Show HN: My first coding project ever (unnamed)

#1

Post by schnabler » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 2:43 AM UTC

HN, I would appreciate some feedback on my first coding project ever. It's a visual instant search for iTunes (using Apple's API) I consider it MVP at this point, some features are still missing. I've tested the site in Safari, IE, and Firefox, and it seems to work in all of them.

http://38069.vs.webtropia.com/tester/test/ (not too fancy of a URL)

My background is nowhere near coding or designing (English major in the making, quite sure my code shows) and I only knew some basic PHP going into this last week, so don't be too harsh.

Why this idea? I strongly believe visual search will be something to look at in the future.

Thanks for your feedback!

Re: Show HN: My first coding project ever (unnamed)

#2

Post by diiq » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 2:53 AM UTC

Hey, neat! My biggest frustration is with your use of autocomplete. It will NOT LET me search for anything that the autocomplete doesn't recognize. Try searching for "feet of steel" --- there is no way to see what (probably bizarre) results that search would return, because it's unavoidably corrected to "Stevie Wonder" (who is interesting, but not very much like the phrase "feet of steel").

For a first go, it's fantastic. Keep it up.

EDIT:

Ah, now I see that I must not press enter, and then I can see the desired results. That's pretty counter-intuitive. It also shows that there _are_ results for "feet of steel", and they make more sense than "Stevie Wonder". I'd let the user choose to accept the autocomplete, rather than forcing it upon them.

Re: Show HN: My first coding project ever (unnamed)

#3

Post by schnabler » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 2:56 AM UTC

diiq wrote: post #2

Hey, neat! My biggest frustration is with your use of autocomplete. It will NOT LET me search for anything that the autocomplete doesn't recognize. Try searching for "feet of steel" --- there is no way to see what (probably bizarre) results that search would return, because it's unavoidably corrected to "Stevie Wonder" (who is interesting, but not very much like the phrase "feet of steel"). For a first go, it's fanta…

agreed. for now, autocomplete only supports artists. or well, is supposed to support artists. no songs, no movies, no shows. that's something i need to fix later.

thanks for the feedback!

answer to your edit: the ajax is supposed to grab the first suggestion and start searching for it while you type. this is a bit buggy though.

Re: Show HN: My first coding project ever (unnamed)

#4

Post by simonista » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 3:51 AM UTC

Great job, I think it looks really good as an MVP. Keep tweaking things, and keep learning!

Re: Show HN: My first coding project ever (unnamed)

#5

Post by autalpha » Tue, Feb 15, 2011, 5:03 AM UTC

It's neat. I do recommend you make some rules about when to fire off the ajax request. On every keypress/keyup/focus is a bit much because you're making necessary requests even if the value didn't change. Maybe make a cache that remembers the last search term.

Re: Show HN: My first coding project ever (unnamed)

#6

Post by schnabler » Wed, Feb 16, 2011, 12:40 PM UTC

(project offline for now, link will 404 - sorry)