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Show HN: My first web app – PDF memo creator
- toomanybeersies 10y agoI just recently used Prawn to make a PDF receipt generator in Rails for work. It's surprisingly fun when you get into it, and Prawn is very powerful. I've been thinking of making a Resume generator using Prawn in my spare time, but I haven't really found the time.
- laurieg 10y agoPrawn is wonderful. I used it to make a worksheet generator for teaching and was blown away by what I could do.
- johnwheeler 10y agoI like it. Dead simple. Makes nice output. The UI is correct. I would use. Feedback: Consider replacing "We take privacy seriously" with "I take privacy seriously". Better yet, consider removing that sentence so you don't make people second guess it. It's even easier then because there's less information that needs mental processing. You might just say, "Once you generate your memo, your information is deleted forever" or you might not say anything at all.
- curryhoward 10y ago> Consider replacing "We take privacy seriously" with "I take privacy seriously". There's some tension between wanting to be taken seriously ("we" makes it sound like there is a team supporting the product) and using the correct pronoun number for a single author. I see the appeal of using the royal "we" everywhere, even when there is only one person behind the project, because at least then the pronouns don't need to be updated once a second team member joins.
- Reedx 10y agoYeah, I'd be very curious to hear what people think about this. Is it better to us "I" or "We" when running a site yourself? And does the answer change depending on the type of site?
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoI think it depends on who is speaking: a team is always a plural, so if it's the team behind X, then you use 'we'; if you're speaking as an individual, you use 'I'. (This can get confusing for some projects, if you're speaking in both capacities while being the only team member.) So it comes down to how much you want your site associated with you personally, versus having its own identity (and associated "team", even if it's just you on the team). For hobby projects, I generally go with 'I'; for anything I'm asking for money in exchange for a service, I go with 'we'. If you feel uncomfortable using 'we' instead of 'I', just file a C-corp and get a registered agent. Now there's two of you, and when you're speaking as the corporation, it's a 'we'. (I'd argue it's always a 'we' for the C-corp, though, because again, it's a team, and teams are always plural.) Of course, I've been known to use language strangely, so make up your own style rules and go with them.
- reitanqild 10y agoIMO both are perfectly acceptable.
- stevewilhelm 10y agoI would suggest: Pretigious Technologies takes privacy seriously. Sounds professional and is "future proof."
- mypalmike 10y ago"We" is fine. Just ask your dog or cat what they think first.
- KerryJones 10y agoIt's been mentioned in a few articles that a lot of startups try to make themselves be more official and less of a personal touch to be more "professional" and this is generally not helpful. I would use "I" as long as it is correct.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- eksemplar 10y agoOn the business end it doesn't matter overtly, privacy claims are worthless until backed by law. Like Microsoft signing data protection agreements with the European Union, before any serious company would consider using their cloud type legal documentation.
- nicky0 10y agoOverly
- rameshkohli 10y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.andr... From the team of Gaao presenting you B-Star - Social Video Networking. Want to have free latest and popular songs in Gaao then download B-Star from above link and send us your B-Star ID. Wanna check your acting capability? Wanna increase your confidence while you have fear to act in front of people? Wanna be famous by your performance? Join B-Star!
- mostafaberg 10y ago+1 on removing it completely, you need a privacy policy link instead, you might create one your own with some online template or better yet have a lawyer write it for you, shouldn't cost so much I guess and will give you the professional look you're trying to show
- elcct 10y agoPeople that are politically on the left spectrum tend to address themselves and the others in the plural form. Having that in mind, not sure how asking the author to consider the replacement is considerate :)
- sametmax 10y agoI don't get it. What's the benefit over starting libre office and saving as PDF ?
- deadcast 10y agoYeah that's what I was thinking. I trust Libre Office way more since it's free software and I can actually inspect the source code to see what it's doing. I don't trust web apps like these at all.
- johnwheeler 10y agoLoads faster than libre office for one thing.
- sametmax 10y agoIt loads faster, but it's not faster to use. - you have to open a new tab. - then remember the name of the stuff and type it. - then make sure you are online (not in a plane). - then type it without all the LO tools such as good spell check and typography fixes. - then you wait for the generation, download the file and the go to the download directory, and then copy it where you want. All in all, I'd say it's the same, except you can change stuff in the LO version, work offline, and refer to the one tool that does all the other stuff as well instead of having to manage 1000 of tools to tools such a simple task.
- artmageddon 10y agoWhy not just say "Your privacy is taken seriously" to remove the ambiguity?
- eschutte2 10y agoCool. For even more privacy, you could generate the PDF client-side.
- uniclaude 10y agoTrue! Plus this would allow the author to host this service on an cheap and robust s3+cloudfront setup!
- thenaturalist 10y agoAsking as a self-taught not-so-advanced-yet guy wanting to build a similar I/O web app: Could you elaborate a bit on how client-side transformation/ generation could be achieved?
- rameshkohli 10y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.andr... From the team of Gaao presenting you B-Star - Social Video Networking. Want to have free latest and popular songs in Gaao then download B-Star from above link and send us your B-Star ID. Wanna check your acting capability? Wanna increase your confidence while you have fear to act in front of people? Wanna be famous by your performance? Join B-Star!
- mypalmike 10y agoPerhaps using http://pdfkit.org/ http://pdfkit.org/
- escap 10y agoor using https://github.com/bpampuch/pdfmake https://github.com/bpampuch/pdfmake e.g. http://pdfmake.org/playground.html http://pdfmake.org/playground.html "pdfmake is based on a truly amazing library pdfkit.org"
- kranner 10y agoThere's also https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF https://github.com/MrRio/jsPDF
- athyuttamre 10y agoCongrats! Always great to see first time apps. Keep on learning and building, and always share what you make with this and other communities. :)
- anondon 10y ago> share what you make with this and other communities Just curious, apart from some programming related subreddits, where else would one share something like this?
- tomtompl 10y agoThere are local groups on facebook for example. You could share it on twitter. You can share it in your company. You can share it in your university group.
- teeboy 10y agoWould you publish the code too? Congrats!
- keyle 10y agoVery nice. Two features you could add is - more templates and - using local storage to cache what's been typed and remember the fields contents. Agree with the others, you probably want to mention what you're saving on the server and a privacy statement.
- hellothree23 10y agogreat stuff man! congrats! good idea too
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rameshkohli 10y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.andr... From the team of Gaao presenting you B-Star - Social Video Networking. Want to have free latest and popular songs in Gaao then download B-Star from above link and send us your B-Star ID. Wanna check your acting capability? Wanna increase your confidence while you have fear to act in front of people? Wanna be famous by your performance? Join B-Star!
- todd3834 10y agoNice work! Would you be interested in sharing anything interesting you used or learned while making this? These are the kinds of posts that made me fall in love with HN over 2535 day ago.
- markdown 10y ago> These are the kinds of posts that made me fall in love with HN over 2535 day ago. And are sadly relatively rare these days :(
- icebraining 10y agoNot really, they just don't always surface to the front page. https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew
- mythrwy 10y agoMight default the date to current date.
- csydas 10y agoVery cool. Pretty much flawless on iOS (8.3) right down to just opening the pdf in iBooks. Loads fast enough that I can grab it between stops on the metro. Is the date going to pre-fill with the current date in future revisions? On my red. It was 06/15/2016 I think.
- reitanqild 10y agoAgree with csydas. Just looked at it and read the text and have to say this is really nice. Makes me happy. More constructive feedback: If it is to be used in Europe the date must be either configurable or default to a format that isn't totally confusing like month/day/year is.
- a_j_s 10y agoHi,nice work! found a bug only worked for me when filled all the fields. Internal Server Error when i left "cc" field empty. Keep up the good work.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- arkadiyt 10y agoLooks great, works great. I'd recommend setting up a free TLS certificate from LetsEncrypt
- saurabhjha 10y agoThis is really great! Thanks for sharing. Here are some comments: * Make a title of your webpage using <title> tag in <head> * I was not sure the "organization" was meant to be a input field. Please make it more obvious. It's great! The first web app I made printed "hello, world" in HTML :-). One thing I would recommend is releasing some part of your code so that people can give feedback on that as well. Keep it up!
- swatkat 10y agoMight want to fix typo: © Pretigious Technologies
- japhyr 10y agoThis is great, and you're receiving well-deserved attention. I have to ask, did you mean to call yourself "pretigioustech" or was that an accidental misspelling?
- coin 10y agoContent doesn't fit on an iPad
- onlyrealcuzzo 10y agoLooks beautiful, dude. I love your typography. Very similar design in terms of simplicity to something I'm working on. So maybe I'm just patting myself on the back, but I dig it. Great job!
- sangd 10y agoGood job! Very nice for a first web app.
- m_asgari 10y agoIf we can comment on functionality too (not just UI and design), I would say at least add an option to your text editor to do left/right alignment to support RTL languages.
- bilalarshad 10y agoThat simplicity is awesome!
- adam77 10y ago'Pretigious Technologies' typo?
- anondon 10y agoVery nice! A few questions: - Where are you hosting this site? - What is your tech stack? - Do have any plan to build on this web app?
- 0xmohit 10y agowkhtmltopdf [0] is being used for generating PDFs. [0] http://wkhtmltopdf.org/ http://wkhtmltopdf.org/
- dan1234 10y agoQuite simple to work out some of this yourself: >Where are you hosting this site? $ dig +short a www.createamemo.com memo-gen.herokuapp.com. us-east-1-a.route.herokuapp.com. 23.23.225.163 > What is your tech stack? $ curl -I www.createamemo.com ... Server: WEBrick/1.3.1 (Ruby/2.2.4/2015-12-16) ... So, it looks like it’s a Rails app hosted on Heroku.
- hackerkid 10y agoThe text editor used is Quill
- sigjuice 10y agoPreview.app says "PDF Producer: Qt 4.8.6" and "Content creator: wkhtmltopdf 0.12.2.1". Is that intentional?
- feider 10y agoWtf. 1st in the HN? Is this a joke I don't get?
- bdcravens 10y agoPerhaps readers are happy to see something about a hacker hacking than the latest Elon-love-fest or continued Apple drama or discussion of SF real estate.
- kagamine 10y agoI want Elon to get the top job at Apple, it would halve the number of posts on reddit and HN.
- tonteldoos 10y agoMayhaps people like supporting someone who made something nice and useful, learned something in the process, and helped us remember why we do what we do. EDIT: Upvoted OP too. Well done!
- cyberferret 10y agoWell, I always thought HackerNews was supposed to be about hackers doing newsworthy things... Dissing the establishment is all fine and good, but personally I love seeing people building stuff, especially first web apps.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago> hackers doing newsworthy things What part of create-a-memo is newsworthy exactly? /agree with GP.
- cyberferret 10y agoWell, you would think that a community of hackers that are focused on, you know, building stuff would be supportive and encouraging of others who like tinkering and building stuff. It's the way to keep the momentum and keep newbies in the ecosystem rather than scaring them off via derision or plain ignoring them. Strange as it may seem even Musk/Jobs etc. didn't create their masterpieces the very first time out of thin air. They would have started on a project that would be considered plain/pointless/boring/embarrassing, but they built upon that experience and platform. Something to remember when talking to the young creators who will be continuing their work in the future.
- golergka 10y agoI really like the fact that something this simple can make the top of the HN's front page. It makes this site feel really beginner-friendly and encouraging. A great contrast with many other websites where programmers exercise in putting down other's work to boost their own ego. And while I don't have any use for this app, I have to admit that it looks awesome and simple. Good job.
- stockkid 10y agoGood job for shipping. I'd love to use it, but the page said internal server error when I clicked on the button.
- abijeet 10y agoLooks neat and clean. Here's my review - 1. Add - <meta charset="utf-8"> in the head section of the page. 2. Try to avoid jumping from h1 directly to h3. Heading progression should be from h1 to h2 to h3 and so on. 3. Towards the end I see you've added some <br> tags to space out content. I'd use CSS margin top and bottom to do that.
- labpdx 10y agoMaybe your server is overloaded or having some other issues - but didn't work at all for me on Android+Chrome. Tried multiple times. Also tried in Desktop Mode, and received a server error. Still interested in trying it out, will wait for a bit.
- photonios 10y ago++kudos for that. Simple, yet effective. Does one thing, but does it well. I was impressed that when I didn't fill in the "Organization" field, it left it out of the PDF completely. I sort of had the expectation that it would create an empty box in the PDF. But it didn't, that shows that you thought about it. Any chance you can share some information on what you used to build this? One piece of feedback though: The "contact" placeholder didn't seem like a text field to me. It took me a while to figure that it's editable. The same goes for the "Organization" placeholder.
- glaberficken 10y ago> One piece of feedback though: The "contact" placeholder didn't seem like a text field to me. It took me a while to figure that it's editable. The same goes for the "Organization" placeholder. Came here to say exactly the same thing. Other than that, 5 stars. =)
- lucb1e 10y agoI am probably missing something in the mobile view. What makes this page easier than creating this in any product from Libreoffice to Word and exporting to pdf?
- webtechgal 10y agoThis app makes it possible to (easily) create PDFs on PCs (and other access devices) that don't have LibreOffice or Word (or other similar tools) installed, using just a web browser (and an Internet connection). Great work, btw.
- davidshepherd7 10y agoMinor bug: If I hit "Create a PDF" without entering any data I get an internal server error page.
- probolsky 10y agoWould you mind telling my what device you are using? OS? Thanks.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y agoI saw exactly the same behaviour; Chrome on OSX. Funny thing is, I entered a single character company name, hit the button again and it worked. Then I deleted that character and it still worked.
- webtechgal 10y agoCentOS 6.7 + FireFox 45.3.0 here, no error when I hit the Create PDF button without typing anything.
- ddorian43 10y agoI'm still waiting for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12489586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12489586 ;)
- probolsky 10y agoThank you all for such great feedback, encouragement. I am adopting a lot of your suggestions. Please, keep them coming.
- anton_gogolev 10y agoFrequently fails with Internal Server Error. And please, add HTTPS: https://letsencrypt.org/ https://letsencrypt.org/
- rameshkohli 10y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.andr... From the team of Gaao presenting you B-Star - Social Video Networking. Want to have free latest and popular songs in Gaao then download B-Star from above link and send us your B-Star ID. Wanna check your acting capability? Wanna increase your confidence while you have fear to act in front of people? Wanna be famous by your performance? Join B-Star!
- rameshkohli 10y agohttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.b_star.andr... From the team of Gaao presenting you B-Star - Social Video Networking. Want to have free latest and popular songs in Gaao then download B-Star from above link and send us your B-Star ID. Wanna check your acting capability? Wanna increase your confidence while you have fear to act in front of people? Wanna be famous by your performance? Join B-Star!
- silvaben 10y agoCongrats on the launch! Looks pretty neat. Minor suggestion: At first, I didn't realize that the organization box was editable. I thought it was some kind of a logo. Maybe you can try changing it to a regular text box like "To:" or "From:".
- 0x54MUR41 10y agoThat's great. It's very simple and I like it. Feedback: I think you're missing your web app title. It only shows your default URI.
- drewm1980 10y agoI couldn't tell if it was an "office space" joke or not, and didn't want to put my e-mail address in just to find out.
- Jugurtha 10y agoHere: https://mytemp.email/2 https://mytemp.email/2 The link takes you, without clicking on anything, to the inbox of a disposable email address that perishes if you don't visit it for 24 hours or if you close the session.
- gchokov 10y agoIt's so much easier to open up Ms Word, have a template by your choice, and export as PDF. I don't get it guys. Super nice domain occupied for a trivial thing... edit: Maybe an OK solution if you don't have Ms Word. But, almost all text editors can export as PDF anyway..
- icebraining 10y agoWhat would you use that domain for?
- gchokov 10y agoKeeping a Meeting Memo in the cloud, for teams, for example. Memo as a PDF? No thanks.
- vim-guru 10y agoShould it perhaps be Prestigious Technologies? And I suggest that you tint your placeholder-text a bit, so it doesn't look like the actual input.
- samdung 10y agoI see simplicity i upvote. Another good example is https://www.resyum.com https://www.resyum.com
- Twisell 10y ago"We take privacy seriously" With an unencrypted service, without any way for others to audit your code, without even basic contact info and with a misleading company name... Who are you kidding? Is that some sort of social science experiment?
- nodesocket 10y agoTake it easy. Let's encourage others and give feedback, not nerd rage on them for releasing their first web app.
- Twisell 10y agoI really dunno people also come here to read tech advices. And even if I appreciate the effort, it would really be dangerous to use this service for real confidential uses. I mean unless someone personally know the author how can you tell this isn't a guy phishing for personnal data and posing as a newbie? Here more than everywhere else we should not take privacy statement at face value. And even if he's honestly wrong, lake of encryption mean this really isn't as secure as claimed. I find it confusing, especially in the middle of the Hilary e-mail stuff that so much HN commenters are so forgiving about a serious flaw. Of course I understood that there is a lots of irony in some comments. So sorry to be captain obvious. But I'm not sure given the context that irony is more serving than a plain and brutal reminder.
- frankquist 10y agoEverything you said could have been said in a polite, or even educational way, without sacrificing its importance. Usually we use "but this is wrong!" or "this really needs to be said and I am passionate about it" as an excuse to be harsh or to vent but really it just causes your comment to drop to the bottom of the comments where people are less likely to read it.
- Twisell 10y agoWell English is not my mother thong so maybe I was harsher than I though. However the current top comment is basically saying that the OP is a poser and that it might have been a viral campaign for codegophers this don't qualify as not harsh... When reality is harsh how are we supposed to soften it without lying?
- Vilkku 10y agoSeems nice and simple, good job! Some comments/suggestions: * There seems to be no <title> tag on the page, or at least I don't see a title for the page. * When the browser downloads the output, it is served to it as a "binary file" (Firefox on Mac), not PDF, meaning I have no other option than to download it. I think (though I'm not sure) that if you set the content type correctly it could open straight in a new tab, or at least let me open it straight in a PDF viewer. * The paper format looks a bit off to me, I guess it's because it's letter? In that case, not everyone uses that (we use A4), though lettings users set it would increase UI complexity.
- frankquist 10y agoMaybe kind of quirky, but I think letter is more popular in the USA and a4 more popular in some other countries... So maybe base it on IP location?
- beher 10y agoInternal Server Error
- randomsearch 10y agoEntering a non-American date format, or leaving the date blank, gives an internal server error. Nice project, well done!
- uberalex 10y agoAlso entering an odd number of double quotes in the from line creates an error too.
- jaspervdmeer 10y agoPretigious?
- quantumtremor 10y agoI think you need some sort of input validation on the length/size of the text. Is the application just throwing everything away if it's too large?
- p333347 10y agoTwo things stood out right away (on Firefox 42) and point 2 particularly dissuaded me from checking it out any further. 1. It doesn't check for empty content and produces a pdf with just 'memo' and horizontal line. 2. Can't paste, ctrl+v won't work and there is no paste in context menu.
- NeuroKix 10y agoSpecial characters such as čšž are not rendered correctly in the bottom Contact information field.
- pklien 10y agoSo cool something like this hits #1 here. What a community!
- dilliwal 10y agoI liked it as well, but from his tweet (https://twitter.com/AdamProbolsky/status/793357675996196864 https://twitter.com/AdamProbolsky/status/793357675996196864) seems he didnt make it!
- sideproject 10y agoYou're right. Looks like the actual development is done by CodeGophers. https://codegophers.com/ https://codegophers.com/ "Email us a programming task and we'll finish it in 48 hours" I would say most HN'ers (me included) thought this was done by a beginner web developer and looking for feedback from the community. And based on the comments provided, many of them are quite positive and constructive.
- erikb 10y agoReally? He let's other people code such a simple tool and then acts like it's his student project?
- shostack 10y agoFrankly I'd be interested in a write-up on their experience using this service, walking us through they scoped it, solved challenges, cost etc. Part of running a business is effectively and efficiently allocating capital. Depending on their goal with this project and how much it cost, this could be an excellent approach for getting low tech MVPs built.
- ng12 10y agoLook at their site: https://codegophers.com https://codegophers.com My guess is this dude literally said "make a web form with these inputs that will produce a PDF formatted like this".
- marcell 10y agoIf you're interested, we put together a quick blog post describing the process. You can read it here: https://blog.codegophers.com/createamemo-com-idea-to-mvp-in-48-hours/ https://blog.codegophers.com/createamemo-com-idea-to-mvp-in-...
- vyuh 10y agoI tried to use it on Opera Mini native on Android. Download dialog is shown but it never starts transferring data. No error message shown.
- kelvin0 10y agoI tried copying some text from a URL (copy/paste the content of that page) into the memo box and hit the create button: Internal Server Error Here's the URL I used. Hope this helps. http://www.thedrive.com/tech/5246/how-george-hotzs-999-autonomous-driving-tech-actually-works http://www.thedrive.com/tech/5246/how-george-hotzs-999-auton...
- shiven 10y agoNot really "Show HN" stuff. Poster did not code it, mercenary programming shop did.
- ocdtrekkie 10y agoWhat's really funny, is I saw the link submitted on /new at least five or six times yesterday. So there was a lot of work put in to get it up here on the front page too.
- probolsky 10y agoNot true.
- ohstopitu 10y agoso umm if the poster didn't do it...why is this here? I'm not saying it should not be here...just asking what exactly the "show HN" in about. If it's about showing of the skills of codegophers...should they have not worked on something more complex? just confused.
- drivingmenuts 10y agoSomeone may have misspelled "prestigious" at the bottom.
- maup 10y agoI played with the editor and a js plugin to create pdf a little bit: https://plnkr.co/edit/R68wzJbtsJXUIZppmETj?p=preview https://plnkr.co/edit/R68wzJbtsJXUIZppmETj?p=preview
- shanecleveland 10y agoSo now we know all about the development of this idea, but what is the genesis behind this probolsky? Why did you want it built? If it was to truly learn "development," then I suspect you would have done it yourself. Scratch your own itch? Expand it into a business offering? Where does it go from here?