I'd start with leaving the desktop metaphor on the desktop.<p>Double clicks, folders, dialog windows, etc. go against the web experience. Try to make the user interface more "webby" -- it will benefit everyone.
Hi freebsd_dude,<p>As a heads-up, let me tell you that I'm applying to YC with a similar concept under the name Theoryville. We envision a very different interface, but we haven't built a demo yet. I'd be happy to exchange ideas with you privately; I'm not difficult to track down.<p>Here are some specific criticisms: I don't like the interface's reliance on double-clicking. I don't like that datasets open in a new tab. I expect words that are bright colors to be clickable (for instance, the word "data" under each dataset's name). When I "open" a dataset, I don't expect to be taken directly to the analysis screen; I expect to learn more about the dataset. For the output to be useful, I really need to be able to save the table in some way. The linear fit line should be shown by default. Also, there seems to be no way to remove the fit line once you've added it.<p>All in all, I agree with Tomas's view that it should be more "webby." And that's a non-trivial problem to solve for something as complex as statistical analysis. Best of luck!<p>(Also, have you seen Swivel? They don't do much in the way of data analysis, but they have a great interface for doing data visualizations. Definitely check them out.)
Neat idea. But I wonder, what are you offering that excel doesn't? So far, the only tool I can see is
y vs x and thats not tough to do in excel. I'm not saying you aren't offering anything, but I don't know what it is.<p>For the interface, a few things I didn't like, but others can chime in.<p>1) When I click on "Basic Statistics" I see the tests there. Then, when I click on "Multivariate Statistics" the basic title bar drops down to the bottom. If I were trying to look for a test to use, I would want to scroll through each category. They way you have it makes that tough.<p>2) When I go to analyze a data set, how do I get back to the list of files? I figured it out (click on Data Management) but that should be easier to find.<p>Also, something that I think would be <i>very</i> cool would be to allow me to take data sets from different files. This would allow me to use your app as a storage for my data sets. I could organize files however made sense to me and then arbitrarily go there and look for correlations. "Oh, I wonder if there is a correlation between temperature and mortality. Lets take the weather file and the mortality file and check."
First, a meta-note -- if you want app reviews, don't mention that they're YC app submissions as that usually gets them killed. (Since otherwise there would be a bajillion apps getting submitted here.)<p>In general it's slick, presumably a good chunk of that coming from GWT usage. However, I kind of lost interest after a couple minutes flipping through stuff. There's no pain point that jumps out at me, i.e., "Oh, wow, I'd love to use that for [...]!"<p>It's a natural tendency for geeks (myself included) to build platforms to solve problems rather than solving problems directly. Fight that. :-)
I did manage to see it before it disappeared first time around.<p>It mostly worked nicely for me but crashed somewhere in datamanagement.nocache.js<p>As a proof of concept demo is ok. However, it would be better to have a demo with the full interface even if some parts are not working so that you can demonstrate the full workflow. (Upload file - manipulate data for example throw away a row, choose statistic, plot save, print). Looks like is build using EXTJS are you using R for calcs?
What does this app do? I clicked "start", and was plopped down on the home page with a frightening amount of information. It would be nice if you explained in a sentence or two what the app does, and why I should use it.<p>I see that while I clicked away to write this I got the "welcome to statgadgets" popup. I still don't know what the data sets are or why I would want to "analyze" them.
As a general tip, any time you feel the need to show a message telling the user how to interact with your application ("double click on X to ...") you should reconsider. Besides which, double clicking isn't a good UI mechanism for web apps (or any other apps, really).
This is really nice. Took me a moment to figure out how to use (eg dragging the fields for the graphs), but nothing too tricky. Over all, its nice and looks like it could end up being quite useful, going by the other (as yet unimplemented) menus). Keep it up!
Homepage doesn't tell me what it is. Start what?<p>Might not matter for YC demo; might matter lots to prove awareness of landing pages or whatever.<p>I'm a total number retard so I'm afraid I didn't last long in the application.
I posted this earlier but all the traffic crashed my basic test server - Im new to HN and under estimated the traffic. So I set it up on an powerful ec2 image - lets see if this can handle it. Since Im paying for the ec2 hosting by the hour, I will on leave this link up for a few days. Thank you for your feedback.<p>Original message:<p>This is a VERY EARLY demo of a web application I am building. Im trying to put statistical software on the web (almost all stat software is desktop). The first page is a document management module (similar to the one on Google Docs)-you can drag items into folders, share folders with other users, trash them, etc. Double clicking on a data set takes you to the data analysis module, where you can do statistical analysis. Right now I have only a simple bivariate regression module up - I want to keep it simple for the demo/proof of concept.<p>I dont expect to be accepted by YC but still want some feed back from the YC community. Please dont be kind - tell me everything that is wrong - but be constructive!
By the way Im open to meeting another cofounder. My current cofounder who used to work at SAS can only commit maybe 10-20% of his time (he's working on a PhD in stat). If you are interested in statistical software please let me know below.