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freshlog

Here's a hotkey-focused screenshot+annotation Mac app I made that uploads to imgur:

http://alvinlai.com/nanotate/

Re:Show HN: A simple way to annotate code on Saturday December 14, 2013 @08:07AM (#6905585)
Nice work!

It'll be great if the textarea for commenting grew in height as you typed more.

Re:Are You A Typing Hacker? Prove It on Saturday November 02, 2013 @07:18PM (#6661285)
Here's a game that looks EXACTLY like yours, but for Japanese kana: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/japanese-frenzy/pp...
Re:Show HN: Recap on Wednesday October 23, 2013 @02:01AM (#6597176)
Yep, it works for all sites.

Recap saves a snapshot of the page and hosts it, to make sure that your saved selection will be available even after the webpage has changed.

Re:[Show HN] Nanotate - Gain super speed with intuitive hotkeys on Tuesday February 26, 2013 @10:49PM (#5290411)
Check out my other app Screendocs!

http://screendocs.com/

It lets you capture step-by-step screenshots, formats them nicely with HTML in a public Dropbox folder, where you can share a link in 1 step.

[Show HN] Nanotate - Gain super speed with intuitive hotkeys

Today I'm introducing Nanotate, the app that grants you super speed snap, annotation and uploading to imgur.All with intuitive hotkeys.http://alvinlai.com/nanotate/While apps like Skitch exist, they've become bloated over time and none of them have the hotkeys that let me be as effective as I can be. Yea, I save time by minimizing the use of the mouse/trackpad, so if you're a hotkey fanatic...

( Read More... | 4 comments | 5 points | on HN )
Re:Mousetrap: Keyboard shortcuts in Javascript on Thursday July 05, 2012 @04:16PM (#4204756)
Sweet! I can now non-metaphorically dare someone to build a better Mousetrap.
When I first saw the logo, I heard:

"Winamp… It really whips the llama's ass!"

Re:Top Technologies Used By YC Companies on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @08:10PM (#4040680)
Stripe's suspiciously missing from this list. I think there should be at least one YC company using Stripe at least?
In my opinion, to be truly confident that your data will be forever exclusive to yourself and people you choose is to pay for the service, to keep it running in the long run.

Otherwise, how is the service going to survive? They have to monetize somehow down the road to pay the bills.

See if you agree with what the creator of Pinboard says: http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

I personally run a site called Handpick that helps people curate links and inform in a considerate manner:

http://handpick.me

I have paying subscribers who help me keep the lights on and do not have pressure to monetize my users' data in any way.

The question is: do you care enough how your data is handled to pay for the service?

Re:Why Users Don't (And Shouldn't) Trust Startups on Friday March 16, 2012 @04:59PM (#3715258)
Good point. I think it helps to learn more about the people behind the app and their motivations.

I made Handpick (http://handpick.me) as a side project and have not taken any outside investment. Hence I have no investor pressure to obtain a critical mass of users in an insane period of time.

Re:Why Users Don't (And Shouldn't) Trust Startups on Friday March 16, 2012 @04:47PM (#3715202)
Would you feel more confident that the app is going to be around in the long haul if they charged you money for using it?

See my other comment about charging users money too.

Re:Why Users Don't (And Shouldn't) Trust Startups on Friday March 16, 2012 @04:46PM (#3715191)
A simple way to show that your app is going to be around for the long haul is to charge users money for it, the founder of Pinboard, a paid bookmarking web app says it best:

http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

While conducting the beta test for my selective link sharing-via-email digests tool, Handpick:

http://handpick.me

I asked my users whether they'd pay to support the app to run for the long haul. They love my app enough to say yes and were delighted that they could actually actively fund the operations and development.

Go on, try asking your users if they'd pay for your product. It's the best validation you can get!

Re:Notifications are Evil on Monday February 20, 2012 @08:24PM (#3614741)
Well, your recipients should be friends, family or colleagues you care about, so you'd be sharing very specific things that you know they will like.

Bundling all the links into a daily or weekly email digest would be less disruptive than sharing via facebook, imo.

Re:Notifications are Evil on Monday February 20, 2012 @02:10PM (#3613440)
To understand why the social web is so noisy, simply follow the money.

Salespeople need marketers to sell products, marketers rely on Facebook and Google to buy targeted advertising slots, who in turn optimize their social networking tools to encourage everyone to share even more, all the time.

Frictionless sharing, as Zuck puts it, because the more you share, the more keywords they can accumulate and sell as ad slots to marketers and sales people.

For the rest of us, we have our work to do and there's only a small window of our day when we're most productive.

Understand that the social web, as we know it, isn't designed in a way optimized for our productivity and happiness. It serves the tripartite of salespeople, marketers and social networking companies.

Sure it's free to use, but if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

I've since weaned myself from Facebook for more than a year with a little tool I made that helps me, my wife, family, friends and colleagues be more selective about what they share in a attention-respectful and considerate pace.

It's called Handpick, which helps you collect links for different groups of people and send a single email digest daily or weekly, totally cutting out pesky notifications in our lives.

http://handpick.me

Let me know what you think.

Re:Show HN: I made a social network for musicians on Monday February 06, 2012 @05:11PM (#3559439)
Wow. Just 12 days ago?

How did you get people to engage with the site?

Tried looking for inspiration at your Fandalism blog (http://blog.fandalism.com/) but it seems to be password protected now.

Looking forward to learning more from you, pud!

Re:Show HN: I made a social network for musicians on Monday February 06, 2012 @05:02PM (#3559401)
A quick Google search reveals that pud created Fandalism in 2006 as a site for "uploading and sharing your tunes":

http://hemiolesque.blogspot.com/2006/10/fandalism-youtube-fo...

Now it's an "invite-only directory of good musicians".

Would love to hear your story how you took your time to launch Fandalism :)

You have your password/session salt checked into github, you might want to remove that :)
Re:Instapaper Founder Marco Arment On The App Business on Wednesday February 01, 2012 @01:12AM (#3536917)
Pinboard also has a $25/year plan for archiving of links, in addition to their one-time signup fee.
Re:GUM: A better CLI for Git on Monday January 30, 2012 @04:32PM (#3530730)
Make this even more intuitive by wrapping git (or gum) in a REPL:

https://github.com/defunkt/repl

I use this on a daily basis to avoid having to type "git" repetitively.

Re:Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @06:50PM (#3379653)
Amazing!

Was it PG's rice and bean Ramen Profitable recipe? I don't remember slow cookers used in that recipe.

Re:Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service on Wednesday December 21, 2011 @03:08PM (#3378918)
I'm sorry to be off topic, but are those slow cookers cooking PG's recipe in the first picture?
Re:I'm turning 30 and I've produced no amazing art. on Saturday December 17, 2011 @11:01PM (#3365881)
^5!

Lol, I got it for my wife, she loved it too!

Re:I'm turning 30 and I've produced no amazing art. on Saturday December 17, 2011 @07:38PM (#3365504)
May I suggest that you try approaching your ideas from a slightly different perspective: pick those that stem from a personal pain point, that way, you'll be personally vested.

Whilst it's exciting to come up with novel ideas, nothing's more spurring than fixing and making your own life better.

To illustrate, here are some projects that I've embarked on, which scratched a personal pain point and went on to be incidentally well liked by others enough to even pay for:

http://freshlog.com

I had to submit bug reports with attached screenshots in Basecamp (later Pivotal Tracker and Fogbugz), which involves many steps, so I made this.

http://screendocs.com

Customers were frequently asking how to do something and nothing beats sharing a webpage with step-by-step screenshots. Later I found Dropbox to be a great medium so I integrated with that.

http://handpick.me

I felt that Facebook was a little too noisy and public to share personal links with my family and friends, so I made this.

http://letsrecap.com

Whilst reading long articles, I'd want to select some text, mark it out and jump back between them easily.

Whilst these are not runway successes with millions of dollars of profit, it certainly helps you build up the stamina to successfully ship and launch projects.

Re:The end of social on Sunday December 11, 2011 @03:22PM (#3340953)
Sure, email me at [email protected] or just enter your email on the front page of http://handpick.me and I'll send you an invite.

- Alvin

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