Ask HN: Looking for a few beta testers (Capsulr)

2 pointskgen12y ago2 comments

I’ve been working the past few months on a tool to help developers capture and document their work. It kind of began when I was looking at my side projects and regretted not having documented past projects better, and also not really having a good way to measure the progress I was making on my current projects. The good news is that I’ve been using it for Capsulr itself, and it has a positive effect on helping me continue to make more progress week after week (ship early, ship often), the bad news is that not many people have tried it and I’m looking for a few enterprising people to try it out and see if it would be useful for them?

I would love any sort of feedback that the wider HN community might have. Thanks!

Capsulr - http://capsulr.com/?hn

2 comments

2 comments · 1 top-level

johnmurch12y ago· 1 in thread

Pretty cool!

I like the concept and think I too don't document my work as often as I should, so a tool like this is super useful.

Quick Notes: On boarding - after signing up - I am just shown collections, maybe a page to describe 3 things you can do - you already have it on the homepage, but to provide (Click on My Colletion (top nav) then Notes... etc.).

It's a little hard to find/see "My collections" as it's not part of the top nav. Collections show public collections so may want to adjust how.

Just some quick thoughts.

I also think a tool for capturing/storing design/ui elemnts (e.g. https://icebergs.com/site) might be another approach (sample tool, but also useful).

This is also assuming all my "projects" are public facing. It would be nice to be able to run/tunnel/some hack to capture local progress and showcase that.

kgenOP12y ago

Thanks John!

Good point on the post-sign up flow, it certainly warrants something more than an alert at the top of the page. I agree that it's nice to be able to store individual snippets, but I look at the web and see how fast it moves, there are patterns that many sites across the site share, that I think people would benefit from exploring and sharing publicly. That said, an Iceberg-like feature might be a cool way to collect various elements from different sites :).

I also definitely agree on the public vs. private work feature. I am thinking about having private Collections for pre-release/private/beta work, and the public Collections for things that are already out there. As there is currently no distinction between the two, I've surprisingly found myself less preoccupied whether something is "out there" and can be copied by someone else, and more preoccupied on just trying to do things right.

Thanks again for your feedback! Much appreciated!

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