This may be great on a touch device, but usability suffers massively with a mouse or track pad. The effect looks nice enough, but I am rarely in favor of sacrificing usability for style.
Fun challenge, but not too difficult. The largest challenge was making the intuitive leaps to discover the missing information in the questions, especially for problem two. A bit of trial and error, and a few lines of Python made for quick testing of those assumptions.
Your site seems to work well, and is a service I could have made use of a few months ago. Finding reviews and scheduling local services like this often leads to a million dead ends using google and traditional search.
Right now, in Kansas City you have one provider with no reviews, so for me it has not yet solved the problem, but it is a great start!
I am in basically the same situation: Over 30, single, own a home, bootstrapping a business. I have steady and flexible part time consulting work I can use to pay the bills if I need to, but rarely do. I have 2 room-mates I share my house with that pay 100% of the mortgage and a large chunk of utilities. I have practically 0 debt (other than the house). I have worked at several startups already, and know better than many first-timers what is involved. If anything I believe I am better off starting a company than a young 22 year old.
One important difference though: Like another commenter said, I am not as eager to accept any investor terms thrown my way, nor am I gauging my success on investor interest. I am in this to make a profitable, successful business venture, and will only accept investment on good terms when it will directly aid in the growth of my company. Perhaps that is why VCs might avoid older entrepreneurs, we are more cautious of investment deals, and don't judge success by those alone.
The article is not discussing sub-pixel anti-aliasing, rather it makes a case for why understanding the sub-pixel properties of AMOLED screens can decrease power consumption while increasing screen life.
We are using Google Docs' forms tied to a spreadsheet for our startup. We have it load in a jquery window and looks decent, it is fully integrated, is customizable to be as complex or simple as you want, requires no registration and is free.
I agree with the basic premise of this article, but saying "99% of the time that quote will be a reasonable price" is disingenuous. While some customers that do not know the value web development expect to pay too little, they are just as likely to get overcharged by opportunistic developers.
It is much like getting car repairs. If you go in informed, you are likely to get a fair price, whereas if you don't you may be taken advantage of.
Thank you. This is a major problem with how media portrays data in news stories. Most people would see 50k over 9 years as a huge number, but if it were instead presented as an individual having a %0.002 chance of getting ill from these foods, or as about %0.0022 of the population is affected per year, the story takes on new meaning. Understanding how to present data like this should be required learning for journalists.
Of course there is always the chance that this is deliberate, and done to make the story more sensationalistic, but I prefer to follow Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
The offer for one of my first programming jobs I landed was due to my having listed game development on my resume. The job had nothing to do with game development (though I later went on to build a 3D data visualization in DirectX that was a cornerstone of the software), but the people who hired me had the same mindset as this article.
The idea is based on a few aspects that game developers almost universally share: they are trained to think of new, innovative ways to solve problems since each new game has to push the boundaries of what was possible before, they tend to be passionate about development and doing cool things with code, they are hardcore about optimization, and they are used to constantly learning new technologies and algorithms.
That said, not all aspects of game development are ideal for other projects, especially on the web. As others have mentioned, web development requires a very different mindset than game development. One major example is that game developers often build components from scratch, rather than re-using existing ones. One of the hardest skill for me to learn was to avoid "reinventing the wheel" and using pre-made off the shelf and open source components in projects.
I am definitely biased, but my own experiences have caused me to pay more attention to resumes I get that list game development experience, but not to the point of excluding others.
This is good to know -- the icon for the app I am working on is blue as well, now I am considering changing it!
As a coder who understands UXP but is not great with design, I often fall back on blues or grays for my projects. For whatever reason I find that designs I make tend to look better in blue than other colors. Reds too often look pink, oranges and yellows are hard to keep from looking overpowering. Greens aren't too bad, but I still have trouble getting it to look just "right." Maybe it is just me.
I have worked with many companies running these sorts of campaigns (I do work with a startup that tracks online engagement marketing) and have found that companies that are upfront and honest in their efforts tend to get better results than those that pretend to be regular people or pay people to pretend they like a product. Disclosure and honesty are unfortunately foreign concepts to many advertisers, but they are slowly catching on.
I don't like this regulation or think it is necessary, but it may actually do some good for the consumer.
Not only that, but an annual subscription is basically equivalent to 12 months of guaranteed monthly renewals. I would be interested to see comparative attrition rates of how 12 months of monthly renewals compare to attrition rates of yearly subscriptions from a popular site that uses both.
We are struggling with this issue with my current startup, whether to do yearly or monthly only, or both, and what the comparative rates would be.
The problem with many of these ideas is that they can alienate users. For a content site, there are few options available for monetization beyond ads, which most of those points are variations of. I personally shy away from businesses that have advertising as a primary source of revenue.
For new business and services online, the site or service should built with a business model in mind, even if it does not launch with one. And the best business model is simple -- find something people value and charge them a fair rate for it. The hard part is figuring out what that is.
So do you know of a script that detects the skill set of the user then displays them an appropriate design?
The biggest problem with this design however is that it does not add anything to the experience other than aesthetics. In fact, it obscures many options and reduces usability. So how is this a power user's interface? Appearance is nice, but usability and understandability are much more important with design.