If somebody sends me a link with the URL "app.getclick.co", there's roughly zero chance I'm clicking on that. Not to dissuade you from your chosen branding, but would it be possible to make your links appear a bit less spammy?
Hey creator, just wanted to say great job. A lot of these Hacker News comments are predictably neck-beardy and lack the recognition of effort and dedication put into a product launch.
Don't listen to the non-constructive "yeah but X already does it" comments. This seems like a simple but useful product, and good on you all for putting this out there. Keep creating and iterating!
Put a CDN in front of S3 to keep your bill low (you’ll only get dinged for the first origin to edge transfer out), or store in Backblaze B2 instead and use Cloudflare (they have a storage/CDN partnership making the overall cost much lower than S3).
Sorry to hear that it's behaving badly for you. Happy to delete your account manually since we don't have any of that built in at the moment. Feel free to email me at george [at] stilllife [dot] studio with the email address.
Registration is useful for future features (like having an index of all your videos for example if you wanted to delete some of them)
Videos are supposed to get uploaded before hitting done to increase performance, but if it's crashing I'm not sure they uploaded succesfully.
If they are being uploaded show a progress bar immedietly. Make it obvious to the user what is happening. Magical applications that do things silently usually tend to fail silently in non obvious ways. At least with a graph you have a point of reference.
Where is the data stored? How is this funded? If out of pocket, why, and how will it be funded beyond that? Would I be unwise to use this with such an unclear future or funding source? Are the videos encrypted at rest with a key as part of the link and never stored? Why not add all of the details about storage, privacy, etc in a clear and upfront way on the website (e.g. a FAQ is fine)?
What languages did you write it in? What stack did you use for your backend? What format is video stored in? What format is it played back in (ie, real video or chopped up video like HTS/DASH)? Can I users get access to direct video file links? How much does bandwidth cost you? Did you chose to use an existing CDN or roll your own? Is this only for Apple (tm) smart phones? Is it only for smart phones?
Great questions! We learned a ton doing the video work on this never having worked with video encoding before.
We built front end using React Native (ejected from Expo), backend API using Rails (as that's our most comfortable stack). The video encoding processing is handled by Amazon Elastic Transcoder, hosting the videos on s3.
There's a sneaky amount of transcoding involved in the simple app, but it's all cheap at a few dollars a month so far with some use.
We're not using a CDN atm but are looking at using cloudfront. Right now it's only on Apple phones, but since we build the front end in React Native building for Android is on the roadmap if there's customer demand!
Why did you choose to use React Native if you weren't planning to use it for cross-platform purposes out of the box? Why not use swift or objective-c and then port to Android if there's customer demand?
> Why did you choose to use React Native if you weren't planning to use it for cross-platform purposes out of the box? Why not use swift or objective-c and then port to Android if there's customer demand?
There's lots of reasons someone might want to start with Expo while developing an app. If their team doesn't have native experience, it's far more accessible than needing to maintain a native stack (or two should they support Android).
It also supports the ability for OTAs out of the box, which allows them to be responsive to feedback / bugs / feature requests.
There's more to RN/Expo than "do you plan on releasing a cross-platform product at once". Even if their road map is "Apple now, Android later" the decision would still be justified.
Good question, I would say the biggest difference is the vine-like recording interface that lets you record multiple clips and merged them together. It also never requires you to save it on your phone. Not sure if the icloud feature allows you to record direct to the cloud but that may be an advantage as well.
> the biggest difference is the vine-like recording interface that lets you record multiple clips and merged them together
How do you view prior clips? Once I start a new clip I don't see a way to go back (it could be I'm missing something that's colored as I keep my iPhone SE in black and white mode)
> Hold-to-record mode lets you string clips together so that you can collect your thoughts between recording.
You can probably hold-to-record multiple times in a single movie (don't have an iPhone to test). Seems like the easiest and most straightforward way to do it, just no re-ordering of recorded clips.
Problem is when uploading from a Webform, IOS downscales the original file which I hate. Does this app get around that problem? If so, be good if I could post to my own S3 endpoint!
Why is there no content visible on the website, without enabling Javascript?
Try using Javascript just for the stuff that actually requires it, and let the rest of the site work for people who browse with Javascript turned off. That will also make it much more mobile-friendly.
Looks really interesting. Are there any plans for an API or something like integration with IFTTT? Would love to be able to automate the process of capturing a video and having the link directly emailed to me or added to todo list.
