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Imagine my surprise when I'm reading down the HN list like I do every day and I stumble upon my own website. Thats a pretty cool feeling! Im happy to answer an
by offsky 8y ago
Imagine my surprise when I'm reading down the HN list like I do every day and I stumble upon my own website. Thats a pretty cool feeling! Im happy to answer any questions people may have. This was my Angular learning project back when Angular just came out. I think Angular ended up being the wrong choice for this project, but it works and I learned Angular, so its all good.
- madeuptempacct 8y agoWhich one flies furthest? (I can narrow down by category, but not sort).
- offsky 8y agoIts hard to say. I never did a test where I threw them all and compared distances. I should do this! A lot depends on how accurate your folds are, and how well you tune it by small bends to the wings. This can make a big difference. I would say that "The Buzz" or "V-Wing" probably are the best. Also the classic "Basic Dart" thrown hard is difficult to beat.
- radicalbyte 8y agoFrom tests conducted 30 years ago: the double dart can be thrown further than the basic dart. It's the same as a dart but you fold the wings one more time..
- dwd 8y agoThere is a ring design that will beat any dart for distance. Particularly when thrown gently from a height where its glide ability can be exploited. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider/ https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/teach/activity/ring-wing-glider...
- phs318u 8y agoThis! Haha. Way back in my 2nd year at university (1985!), these were all the rage. Myself and a couple of friends made a giant version out of 6 university calendars. It had a diameter of about 40-50cm. We launched it one day (when the lecturer was facing the board) from the back of a math lecture. The slope of the lecture hall was a gentle 20 degrees, slowly tapering off towards the front. Initially it cleared people's heads with a few cm to spare, then about halfway it was clearing the backs of chairs - fortunately there were quite a few rows from the middle to the front with no one in them - until it finally found the back of some poor guy's head sitting in the 1st or 2nd row. The ring clunked him square and he ended up wearing it. We all exploded in laughter. It wasn't aimed at him mind - he was just in the wrong spot at the wrong time. I still smile when I think of that (does that make me a bad person?). EDIT: got the year wrong (memory is fading...)
- dwd 8y agoI first saw one back in the 70s as a kid at a summer activity. I had made a sharp double folded dart that I would throw furiously towards the rafters to trace a ballistic arc and land almost point down. I was easily beat by a ring an older kid gently launched from the elevated stage that glided and swooped well past where my dart landed.
- jeremy_wiebe 8y agoI used to have a paper airplane book and this was one of my favourites. The other was a plane made with a drinking straw and two paper rings. It always flew really far also! https://sciencebob.com/the-incredible-hoop-glider/ https://sciencebob.com/the-incredible-hoop-glider/
- dwd 8y agoI believe I had the same book when I was a kid, as I remember that one.
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- rustoo 8y agoThis is such an awesome project :)
- kevinSuttle 8y agoI have had this bookmarked on my phone for years, so I can pull it up every time one of my kids asks me to make one. :)
- icsllaf 8y agoWhy do you think Angular was the wrong choice? This question is coming from a person with little knowledge on most front-end frameworks.
- madeuptempacct 8y agoMight be a bit heavy for the use-case. That's all I can think of.
- offsky 8y agoThe main problem I ran into with Angular was SEO. With a single page app, I had a hard time getting google to index the individual airplane pages. This was 5 years ago, before good solutions existed. I cobbled together a solution, but its not perfect. And Google is better about this now anyway. It would have been better to use vanilla JS or jquery to do the simple home-page filtering. But I wanted to learn Angular, so thats what I did.
- a13n 8y agoAh yeah you pretty much have to set up server-side rendering to combat SEO difficulties with single page apps. Google says they'll execute your JS to index client-side rendered sites too, but they really don't do it nearly as often/well in my experience.
- tke248 8y agoWould you ever sell the site? Been thinking about making one myself that you can print that has the fold lines and maybe some fighter jet graphics
- TomK32 8y agoI wonder, I wonder wether producthunt will love this too...
- TomK32 8y agolet's find out https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fold-n-fly https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fold-n-fly
- scoot 8y agoVery nice, although (and just a suggestion, not a criticism), from a design perspective, a little bit more padding in the cards would go a long way.
- abraae 8y agoTo counter that, I personally find the padding to be absolutely spot on. I often see designs where the designer has added lots of beautiful white space, and the result is that the actual content spans 2 or 3 pages instead of one.i personally feel that web sites that use less padding often feel more"real" and fit for purpose.
- alex_stoddard 8y agoAm I correct to assume all the designs are for US Letter paper? (And not the A4 size common in the UK and elsewhere. http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/ http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/) I remember the frustration as kid getting a book of designs from the US and having none of them work quite right.
- offsky 8y agoYeah. Sorry :(
- qwerty456127 8y ago> I remember the frustration as kid getting a book of designs from the US and having none of them work quite right. "Not quite right" means even more fun. We used a non-standard paper format, the resulting planes were a little bit different than shown and this made them unique.
- bostonpete 8y ago> a little bit different than shown and this made them unique. Sounds like when I attempt a 1000 piece puzzle. It doesn't always have to match the box!
- pantalaimon 8y agoFor the very same reason I wonder whether there might be a difference in taste between a metric recipe and an imperial one.
- JorgeGT 8y agoFun story: when the Soviets tried to reverse-engineer captured B-29s bombers (into Tupolev Tu-4s) they had a lot of trouble because their production of sheet aluminium, rivets, etc. was done in metric sizes, whereas the B-29 used imperial-sized components, and thus extensive re-engineering was required to compensate the slight differences in thickness (and thus in weight and balance) of all components.
- cknoxrun 8y agoSome of these look so similar to the ones I used to design. We used to call a single "swoop" where it would go down and glide back up a "neener-neener". The peak of our design was the "neener-neener 9", which I recall would do a full 9 neener-neeners on a blustery day.
- dirktheman 8y agoI've recently started running a STEM club for girls. One of the lessons is about flight: what makes an airplane fly, and can we design a better airplane than the standard 6-fold-arrow? I've been searching the internet for a website that ranks paper planes both difficulty AND purpose. You just saved me a lot of time. On behalf of the girls in my club: thank you!
- amphibian87 8y agoThat's awesome. I have fond memories of similar experiments in physics, where the winning group used the "paper clip" trick to put some weight on the nose. The world record paper airplane flight is just a straight up rectangle haha.
- thatcat 8y ago>just a rectangle Haha, that makes sense though since it optimizes for maximum surface area resisting descent.
- romwell 8y agoHey, what do you think of Greatest Paper Airplanes? https://classicreload.com/win3x-greatest-paper-airplanes.html https://classicreload.com/win3x-greatest-paper-airplanes.htm... Do you plan on doing something like that with your website?
- sigmonsays 8y agothis is amazingg!
- SirMonkey 8y agoA Demo of the gameplay for the ones too lazy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx2cHmkqWZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kx2cHmkqWZ4 I remember playing this with my dad and having it installed for a birthday party. Fun times.
- amatecha 8y agoI just noticed this one still shows up when I choose "no scissors" https://www.foldnfly.com/13.html#The-UFO https://www.foldnfly.com/13.html#The-UFO :)
- offsky 8y agoThanks. I’ll fix it.
- quakeguy 8y agoI just want to say thank you. Your site just made my teaching job a lot easier. PSA: am working with kids on some optimization stuff. Teaching not daily.
- stretchwithme 8y agoWe did paper airplane design when I studied the Taguchi method in college.
- Endy 8y agoMy only problem with this website is that when I used it with a class of students, there were pornographic advertisements in between the plane types. That was really upsetting. Please reconsider your ads.
- profalseidol 8y agoBest to use Brave as your browser. Or even Opera. Both has built-in ad blocker.
- Endy 8y agoCouldn't do that when I was using the school Chromebook.
- thrower123 8y agoThe school doesn't have some kind of filtering proxy setup? A decade and a half ago I was having to end-run Bess to get to the Sun Javadocs - blocked for "hacking." Useful education, but it made studying for the AP comp sci test difficult...
- langfo 8y agoAgree, sorry only saw your response after I posted mine. I don't know how I missed seeing it
- offsky 8y agoThat is very odd and not what I want. It’s just google Adsense. You sure your computer doesn’t have spyware?
- offsky 8y agoSo, I just discovered that Adsense has an option to block ads that have "Significant Skin Exposure" so I turned this on a few mins ago.
- 8y ago
- qwerty456127 8y agoThank you for an amazing website, it's so much fun! I really hope it is going to stay up for many years onward.
- sytelus 8y agoIt would be great to have some data on these designs, for example avg time aloft, max distance travelled. May be users should be able to report this and you can do average or median?
- bwldrbst 8y agoThis is a great site! The Stunt Plane is a design I learned from a book as a kid and is still my go-to when my kids want me to make a plane. Time to pick up a few more.
- xelxebar 8y agoCool website! You might already be aware, but when toggling some of the tag filters, mixed in with the normal square images, I get several empty squares that don't link to anything. Anyway, happy folding!
- taherchhabra 8y agoyou can start selling the physical paper with dotted lines and instructions on the back, would be so cool for gifting
- ttty 8y agoI was wondering how much time it took you to build the content? Also is missing the most important thing. A video of the plane flying.
- nathan_f77 8y agoI just wanted to say that your portfolio is amazing [1], and you've had the coolest career ever [2]! I was wondering, are you still the sole developer of Toodledo, or do you have some employees now? I hope this HN bump has been good for Fold N Fly! [1] http://www.jakeo.com/portfolio.php http://www.jakeo.com/portfolio.php [2] http://www.jakeo.com/about.php http://www.jakeo.com/about.php
- mrunkel 8y agohttps://www.toodledo.com/info/jobs.php https://www.toodledo.com/info/jobs.php looks like they are hiring.
- waterhouse 8y agoNice diagrams. Do you know the book "Kids' Shenanigans" by Klutz? [1] I grew up with it, and it has three paper airplane designs, corresponding to your "Basic Dart", your "The Square Plane", and one called the "Nakamura Lock"[2] (also mentioned elsewhere in this thread), which you don't seem to have but bears some resemblance to your "Tail Spin". [1] https://www.amazon.com/Kids-Shenanigans-Approve-Whoopie-Cushion/dp/1878257412 https://www.amazon.com/Kids-Shenanigans-Approve-Whoopie-Cush... [2] https://www.instructables.com/id/Paper-Airplane-The-Nakamura-Lock/ https://www.instructables.com/id/Paper-Airplane-The-Nakamura...
- corpMaverick 8y agoHow did you get into the hobby ? How did you collected the designs ? You should add a little bit of history to make it more personal and engaging.
- lightlyused 8y agoI used to make one like the square plane, except at step 4 I would fold the outer points on more time toward the center line then fold the tip while inserting the previous folds into the folded tip so it makes a thick triangle. You could then fold the wing tips up or down to make the vertical surfaces. I'm not sure I'm describing it well.