6 ms·

Ask HN: Please review my new project: almost.at

164 points by davidcann 17y ago

davidcann 17y ago
I used Cappuccino to build the front-end, so thanks go to the 280 North guys!
- ashleyw 17y ago
  May I ask, how much work went into it? (compared to what you'd imagine it'd have taken you to do from scratch, using jQuery or something?) Because it's the slickest web-app I've seen in…well, ever!
  - davidcann 17y ago
    Well, quite a bit, I guess... but not THAT much. I'm a full time freelance developer and I made this in my spare time over the past 3-4 months. I had the idea a year ago, but you know how that goes!
    - holaberlin 17y ago
      Congratulations. This is remarkable. What's the backend like?
      - davidcann 17y ago
        The index.html and Cappuccino javascript are served from an EC2 server and the new content is continuously loaded from sequential files on Amazon S3 via JSONP (0.json, 1.json, 2.json, etc.). Views, suggesting events, and adding followees are sent to php pages on EC2 with MySQL.
- messel 17y ago
  I like that it grabs events out, instead of just trending words. How did you manage that if you don't mind sharing? I'm a big fan of tools, especially cool ones so thanks for showing great ideas can be made real in ones spare time if they keep plugging!
  - davidcann 17y ago
    Events are suggested by users (the little + button in the lower left). Currently, I approve/reject them by hand to keep it focused. Eventually, I'll have a public voting system.
- messel 17y ago
  Just finished bouncing to all my favorite social sights and bumped almost.at When I'm jealous of a developers work, I actively promote said dev :D Great job, please keep on cookin' How many services can you pull in and grab info from? in the future google waves? Whatever you're using to identify events from the data deluge should be applicable to all real time web services. I'm very interested in the code used, and if you need any volunteers for specific APIs or problems give a hollar (my background is algorithm development + monte carlo analysis simulations/modeling mostly c++)
aditya 17y ago
Fascinating. Would be nice if you labeled the three columns, (The first is twitter mentions, the second flickr and the third everything else?) But it looks like a great way of visualizing developing stories, with the downside being that you can only really track one thing at a time. How are you dealing with reducing noise from stuff that you pull from twitter or the web?
- davidcann 17y ago
  Thanks! The "Followees" feature is going to be key in avoiding the twitter hashtag spam. Basically, you add people on twitter who are actually attending the event... and their posts are highlighted in yellow. You can also see only followee posts with the button at the top. I was testing Google I/O last week with 50-60 followees and it really cut through the spam and all the "I wish I were at Google I/O!!!!" posts. I'll be at WWDC next week and I'm hoping that the big Keynote will be a good test for the system.
jack7890 17y ago
Very cool. Easy quick improvement: add "cursor: pointer" to the CSS of the event links on the left-hand side. That will make it easier for the user to tell he should click on them.
- davidcann 17y ago
  Thanks, good point.
paul9290 17y ago
Cool that you list tweet links from major news sources! When a user clicks on CNN, BBC or others could you not on the left most side bring up the article they clicked so they dont go to another site? Would be a UI thing, but I would never leave the page and I could click and read all the news stories about X, while staying within your site.
- davidcann 17y ago
  Interesting... I was thinking an embedded viewer for photos would be good, but articles could work too. I could make that an option, so people could jump out to a new window if they prefer. Thanks!
geuis 17y ago
Man, I love what Cappuccino can do. It looks really slick. However, on a top-end Mac Pro with 6gb of RAM in Safari 4 beta and Firefox 3.5 beta, its sloooooow. Everything is just really jerky and non-responsive while trying to navigate around. All that aside, its a really great interface. Soon as you enable some additional functionality (like search) and speed up the interface, this will be something I want to come to.
- davidcann 17y ago
  Yea, I am definitely working to speed up the interface responsiveness. There's a standalone app OS X that you can keep open for hours, so it won't bog down your main browser: https://s3.amazonaws.com/almostatapps/almost.at.dmg https://s3.amazonaws.com/almostatapps/almost.at.dmg
  - Caged 17y ago
    Great Stuff, although when I fire up this app all I get is a blank white screen. Didn't get any useful information on the console. I assume this is just a wrapper around a WebView? I'm running the latest Safari 4 beta and the web version works fine.
    - davidcann 17y ago
      Hm. I guess I have some bugs to work out. I had that happen to me once, but haven't been able to reproduce it since. I'll try, though. Yes, it's just a WebView... I hope people don't think I'm trying to push it as a "real" OS X app, because it's just javascript, so I'm trying to call it a "Standalone Browser."
  - kqr2 17y ago
    Since you used Cappuccino, were you able to compile this from the same source as the web site?
    - davidcann 17y ago
      Yea, though technically it's not "compiled" ... only the browser wrapper is compiled objective-c code. It's still just html/javascript running inside.
redorb 17y ago
You must be getting hammered by traffic; I just gave ya 30 seconds to load.. I'll try again later.
- davidcann 17y ago
  The initial load might take a minute, but once it loads, 99% of the traffic is served from Amazon S3 via JSONP, so that part should hopefully scale well. If you're on OS X, there's a standalone browser app you can download (has the code embedded, so no loading time). I'm still working on a Mozilla Prism or custom WebKit standalone browser for Windows. I welcome the traffic rush, though, because I want to figure out how to scale it!
  - jeroen 17y ago
    The initial load might take a minute You might want to mention that on the initial page. Yesterday I also gave up after 30 seconds, and I only came back today because this is still on the HN frontpage.
kwamenum86 17y ago
uuuh...guys? I think Bing might be better than Google....what do I do?
wooster 17y ago
This is fantastic! I could see myself paying for the ability to set up feeds to share with other people during an event. It's also nice to see Cappuccino being used for something outside of 280 North. :)
- JacobAldridge 17y ago
  I hadn't even thought of that, but you're right - I would definitely pay to have one of my conferences included / featured, which would encourage attendees to communicate about them more - I win all round.
- messel 17y ago
  automagic revenue stream, sounds brilliant
alexkearns 17y ago
Beautiful, beautiful interface. Worked perfectly smoothly on my MacBook 2.2Ghz with 2GB ram. Am very jealous. Makes the interface of my AJAXified web app - www.gambolio.com - look a tad amateurish. Mine was done using jQuery, btw.
- whacked_new 17y ago
  Nice interface, but jerky animation, which isn't surprising for jQuery, but a bit unfortunate.
  - alexkearns 17y ago
    Whacked, what library is best for animations, in your opinions> I heard mootools was pretty good.
    - whacked_new 17y ago
      6 months ago I could easy find a jQuery animated effect somewhere that got sluggish if you start generating many simultaneous effects. There is an article by Dave Shea on A List Apart that would visibly choke if you moved your cursor around the links quickly; someone wrote one in Mootools and it was smooth. But I just revisited the article and it wasn't choking anymore. My hunch is Mootools will still give you an edge. But it might not last long.
      - ahoyhere 17y ago
        You guys are both oversimplifying the animation performance issue. Alex will probably write slow animations with whatever framework he's using, because it depends way more on how you program than with what. You have to be cognizant of your DOM, your scripting practices, your loops, etc., etc. I'm gonna be a total whore and probably get downmodded but, hey, I wrote a book on this exact topic: http://jsrocks.com/ http://jsrocks.com/ with Thomas Fuchs, the creator of Scriptaculous. (Wait til you see Scripty2.)
        17y ago
crux 17y ago
I think it's pretty cool looking. One question, one concern: 1) Are events added manually? They certainly seem well-enough targeted that I could see them being so. But the flip side of that is that there's a lot of other events of a similar nature, but with less of a geeky focus, that I'm afraid I wouldn't see. If they're not manually added, how are you ensuring that all events that could be potentially targeted are included? 2) It might be nice to include a throttle for the refresh speed. 5 seconds, for a high-volume item like the BEA, was total information overload. EDIT: I should be more precise about #2. I'm seeing that even though it's been constantly refreshing every 5 sec for a couple minutes, it's still up to May 29. So maybe it's not actually that high-volume, but there's still something going on where I'm seeing a hard-to-follow stream of text.
- davidcann 17y ago
  1) Yes, users suggest events and the moderator (me) approves them, if they're relevant. I'm trying to keep it to a short curated list of what's happening in the world (also, there's rate limits on most APIs!). Eventually, I'll add a system for users to publicly vote for "upcoming" events. 2) There isn't currently a throttle, but if you mouse-over a column, it will pause so you can read something interesting that you see. Mouse out and it un-pauses. Also, it's like an IM conversation... if you scroll up, it will stop auto-scrolling to the bottom.
mahmud 17y ago
I am not sure what it does, but it looks fucking gorgeous.
- chops 17y ago
  I had the same thought. It's a very impressive interface, but I couldn't find an "About" link that really says what it is, and it wasn't terribly obvious (at least to me). I see what looks like twitter stuff, I see comments, and I see links to news stuff. But perhaps an "About" clicky would be helpful. But overall nice job with the interface. Very slick.
  - astine 17y ago
    Or even a video would be helpful.
    - mahmud 17y ago
      As someone trying to make a video for "the product" with zero video editing experience, let me say that I no longer expect it from others. It's enough programmers are even making the UI useable.
- markm 17y ago
  It looks like a real-time news aggregation service. Very good, would benefit from a search bar on the homepage and integration of real time comments from social sites such as digg, reddit and even Facebook public profiles.
- buugs 17y ago
  To be fair it does say: "Following People at Real-World Events in Real-Time" on the front page and then lists the services it uses to find the information.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
ErrantX 17y ago
I played around with it for a bit and thought it was quite cool. Then just as I was about to click close I saw the wierd slider thing at the bottom and though - ah that would be so awesome if I could slide it and.... OH COOL! Kudos.
- username 17y ago
  I read this and slided to an earlier time. Now it's difficult to get back to the current time. Dragging the slider to a future time or clicking to the right brings me back to the earliest simulated time. Using Chrome 2 and it isn't slow.
  - ErrantX 17y ago
    Same issue here (using Chrome 2 as well :D). However for me the slider stayed at the earliest time but the updates appeared correctly in real time.
- messel 17y ago
  Hacker ;)
halo 17y ago
Neat idea, but this is unusably slow on my PC (Firefox 3, Core 2 Duo 2ghz).
- bradlane 17y ago
  hate to add a "works for me" post, but try it in the firefox 3.5 beta - it has the new javascript engine, which makes this run very nicely. It was speedy in google chrome too.
papaf 17y ago
All I see is a timer and then just a black screen. I'm using Opera 9.64 on x86_64 Linux. I'm sad because the other comments make it sound awesome.
- davidcann 17y ago
  hm. I tested it on Opera 9.64 on OS X and it seems to work fine. I haven't tested the linux version, though. Sorry, you must hate that Opera is always neglected by web sites!
- kingnothing 17y ago
  For what it's worth, it loads fine for me with Opera 10 build 4345, but it didn't work with the first Opera 10 alpha. Here's a link if you're interested: http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4345/ http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4345/
ilyak 17y ago
Of course it doesn't work in my Konqueror :)
endtime 17y ago
Looks really nice, but perhaps a little buggy? I'm using Opera 9.64 on XP and when trying to view the stream about the missing France flight, I was only able to get two of three streams at a time. The third would show a paused icon in the top right. First, the Twitter stream was paused; after I clicked around the timeline, the Twitter stream started working but the pictures frame emptied and stopped working. Great stuff overall.
- davidcann 17y ago
  Hm, did you see a little pause icon in the top right of the column? If so, you probably had your mouse hovering over that column. It pauses on mouse-over so you can read something that you see is interesting. Edit: Having said that... yes, I'm sure there are bugs!
  - endtime 17y ago
    I did have the pause icon, but it didn't go away as I moved my mouse around the screen.
ochiba 17y ago
Very cool! When I watched the Air France stream, many of the items were in foreign languages. You could offload language detection to the Google Languages AJAX API to allow filtering by language, or even better, automatic translation on-the-fly ;)
rythie 17y ago
It looks good! I had a few problems though: It appears you can pause individual columns but clicking on the pause button doesn't work (in Firefox at least) The columns should have titles The last column (Links) keeps the background title over the text (in Firefox at least) Selecting different stories on the left seems not to work some of the time and there is no pointer icon when hovering over them (in Firefox at least) I think you need a page explaining what is going on and how the site works because it seems to assume you already know.
vaksel 17y ago
congrats on getting techcrunch covered
- rythie 17y ago
  here is the link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/almostat-real-time-events-as-tweeted-by-the-people-who-are-actually-there/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/almostat-real-time-even...
- davidcann 17y ago
  Thanks! That's pretty funny because I only told people about this site 2 and a half hours ago!
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
mrduncan 17y ago
Looks great! This is definitely one of those first apps which will help give people an idea of what Cappuccino can do. One bug I noticed: Expanding the left column seems to have some issues. More specifically, the content doesn't seem to expand with it until you click on another event. (In Safari 4 on a Mac)
- davidcann 17y ago
  Yea :/ I've been trying to solve that bug, though it has been elusive, thus far.
moe 17y ago
Hm. Doesn't work on linux in Firefox Minefield , Opera 9.63 or in Konqueror 3.5.8. I only get a spinner for a few seconds - followed by a blank screen. In windows firefox it works (a bit sluggish, though). Anyways, apart from that problem and a few minor bugs it's a really nice tech-demo. I don't see myself using such a service, but you might find some followers in the twitter crowd.
palish 17y ago
I am not sure it's working correctly on Chrome. Here's what I see: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/almost.at.jpg http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/almost.at.jpg I gave up trying to figure out what to do after about a minute.
- davidcann 17y ago
  Hm... that's not good. It should have a sidebar on the left. Looks like it's Chrome on Windows, right? I'll have a look and see if I can reproduce it.
  - palish 17y ago
    Yep, Chrome on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.
alain94040 17y ago
It looks gorgeous, but I have one question about web pages that look like applications: what happens when I leave the page and later want to come back? Is there a "save" button? On my computer, I can come back to my data very easily. The next time I open an app, everything is where I left it. Does Capuccino work the same way?
- davidcann 17y ago
  Not really, but there's not much "personalized" data on almost.at to save. If there were (or is in the future), then yea, your data could definitely be saved and displayed when you return. Check out 280 Slides from the creators of Cappuccino: http://280slides.com http://280slides.com
wmeredith 17y ago
I gave it about 30 seconds to load and then left. I saw it was just TC'd so maybe I'll try back in a few days.
vindi 17y ago
nice job. let me guess, you own a Mac? :) Beautiful UI. mouse cursor over items on left remained as arrow for me. Maybe hover color or hand cursor?
khandekars 17y ago
Beautiful! Rocks on FireFox 3.0.10 on Fedora 10. I expected it to be slow, but was pleasantly surprised to see the overall speed after initial loading was over. The '5 seconds remaining' idea is elegant.
smokinn 17y ago
I'm not sure if this is intentional or a browser bug (I'm using Chrome so anything Webkit/Safari should be the same) but at the bottom of the menu panel on the left I see a resize button (bottom right of left panel). If I resize the panel, the menu itself doesn't resize, only the right side menus shrink.
- davidcann 17y ago
  Definitely a bug... thanks for the report.
zitterbewegung 17y ago
It looks pretty professional. Sort of interesting too. If there was a way to automatically get hashtags or news stories or submit possible stories that might be a way to improve the service.
asmosoinio 17y ago
Font aliasing in the bottom timeline is not working for me. Running Google Chrome on Vista. Screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/zhoSHkz1Q http://screencast.com/t/zhoSHkz1Q
- davidcann 17y ago
  Thanks for the report. That looks awful! I'm going to try to reproduce it.
HouseTrip 17y ago
Love the interface and the real-time aggregation thing. However I think it would be even better if one could submit the topic to be searched and aggregated for --> not limited to events chosen by you. For instance I'd like to find mention of my company at specific times (during a viral campaign, etc.)
Ravir 17y ago
very nice interface. thanks for adding #cricket. :)
c00p3r 17y ago
Eye candy sells, especially for toys. iPhone is an icon because of an eye candy, visual effects and primitiveness - the stuff for masses. This is really very good toy - just sit and watch and sometimes read, but not much (140 chars of very simple language) - that is exactly what a people wants from time waster.
arihelgason 17y ago
Amazing interface. Favicon maybe a bit too reminiscent of Alexa.

164 points by davidcann 17y ago

davidcann 17y ago

I used Cappuccino to build the front-end, so thanks go to the 280 North guys!

ashleyw 17y ago
May I ask, how much work went into it? (compared to what you'd imagine it'd have taken you to do from scratch, using jQuery or something?) Because it's the slickest web-app I've seen in…well, ever!
- davidcann 17y ago
  Well, quite a bit, I guess... but not THAT much. I'm a full time freelance developer and I made this in my spare time over the past 3-4 months. I had the idea a year ago, but you know how that goes!
  - holaberlin 17y ago
    Congratulations. This is remarkable. What's the backend like?
    - davidcann 17y ago
      The index.html and Cappuccino javascript are served from an EC2 server and the new content is continuously loaded from sequential files on Amazon S3 via JSONP (0.json, 1.json, 2.json, etc.). Views, suggesting events, and adding followees are sent to php pages on EC2 with MySQL.
messel 17y ago
I like that it grabs events out, instead of just trending words. How did you manage that if you don't mind sharing? I'm a big fan of tools, especially cool ones so thanks for showing great ideas can be made real in ones spare time if they keep plugging!
- davidcann 17y ago
  Events are suggested by users (the little + button in the lower left). Currently, I approve/reject them by hand to keep it focused. Eventually, I'll have a public voting system.
messel 17y ago
Just finished bouncing to all my favorite social sights and bumped almost.at When I'm jealous of a developers work, I actively promote said dev :D Great job, please keep on cookin' How many services can you pull in and grab info from? in the future google waves? Whatever you're using to identify events from the data deluge should be applicable to all real time web services. I'm very interested in the code used, and if you need any volunteers for specific APIs or problems give a hollar (my background is algorithm development + monte carlo analysis simulations/modeling mostly c++)

aditya 17y ago

Fascinating. Would be nice if you labeled the three columns, (The first is twitter mentions, the second flickr and the third everything else?) But it looks like a great way of visualizing developing stories, with the downside being that you can only really track one thing at a time. How are you dealing with reducing noise from stuff that you pull from twitter or the web?

davidcann 17y ago
Thanks! The "Followees" feature is going to be key in avoiding the twitter hashtag spam. Basically, you add people on twitter who are actually attending the event... and their posts are highlighted in yellow. You can also see only followee posts with the button at the top. I was testing Google I/O last week with 50-60 followees and it really cut through the spam and all the "I wish I were at Google I/O!!!!" posts. I'll be at WWDC next week and I'm hoping that the big Keynote will be a good test for the system.

jack7890 17y ago

Very cool. Easy quick improvement: add "cursor: pointer" to the CSS of the event links on the left-hand side. That will make it easier for the user to tell he should click on them.

davidcann 17y ago
Thanks, good point.

paul9290 17y ago

Cool that you list tweet links from major news sources! When a user clicks on CNN, BBC or others could you not on the left most side bring up the article they clicked so they dont go to another site? Would be a UI thing, but I would never leave the page and I could click and read all the news stories about X, while staying within your site.

davidcann 17y ago
Interesting... I was thinking an embedded viewer for photos would be good, but articles could work too. I could make that an option, so people could jump out to a new window if they prefer. Thanks!

geuis 17y ago

Man, I love what Cappuccino can do. It looks really slick. However, on a top-end Mac Pro with 6gb of RAM in Safari 4 beta and Firefox 3.5 beta, its sloooooow. Everything is just really jerky and non-responsive while trying to navigate around. All that aside, its a really great interface. Soon as you enable some additional functionality (like search) and speed up the interface, this will be something I want to come to.

davidcann 17y ago
Yea, I am definitely working to speed up the interface responsiveness. There's a standalone app OS X that you can keep open for hours, so it won't bog down your main browser: https://s3.amazonaws.com/almostatapps/almost.at.dmg https://s3.amazonaws.com/almostatapps/almost.at.dmg
- Caged 17y ago
  Great Stuff, although when I fire up this app all I get is a blank white screen. Didn't get any useful information on the console. I assume this is just a wrapper around a WebView? I'm running the latest Safari 4 beta and the web version works fine.
  - davidcann 17y ago
    Hm. I guess I have some bugs to work out. I had that happen to me once, but haven't been able to reproduce it since. I'll try, though. Yes, it's just a WebView... I hope people don't think I'm trying to push it as a "real" OS X app, because it's just javascript, so I'm trying to call it a "Standalone Browser."
- kqr2 17y ago
  Since you used Cappuccino, were you able to compile this from the same source as the web site?
  - davidcann 17y ago
    Yea, though technically it's not "compiled" ... only the browser wrapper is compiled objective-c code. It's still just html/javascript running inside.

redorb 17y ago

You must be getting hammered by traffic; I just gave ya 30 seconds to load.. I'll try again later.

davidcann 17y ago
The initial load might take a minute, but once it loads, 99% of the traffic is served from Amazon S3 via JSONP, so that part should hopefully scale well. If you're on OS X, there's a standalone browser app you can download (has the code embedded, so no loading time). I'm still working on a Mozilla Prism or custom WebKit standalone browser for Windows. I welcome the traffic rush, though, because I want to figure out how to scale it!
- jeroen 17y ago
  The initial load might take a minute You might want to mention that on the initial page. Yesterday I also gave up after 30 seconds, and I only came back today because this is still on the HN frontpage.

kwamenum86 17y ago

uuuh...guys? I think Bing might be better than Google....what do I do?

wooster 17y ago

This is fantastic! I could see myself paying for the ability to set up feeds to share with other people during an event. It's also nice to see Cappuccino being used for something outside of 280 North. :)

JacobAldridge 17y ago
I hadn't even thought of that, but you're right - I would definitely pay to have one of my conferences included / featured, which would encourage attendees to communicate about them more - I win all round.
messel 17y ago
automagic revenue stream, sounds brilliant

alexkearns 17y ago

Beautiful, beautiful interface. Worked perfectly smoothly on my MacBook 2.2Ghz with 2GB ram. Am very jealous. Makes the interface of my AJAXified web app - www.gambolio.com - look a tad amateurish. Mine was done using jQuery, btw.

whacked_new 17y ago
Nice interface, but jerky animation, which isn't surprising for jQuery, but a bit unfortunate.
- alexkearns 17y ago
  Whacked, what library is best for animations, in your opinions> I heard mootools was pretty good.
  - whacked_new 17y ago
    6 months ago I could easy find a jQuery animated effect somewhere that got sluggish if you start generating many simultaneous effects. There is an article by Dave Shea on A List Apart that would visibly choke if you moved your cursor around the links quickly; someone wrote one in Mootools and it was smooth. But I just revisited the article and it wasn't choking anymore. My hunch is Mootools will still give you an edge. But it might not last long.
    - ahoyhere 17y ago
      You guys are both oversimplifying the animation performance issue. Alex will probably write slow animations with whatever framework he's using, because it depends way more on how you program than with what. You have to be cognizant of your DOM, your scripting practices, your loops, etc., etc. I'm gonna be a total whore and probably get downmodded but, hey, I wrote a book on this exact topic: http://jsrocks.com/ http://jsrocks.com/ with Thomas Fuchs, the creator of Scriptaculous. (Wait til you see Scripty2.)
      - 17y ago

crux 17y ago

I think it's pretty cool looking. One question, one concern: 1) Are events added manually? They certainly seem well-enough targeted that I could see them being so. But the flip side of that is that there's a lot of other events of a similar nature, but with less of a geeky focus, that I'm afraid I wouldn't see. If they're not manually added, how are you ensuring that all events that could be potentially targeted are included? 2) It might be nice to include a throttle for the refresh speed. 5 seconds, for a high-volume item like the BEA, was total information overload. EDIT: I should be more precise about #2. I'm seeing that even though it's been constantly refreshing every 5 sec for a couple minutes, it's still up to May 29. So maybe it's not actually that high-volume, but there's still something going on where I'm seeing a hard-to-follow stream of text.

davidcann 17y ago
1) Yes, users suggest events and the moderator (me) approves them, if they're relevant. I'm trying to keep it to a short curated list of what's happening in the world (also, there's rate limits on most APIs!). Eventually, I'll add a system for users to publicly vote for "upcoming" events. 2) There isn't currently a throttle, but if you mouse-over a column, it will pause so you can read something interesting that you see. Mouse out and it un-pauses. Also, it's like an IM conversation... if you scroll up, it will stop auto-scrolling to the bottom.

mahmud 17y ago

I am not sure what it does, but it looks fucking gorgeous.

chops 17y ago
I had the same thought. It's a very impressive interface, but I couldn't find an "About" link that really says what it is, and it wasn't terribly obvious (at least to me). I see what looks like twitter stuff, I see comments, and I see links to news stuff. But perhaps an "About" clicky would be helpful. But overall nice job with the interface. Very slick.
- astine 17y ago
  Or even a video would be helpful.
  - mahmud 17y ago
    As someone trying to make a video for "the product" with zero video editing experience, let me say that I no longer expect it from others. It's enough programmers are even making the UI useable.
markm 17y ago
It looks like a real-time news aggregation service. Very good, would benefit from a search bar on the homepage and integration of real time comments from social sites such as digg, reddit and even Facebook public profiles.
buugs 17y ago
To be fair it does say: "Following People at Real-World Events in Real-Time" on the front page and then lists the services it uses to find the information.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

ErrantX 17y ago

I played around with it for a bit and thought it was quite cool. Then just as I was about to click close I saw the wierd slider thing at the bottom and though - ah that would be so awesome if I could slide it and.... OH COOL! Kudos.

username 17y ago
I read this and slided to an earlier time. Now it's difficult to get back to the current time. Dragging the slider to a future time or clicking to the right brings me back to the earliest simulated time. Using Chrome 2 and it isn't slow.
- ErrantX 17y ago
  Same issue here (using Chrome 2 as well :D). However for me the slider stayed at the earliest time but the updates appeared correctly in real time.
messel 17y ago
Hacker ;)

halo 17y ago

Neat idea, but this is unusably slow on my PC (Firefox 3, Core 2 Duo 2ghz).

bradlane 17y ago
hate to add a "works for me" post, but try it in the firefox 3.5 beta - it has the new javascript engine, which makes this run very nicely. It was speedy in google chrome too.

papaf 17y ago

All I see is a timer and then just a black screen. I'm using Opera 9.64 on x86_64 Linux. I'm sad because the other comments make it sound awesome.

davidcann 17y ago
hm. I tested it on Opera 9.64 on OS X and it seems to work fine. I haven't tested the linux version, though. Sorry, you must hate that Opera is always neglected by web sites!
kingnothing 17y ago
For what it's worth, it loads fine for me with Opera 10 build 4345, but it didn't work with the first Opera 10 alpha. Here's a link if you're interested: http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4345/ http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/snapshot-4345/

ilyak 17y ago

Of course it doesn't work in my Konqueror :)

endtime 17y ago

Looks really nice, but perhaps a little buggy? I'm using Opera 9.64 on XP and when trying to view the stream about the missing France flight, I was only able to get two of three streams at a time. The third would show a paused icon in the top right. First, the Twitter stream was paused; after I clicked around the timeline, the Twitter stream started working but the pictures frame emptied and stopped working. Great stuff overall.

davidcann 17y ago
Hm, did you see a little pause icon in the top right of the column? If so, you probably had your mouse hovering over that column. It pauses on mouse-over so you can read something that you see is interesting. Edit: Having said that... yes, I'm sure there are bugs!
- endtime 17y ago
  I did have the pause icon, but it didn't go away as I moved my mouse around the screen.

ochiba 17y ago

Very cool! When I watched the Air France stream, many of the items were in foreign languages. You could offload language detection to the Google Languages AJAX API to allow filtering by language, or even better, automatic translation on-the-fly ;)

rythie 17y ago

It looks good! I had a few problems though: It appears you can pause individual columns but clicking on the pause button doesn't work (in Firefox at least) The columns should have titles The last column (Links) keeps the background title over the text (in Firefox at least) Selecting different stories on the left seems not to work some of the time and there is no pointer icon when hovering over them (in Firefox at least) I think you need a page explaining what is going on and how the site works because it seems to assume you already know.

vaksel 17y ago

congrats on getting techcrunch covered

rythie 17y ago
here is the link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/almostat-real-time-events-as-tweeted-by-the-people-who-are-actually-there/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/almostat-real-time-even...
davidcann 17y ago
Thanks! That's pretty funny because I only told people about this site 2 and a half hours ago!

deleted 17y ago

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mrduncan 17y ago

Looks great! This is definitely one of those first apps which will help give people an idea of what Cappuccino can do. One bug I noticed: Expanding the left column seems to have some issues. More specifically, the content doesn't seem to expand with it until you click on another event. (In Safari 4 on a Mac)

davidcann 17y ago
Yea :/ I've been trying to solve that bug, though it has been elusive, thus far.

moe 17y ago

Hm. Doesn't work on linux in Firefox Minefield , Opera 9.63 or in Konqueror 3.5.8. I only get a spinner for a few seconds - followed by a blank screen. In windows firefox it works (a bit sluggish, though). Anyways, apart from that problem and a few minor bugs it's a really nice tech-demo. I don't see myself using such a service, but you might find some followers in the twitter crowd.

palish 17y ago

I am not sure it's working correctly on Chrome. Here's what I see: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/almost.at.jpg http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/random_pics/almost.at.jpg I gave up trying to figure out what to do after about a minute.

davidcann 17y ago
Hm... that's not good. It should have a sidebar on the left. Looks like it's Chrome on Windows, right? I'll have a look and see if I can reproduce it.
- palish 17y ago
  Yep, Chrome on Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit.

alain94040 17y ago

It looks gorgeous, but I have one question about web pages that look like applications: what happens when I leave the page and later want to come back? Is there a "save" button? On my computer, I can come back to my data very easily. The next time I open an app, everything is where I left it. Does Capuccino work the same way?

davidcann 17y ago
Not really, but there's not much "personalized" data on almost.at to save. If there were (or is in the future), then yea, your data could definitely be saved and displayed when you return. Check out 280 Slides from the creators of Cappuccino: http://280slides.com http://280slides.com

wmeredith 17y ago

I gave it about 30 seconds to load and then left. I saw it was just TC'd so maybe I'll try back in a few days.

vindi 17y ago

nice job. let me guess, you own a Mac? :) Beautiful UI. mouse cursor over items on left remained as arrow for me. Maybe hover color or hand cursor?

khandekars 17y ago

Beautiful! Rocks on FireFox 3.0.10 on Fedora 10. I expected it to be slow, but was pleasantly surprised to see the overall speed after initial loading was over. The '5 seconds remaining' idea is elegant.

smokinn 17y ago

I'm not sure if this is intentional or a browser bug (I'm using Chrome so anything Webkit/Safari should be the same) but at the bottom of the menu panel on the left I see a resize button (bottom right of left panel). If I resize the panel, the menu itself doesn't resize, only the right side menus shrink.

davidcann 17y ago
Definitely a bug... thanks for the report.

zitterbewegung 17y ago

It looks pretty professional. Sort of interesting too. If there was a way to automatically get hashtags or news stories or submit possible stories that might be a way to improve the service.

asmosoinio 17y ago

Font aliasing in the bottom timeline is not working for me. Running Google Chrome on Vista. Screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/zhoSHkz1Q http://screencast.com/t/zhoSHkz1Q

davidcann 17y ago
Thanks for the report. That looks awful! I'm going to try to reproduce it.

HouseTrip 17y ago

Love the interface and the real-time aggregation thing. However I think it would be even better if one could submit the topic to be searched and aggregated for --> not limited to events chosen by you. For instance I'd like to find mention of my company at specific times (during a viral campaign, etc.)

Ravir 17y ago

very nice interface. thanks for adding #cricket. :)

c00p3r 17y ago

Eye candy sells, especially for toys. iPhone is an icon because of an eye candy, visual effects and primitiveness - the stuff for masses. This is really very good toy - just sit and watch and sometimes read, but not much (140 chars of very simple language) - that is exactly what a people wants from time waster.

arihelgason 17y ago

Amazing interface. Favicon maybe a bit too reminiscent of Alexa.