considering this is what you've been able to do without much real world experience, you will have no issue finding work.)

Re: Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

#32

Post by eevilspock »

michelle_ wrote: post #21
blatherard wrote: post #13

One thing that confused me was the "Team" link at the top. Having it placed between "Philosophy" and "Contact" made me expect that it was going to be a page about the people that made the site, not a signup page about a future featureset. Anyway, you might want to make the "team" thing stand out in a different way, if you're hoping to capture people interested in group features.

Hah, I hadn't thought of that. I agree though, it needs to be much more obvious if I'm expecting people to actually find it! I'll play around with it, thanks :)

Try "TeamDoIt"

Re: Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

#36

Post by sparknlaunch12 »

michelle_ wrote: post #10
sparknlaunch12 wrote: post #4

Like the design. Looks good for first web app. Do you mind sharing some background? How did you come up with product idea? What technologies did you use? What are your planned next steps for app?

Thanks! The design started as a themeforest template, but at this point it has been very heavily modified. I used PHP and MySQL for the backend, and jQuery for the UI interaction. I'm a chemistry major spending the summer learning to code, so this is all a learning experience. It's only been about 3 weeks so I'm happy to have gotten something functional out of it. I'm really hoping to get some good feedback from HN.…

Wow - really impressive. Thanks for sharing. Good luck with the future development.

How did you code the PHP and MySQL? Was this straight into notepad or did you use a template/tool?

Like others, really interested how you picked up the skills so quickly.

Re: Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

#38

Post by ryangilbert »

blatherard wrote: post #13

One thing that confused me was the "Team" link at the top. Having it placed between "Philosophy" and "Contact" made me expect that it was going to be a page about the people that made the site, not a signup page about a future featureset. Anyway, you might want to make the "team" thing stand out in a different way, if you're hoping to capture people interested in group features.

Agreed - I clicked on it hoping to learn more about who made the app.

Re: Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

#39

Post by michelle_ »

ZanderEarth32 wrote: post #30

So, going from zero programming knowledge or experience to this in 3 weeks? If that is the case, it's pretty amazing. I would never have pegged this as a 'first app'. Great job.

Not quite zero. This past semester I took a course in MATLAB which was fairly unrelated, but definitely helped me get comfortable with programming a real project (we did bridge design in the course). I also live with a software developer who helped bail me out from time to time. DailyDo.it was started on April 29th, and I worked long days since then to get it up to what you see now. During the weekend before that I made http://html5helicopter.com to get familiar with JS. I've played around with HTML and CSS before, but always found the process frustrating and overwhelming when trying to make a whole website from scratch; this time I started with a micro-framework that helped me focus on the actual app.

As for anyone who was in my position (limited coding knowledge and not a pro-designer) I would definitely recommend starting from a cheap themeforest design and building up on that. Also, start small and focus. The idea of DailyDo.it was actually conceived last year, but I tried to do way too much with it, and ultimately it amounted to nothing of value. Just piles of bad designs and funky, non-functioning UI, never mind getting to code. This summer I started from scratch (which cleared my mind up), plus I was able to focus on it full-time, and everything just kind of clicked.

I think I just used the word "focus" three times in this post. That's the key. :)

Re: Show HN: My first web app, DailyDo.it

#40

Post by robwgibbons »

Great job. You've made a great app here :)

Only one suggestion for usability -- autofocus the "Add a task" input on page load, so the user can begin typing without an extra click upon arrival (think Google.) I think this convention works well with any app which expects text input as its immediate feature

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