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Review my hackathon MVP - Amazon instant search

61 pointsby wushuporkover 14 years ago

28 comments

83457over 14 years ago
* Add paging of search results in some manner<p>* Delay search by a split second on keypress and cancel if another character is typed. Currently if you type a word quickly every keypress results in a separate search that flickers up on the screen, and if there is a delay in results you have to sit and wait for them to appear sequentially.<p>* Show more information about book in detail view<p>* Allow building of custom bookshelves (at least without login) by dragging book somewhere, then allow useful actions on that list like emailing info, send to amazon wishlist, compare in amazon somehow, etc.
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wushuporkover 14 years ago
Hi HN community<p>Please check out my lastest pet project ShelfLuv - an implementation of Amazon instant book search I made for the midVentures hackathon. It won Best Overall App.<p>I'd love to hear what this community thinks of it and how I can make it better.
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ryanwaggonerover 14 years ago
Very, very slick. I was happy to see you have an Amazon affiliate ID in your links :)
Nekojoeover 14 years ago
I like it. It would be nice if the buy button was more prominent. I found a book I was interested in buying, or at least finding more about. I tried clicking on the book cover and nothing happened. I did notice the Buy button in the top right at the end, but it's not prominent as it's the same colour as the shelf.
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shiftbover 14 years ago
You took the instant, barebones style and turned it on it's head with a beautiful design. Could be slightly smoother, but loading images sucks (especially from Amazon).<p>Also, works perfectly in my iPad. Great job!<p>Couple questions... * You did this in 2 days? * What tech did you use to build it?
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thinkerover 14 years ago
I was honestly expecting another quick and dirty instant implementation but this is actually very nicely designed. Wish the book covers would slightly faster though.
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robertgover 14 years ago
Excellent app. I can see why you won.<p>One minor thing I saw: when I searched for "C#" it returned "c programming"
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waveover 14 years ago
One suggestion I have is that since search is the main feature of your site, you may want the search box to stand out. Maybe it should be little bigger and in center of the page
benvanderbeekover 14 years ago
I think the affiliate tag might be messed up in the URL, looks like the ampersands are getting URL encoded?<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Years-Well-All-Chicks/dp/0307717372%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAJ7NZCGKBGIDAE2VQ%26tag%3Damzn_instant-20%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D0307717372" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Years-Well-All-Chicks/dp/0307717...</a><p>I think that should be &#38;tag=amzn_instant-20
DevX101over 14 years ago
I think compelling user interfaces will be how a lot of new startups differentiate themselves. I came to this realization after seeing hipmunk. From a tech standpoint, there wasn't anything new. Just api calls. But the way the info was displayed was novel and intuitive. Same can be said for this app.<p>Now I'm trying to teach myself how to "do UI". All that said, so...how do you make the book titles smoothly re-arrange? Not sure how to do this.
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jeromecover 14 years ago
Really, really nice. I can see myself using this, as a peeve of mine searching Amazon for books was certainly the horrible UX. First big suggestion: please, please, include some way to scroll for more search results. Also, like another commenter I noticed some odd search behavior for the results to settle down. Last, the name is fantastic. Simple, short, easy to remember. Good job!
Timotheeover 14 years ago
Looks very nice! (I like the power plugs on the left)<p>One tiny pet-peeves of mine: add a "cursor: pointer;" in the CSS for your buttons.
nopalover 14 years ago
Looks good. My suggestions:<p>* After altering the sort, I can't click on a book in Firefox<p>* The URL changes when I do things, but the back button doesn't seem to work<p>* I'd like to see more than 10 results<p>* I'd like to be able to click on the suggestion
bwwhiteover 14 years ago
Nice work Pek, design looks great! I noticed some odd behavior of the search term suggestions as well, but overall it's awesome. Only suggestion would be having a brief summary of the books on your site, without having to click through to Amazon.
marramover 14 years ago
This is awesome! I shared it on Facebook, but your mugshot showed up in the preview rather than say a ShelfLuv logo. The latter would probably be more enticing for my friends to check out!
desigoonerover 14 years ago
Great work .. I wish there was some sort of a pagination to browse more results.<p>Also, do you plan to open up this project at some point of time?
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ConceptDogover 14 years ago
I'd love to see what architectures are being used server side to make these instants work.<p>According to google, it's not map reduce.
peregrineover 14 years ago
One suggestion is to maybe restrict bad words similar to how google works. I typed in "sire" and got some unexpected results.
sebgover 14 years ago
Hi - looks awesome. Looked through your profile to contact you to ask some questions and found this link - "<a href="http://hnofficehours.com/profile/wushupork/" rel="nofollow">http://hnofficehours.com/profile/wushupork/</a> This doesn't seem to work. Is there another way to contact you?
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ramkalariover 14 years ago
Nice! I noticed it still retains the previous image when I click on a book doesn't have an image available.
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miseover 14 years ago
Dude, make the cover clickable to buy.
animeshjainover 14 years ago
this immediately made me think, don't the amazon API limits prevent one from making more than a few thousand calls an hour. Would be very interested to learn how you are countering that. I simply avoid doing anything with Amazon's product api just because of that reason.
markbaoover 14 years ago
Wow, nice! It actually is an Instant search, i.e. not just Amazon Suggest.
sharpemtover 14 years ago
Do you have to throttle back to 1 api request per second per ip? Any worries about hitting the daily request limit with Amazon?
rvivekover 14 years ago
Very cool! Your UI reminds me of shelfari.com
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bretthellmanover 14 years ago
nice app, interesting design too... It would probably be good to have the mouse change to a pointer over books...
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wushuporkover 14 years ago
As far as the detail page - any thoughts or ideas that should go on there. It's super bare bones right now
singerover 14 years ago
You should make your site compatible with IE.
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