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Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

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Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#11

Post by neoveller »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #6
neoveller wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there). The problem: paperback/print always…

Scrolling is severely buggy in Chrome (20.0.1132.57 on OS X) and partially buggy in Firefox (13.0). I did some screen captures. #1 ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/bczmu8kjfhn6ymr/bug1.mov ): Scrolling is actually faster in the upward direction than the downward direction. In this video, I continuously move my fingers on my trackpad up 1cm and down 2cm. You would expect the same movement to scroll equivalent distances, bu…

I'm a little baffled by this report, but I don't at all suspect it's inaccurate. I'm on the same version of Chrome on OSX on a macbook air (where I developed the custom scrollbar). Programmatically, I'm using the "scroll wheel"'s delta increment to determine the distance to scroll--the same amount in both directions. If anyone with relevant experience developing JS interaction with the scroll wheel has any hints or related knowledge, I'd love to hear it.

Thanks for the thorough feedback and videos. Looking forward to making the scroll bar perfect!

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#12

Post by lucidusvenerat »

pfraze wrote: post #9
neoveller wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there). The problem: paperback/print always…

Looks good. The "heart" on paragraphs is cool -- now just make it so you can sort by hearts for a quick view of highlights. You could then jump to a selected paragraph in the correct ordering, if you want to read more of the context.

I second this. Being able to pick out the most hearted segments across an entire chapter, even the entire book, would make it easy to skim chapters. I could look at the top snippets, see if they're compelling, and then commit to reading an entire chapter based on that impression.

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#13

Post by tmpaccount »

neoveller wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there). The problem: paperback/print always…

Hi Michael. Congratulations on building a very good product. It's probably the best web-based e-reader I've seen, apart from the 'social' bits. No doubt the great majority of your users like them, but they're a useless annoyance to me. If you could add an option in the user preferences to suppress all the social stuff, you'd have me as a user right away.

A small note: the scrolling code seems to break mouse-gesture history navigation in Chrome 20.0.1132.57 on OS X - my attempt to go back just scrolled the page up...

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#14

Post by alainbryden »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #6
neoveller wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there). The problem: paperback/print always…

Scrolling is severely buggy in Chrome (20.0.1132.57 on OS X) and partially buggy in Firefox (13.0). I did some screen captures. #1 ( https://www.dropbox.com/s/bczmu8kjfhn6ymr/bug1.mov ): Scrolling is actually faster in the upward direction than the downward direction. In this video, I continuously move my fingers on my trackpad up 1cm and down 2cm. You would expect the same movement to scroll equivalent distances, bu…

I can confirm this. My scroll wheel is very easy to move one increment at a time, and repeatedly moving down one then up one increment results in text moving upwards about 4 lines per cycle. When testing on this site: http://www.javascriptkit.com/javatutors/onmousewheel.shtml I can confirm that scrolling up and down provide a delta of 1200 and -1200 respectively, the way it's being handled on your app must not be even.

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#15

Post by dinkumthinkum »

The most overrated writer in the history computing. It always made me scratch my head why Joel Spolsky, who, say what you want, but I think is a very legitimate writer said so many praises for Atwood's writing. But Spolsky also said Yegge wrote beautifully, which I cannot fathom; it is definitely a different standard for writing than the rest of the world. There's more to writing than using correct grammar, but in the standard of programming blog writing I guess that's amazing. :) Really, I'd rather have wonky grammar and good content on programming blogs than just a series of pictures and backlinks with ideas that make no sense.

That being said, I was not familiar with hyperink at all but it is actually a very pleasant reading experience (it was just the actual words that upset/annoyed me :) )

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#16

Post by codinghorror »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #15

The most overrated writer in the history computing. It always made me scratch my head why Joel Spolsky, who, say what you want, but I think is a very legitimate writer said so many praises for Atwood's writing. But Spolsky also said Yegge wrote beautifully, which I cannot fathom; it is definitely a different standard for writing than the rest of the world. There's more to writing than using correct grammar, but in th…

I find that the best way to handle things I don't enjoy is to avoid them. Perhaps try that in the future as a strategy?

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#17

Post by jennyma »

lucidusvenerat wrote: post #12
pfraze wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks good. The "heart" on paragraphs is cool -- now just make it so you can sort by hearts for a quick view of highlights. You could then jump to a selected paragraph in the correct ordering, if you want to read more of the context.

I second this. Being able to pick out the most hearted segments across an entire chapter, even the entire book, would make it easy to skim chapters. I could look at the top snippets, see if they're compelling, and then commit to reading an entire chapter based on that impression.

Agreed! And the best part is being able to discuss specific parts of a book.

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#18

Post by adamzochowski »

neoveller wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there). The problem: paperback/print always…

Hi Michael.

The scroll is different from OS Scroll. It is much slower, moving at a pixel per scroll wheel event. Also [space] doesn't do page down. Running Chromium 18.0.1025.168 (Developer Build 134367 Linux) Ubuntu 12.04, with smooth scrolling enabled (in about:flags )

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#19

Post by pfraze »

neoveller wrote: post #10
pfraze wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks good. The "heart" on paragraphs is cool -- now just make it so you can sort by hearts for a quick view of highlights. You could then jump to a selected paragraph in the correct ordering, if you want to read more of the context.

That's actually some really kickass feedback that we now have no choice but to implement! Thanks pfraze!

Cool, look forward to seeing it in action

Re: Show HN: Jeff Atwood's "Effective Programming" on Hyperink's new Crowd Reader

#20

Post by neoveller »

adamzochowski wrote: post #18
neoveller wrote: post #2

Hey everyone, I'm Michael, a product engineer at Hyperink. Over the past month or so, I've been developing a rich, social reading experience for our content, freeing us from the stranglehold of MOBI and EPUB file formats. Today, Jeff Atwood generously granted us permission to release half of his book completely free on this Crowd Reader (paid customers get to see all of it there). The problem: paperback/print always…

Hi Michael. The scroll is different from OS Scroll. It is much slower, moving at a pixel per scroll wheel event. Also [space] doesn't do page down. Running Chromium 18.0.1025.168 (Developer Build 134367 Linux) Ubuntu 12.04, with smooth scrolling enabled (in about:flags )

Good call, and easy enough. Added spacebar support live, and the scroll should be twice as fast as previous. Let me know if that's more livable. Thanks!
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