Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by matthewcanty 4243 days ago
This is excellent in every way. Not only building a homemade UAV, but the presentation was spot on.

I expected the page to run badly with all that big content but had no problems.

The images and video add so much and not even a single click required!

3 comments

(Jonny the author here)

Thanks for the kind words! This is primarily a taster article to introduce the UAV project, I intend to write a more technical report and publish the designs/code in due time (and some more videos!).

The presentation uses Story Glass, also a project of mine, which we hope to offer soon as a service. It is an experience, lying in a damp field shooting a video to think about how the text will flow over it!

Hmm. A few of the videos were broken for me in Firefox, but worked in Chrome. In particular, the 3D model of the plane (caption "On a real plane these control surfaces are moved by large hydraulic pistons connected to the pilot's control stick."), and the PCB design software ("PCB design is quite fun. You start off by placing the ‘footprints’ of each of the chips, and then draw in all the connections.").

Ah, looking at it, it appears that these may not have webm variants. You might want to include a static fallback image or something of the sort for videos that you don't have webm variants for; in fact, static fallback images for all of the videos would be good for people who have video disabled, don't have video support, don't have appropriate codec support, or the like.

A small bit of feedback - The only issue I have with this style is offline reading: I tend to print every webpage I'm interested in to PDF files for offline reference. Story Glass doesn't really work very well for that - the PDF I got was not formatted and not usable.
How are you planning to reliably serve all the video content? I am looking to have a similar static site with a bunch of videos and am debating between Youtube, Vimeo, mp4/webm over some cdn.
On my android tablet, I mostly see bunch of black panels with small white paragraphs. Your fancy page layout makes the article unreadable (for me).
Great job, I can definitely see myself using your service assuming it runs properly on several different platforms upon release.
please do! I subscribed with my email, hope to read more updates.
Yes I loved the presentation. Got way more out of it than if it was just pictures and youtube embeds. Nice work!
In an an iPhone the videos of the site are broken. So much better expirience from the desktop browser!
let me add it was terrible for me. I'm using a modern macbook pro over a slow 3g connection (there's not currently wired connection near by). As soon as the page content loads, I hit "ESC" to stop loading images.. with most sites this approach just works, this was not the case..

Anyways, this looks like a really great project and looking forward to re-open over a wired full-speed connection.