Show HN: I finally relased my first product

[vColin]

So, after many years of kicking about little apps and not putting the full effort in, I decided to bite the bullet and get on with it.

Very much inspired by patio11 and Bingo Card Creator, I present Griddol (http://www.griddol.com) a tool to create and play word searches. Intended mainly for teachers, but encouraging those who like a word search too.

This been churning around in my head for over a year in various forms, and I used the concept to help learn CoffeeScript, CouchDB and node.js, so even if the product itself is a failure, the learning process has been valuable.

I'll be the first to admit that it's somewhat(!) unpolished and needs a lot of work and content, but it's out there now.

I appreciate any comments you might have.

[patio11]

Congratulations. I strongly suggest a design which visually suggests what to click on. At the moment everything looks buttonesque and virtually nothing leads to you being happy if I click it.

[vColin]

Noted. At the moment I am just happy if anyone even visits the page though. But I realise that there is no clear direction to the new visitor. Another thing to add to the never-ending list.

[petervandijck]

You need to prioritize that never-ending list. Visitors having a bad experience should be somewhere at the top of things to fix. Adding feature X and Y should probably be somewhere at the bottom.

[gobr]

It's cool, but needs a lot of design, it's very raw yet.

One other thing, the program should not allow me to click anywhere, like, if I start to make a word in horizontal and them click 4 columns on the vertical he shoul not compute that, or something like this... (I don't know if you can understand this without some screenshot)

polish, polish and polish more. :D

[vColin]

I think I know exactly what you mean - restrict the highlighted letters to be in a single direction.

Something I was considering was changing the selection mechanics so that you click at the first letter and then drag to the final letter before releasing. I think that would be more intuitive.

Yes, I agree it's raw, almost embarrassingly so. Still, release early and iterate!

[cambriar]

Great job getting on with it. I look forward to seeing if/how you modify your design and implementation.

As I was browsing through your JS code to figure out how you end up positioning the words (vertical, horizontal or diagonal), I found the "naughtyWords" list to be hilarious. It was immediately clear to me that the developer inhabits the UK.

Congratulations on your success!

[vColin]

Thanks for the encouragement!

That actually reminds me - that stuff shouldn't even be in the client-code. And even if it should be there, methinks it ought to be scrambled somehow :)

Your deductions are indeed correct - I am in the UK - Cambridge in fact.

[gspyrou]

First of all congratulations ! Some feedback : on IE9 at the registration page the textboxes appear emtry (no username,password,confirm passwork text) , a visitor would probably hit the back button !

[vColin]

Thanks for pointing that out - my IE testing has been sporadic at best! I'll definitely take a look at that.

[gspyrou]

Also , as patio11 mentioned a better visual design would be helpful for your site. You may find great templates for a low price at http://themeforest.net/

[iambot]

clickable: http://www.griddol.com