allang

Hi everyone. A few months ago I left my gig as a product designer at Apple to work on Schema, a pocket-sized PostgreSQL and MySQL database client.

Like many (most?) of you, I build things regularly and often find myself wishing for a great db client for iOS. So... I’m shipping one. A couple things worth highlighting:

1. Schema has a simple but customizable interface designed for small screens. You can format raw data, mess with layouts, and use gestures to expand and collapse rows.

2. Supabase realtime API support is built right in.

3. The search works within and across tables.

4. You can enable notifications to subscribe to inserts on tables. Useful when you’re watching something like new signups like a hawk.

5. There’s a lightweight way to share a rows in emergencies (think gist for table rows) called expiring links.

But it’s early and we’re now a team of 4 working towards the next major release. There’s lots to build, and I hope you give it a try.

I've been using TaskTXT for a few weeks and it's a highly polished and very useful bit of software. Nice!

PSD.rb is also not intended for production use. Among other inadequacies, it's painfully slow.

That's what PSD Native is for: http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/82315160104/psd-rb-and-psd...

Of course we wouldn't.

If you're having tab problems I feel bad for you son...

There are a bunch more that we hope to share soon. Glad you like this stuff!

I'd imagine that it's a QA engineer's dream. Imagine never having to worry about spinning up some brach to test. That's kinda cool.

The concept itself is pretty great, though I'm not sure if something like this has ever been implemented before. It seems like such an "of course" product that you'd expect it to already exist (though perhaps not as a really simple API).

Aside from the concept, the page design could use a little work. Here are 3 suggestions that'll improve your landing page big time.

1. You're doing a good job by sticking to (what seems to be) a grid, but you need to tighten the grid up. The last row is just hanging there, and you could definitely benefit from bringing more attention to it.

2. Designers would refer to this kind of padding and spacing as claustrophobic. You should consider padding things out a little more and adding breathing room. In the header area, try padding out above and below the headline. In the lower section with each feature callout, give it some top-padding.

3. Try reducing the contrast of the body text in the features section, as well as lowering the font size by 1px and increasing the line-height by 2px. For example: http://imgur.com/tw8QT

4. Be sure to vertically center the icons with the h3 text. They're off a little. It's nitpicking, but it counts.

5. The 45deg line in the header background is working against you. Your product is dead simple, your landing page is stripped to the bone. Keep with it — don't add needless textures.

Hope this was helpful and constructive.

Not sure I agree that normal people need a ton of hand holding, but even that's true, those people will eventually disappear.

As for the image on our homepage — that's our app icon. Pretty funny that it's quite realistic (done by the talented folks at SoftFacade). We didn't think it was a huge contradiction, since it serves as more of a pretty picture than an interface.

That said, we probably will end up throwing it out when redesign our rather outdated external site :)

We actually ran a closed beta program for a month or so with an invite system. We released invites slowly while we got the product up to speed, and then launched.

And, yes — there's more to going fulltime than hitting X customers. How much cash do you need in the bank to avoid cash flow issues? What's your margin like — is it really X users, or is it X*2? What's your churn rate? If you don't know the avg. lifetime of a customer, you may be out in the cold.

It's not just for Photoshop, though it is what we're launching with.

The short answer is that it is indeed very much like iCloud for Photoshop, though we're rolling out support for more filetypes over time. If we were to stop in our tracks and cease development, it might be something to be concerned with. There's so much in the pipeline that we're not too focused on it at the moment.

Hi ollie,

The video is a bit blurry, yes. For the moment, might be best to head over to vimeo and watch it in HD. We'll likely take another pass at the demo and address the quality issue.

As for the timeline markers - if you hover over the timeline, you get a nice tooltip that indicates where you're scrubbing to in the file's history.

It's still a first iteration, so we're open to suggestions if you have some input on how we might do that better. Hope to get you into layervault soon — would love the feedback.

Thanks!

Agreed. The ascetic approach to features is what keeps me using it, even though there are other services with 20x as many features. Very simple, very useful.

Agreed. Looks like it has potential. Nice work!

This is a good start. You should do a better job of selling the idea of the service to developers. Come up with some pain points that Akshell relieves, and use that as the basis for the language on the homepage.

A directory of apps written with Akshell would be more powerful than a screencast or explanation. If you don't have very many users yet, write the applications yourself.

It might be wise to hire or find someone to narrate the screencast.

Great work!

Perhaps it's a lofty suggestion, but I would definitely bank at any bank partnered with a gold mint which allowed me to convert my savings to gold bullion with one-click. After the purchase, I would be allowed to visit my own safe with the physical bullion. That would be incredible.

Add a beautiful/easy online interface to manage your accounts, your gold, and foreign currencies.The bank would charge premiums for conversions in small quantities, or add a premium to the spot price.

Plus all the best aspects of current banks - as few or as low fees as possible, weekend hours, etc.