Bootstrap 4 Beta 2(blog.getbootstrap.com) |
Bootstrap 4 Beta 2(blog.getbootstrap.com) |
"Emotionally Distant Grandchild" , "Good Grandchild", "Nana's #1"
We didn’t put much thought into the pricing plan names to be honest. Will pitch this to my brother, who I built this out with over the last couple months.
Edit: I see you replied to someone else and I cannot tell if the service is actually live (as in my card is going to be charged and photos are going to ship).
We’re definitly going to add other options in time. Right now we’re trying to get the MVP right with 4x6 glossy prints.
There’s a few other services that let you send postcards (expensive) or use apps to let you grab pictures from your phone. The apps tend to have more friction than just sending an MMS and to my knowledge, we’re the only ones that let you add the captions for context for your grandparent.
Would love feedback as you use it more. We’re pretth fast at building stuff and love hearing ideas from our customers.
We have the ability to do matte or glossy already and I just need to get in there an add it as an option. I'll make a note to ping you once that's ready.
The service is live and ready. Your first order will ship in 30 days from now! :)
I just sent your link to my wife who literally sends photo packages of our kid to her mother (who does not live independently and lives vicariously through the life of our kid).
I appreciate that you're not fully up-and-running just yet, but from the looks of it, a little operational scaling may be in your future :-)
Best of luck with the venture.
We're beta testing the app right now with friends & family and have made our first few deliveries already. The response has been great so far from people's grandparents. They love getting the prints in the mail with the captions to tell the story of the photo on them.
We're going to be exploring international shipping soon. What country does the person you want to send photos to live in?
[edit - spelling]
However, just as frameworks like angular and libraries like react are "componentizing" the front end and replacing general purpose utilities like jQuery, will we see a similar trend with modular css where component styles will replace the need for large css frameworks like bootstrap? Or is modular css merely a complement to whatever sitewide css framework you've chosen?
My favorite part of Bootstrap 4 is actually its newly included CSS reset Reboot [0]. It's built on Normalize, but also provides a set of very compelling improvements like making use of the native font stack, a bunch of very sensible spacing and layout adjustments, and built-in optimizations for touch responsiveness (removing the 300ms delay). I'm definitely going to be trying it out on my next project regardless of whether or not it uses Bootstrap itself.
With that said, I don't mean to rain on the parade, but I've been gradually deviating away from using CSS frameworks for my projects, not because I don't _want_ to use them, but rather because most CSS frameworks don't seem to mix naturally with component-oriented CSS-in-JS libraries like glamorous [1], which is my preferred way to work with styling these days.
If I do include a CSS framework, I end up having to use a mix of custom component-scoped styles and global CSS classes from these frameworks, and those CSS classes may have margins and cascading effects that reach into children. This breaks component-level style isolation, and makes the styling of children much harder to reason about, which defeats much of the purpose of using component-oriented CSS to begin with.
What I really want to do is to import styles from a well designed CSS framework _as a JS module_ (but I'm willing to accept anything that's properly namespaced and isolated, like CSS Modules), and compose them with my own styles without worrying about a polluted global namespace or styles from parents reaching into children/vice versa or fighting with specificity issues.
So far, I haven't found any CSS frameworks that fit the bill, but Tachyons [2] seems like it could be close enough (by emphasizing modular, low specificity, shallowly cascading styles) that I could maybe just run it through a CSS to JS compiler like native-css [3] and import its classes and compose them as I would with any other JS style object. This is something I'm going to experiment with soon enough, but I'd love to hear if others have any thoughts/experiences they'd like to share on using CSS frameworks with component-oriented CSS.
Bootstrap has a nice grid system (although the actual CSS standard is amazing now) and handles basic elements like buttons well. For everything else, Tachyon's component helpers make layouts really easy and fast.
* Lacks all the JS components
* Lifts from Bootstrap for most of the CSS components, sometimes down to the class name
* Makes the mistakes of early Bootstrap, namely heavily nested classes like .card .media:not(:last-child) that are difficult to overwrite and cause great pain when customizing
* Uses antiquated non-extensible syntax/naming conventions for breakpoints, such as "is-desktop" instead of "small, medium, large" etc
* grid system is not flexible, breakpoints are hardcoded and there's no easy way to generate your own grid
* no mixins I can use in Sass instead of using classes in HTML. There are a few helpers but no way to setup columns without HTML classes (like you can in Bootstrap)
* overall lack of easy customization, no theming tool and very limited variables. in BS almost everything can be customized using Sass variables
It simply isn't as mature or battle-tested as Bootstrap. There's a reason it's not 1.0 yet. BS can do everything Bulma can, the reverse is not true.
Bootstrap has more stars (117k) on GitHub than the next 6 CSS frameworks combined: https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=css+framework&s=stars&typ...
FWIW Bulma is third with 20.4k. And I’m legit going to check it out now that, you know, I’ve heard of it ;)
Of course, GitHub stars aren’t everything, and momentum is important, but to say no one cares is objectively wrong. This is a big deal for a large swath of the industry.
Really it's very easy to build your own database software these days, database servers look an easy solution for beginning your project but they become a burden gradually as your project grows.
Really it's very easy to build your own car these days, pre-made cars look an easy solution for beginning your project but they become a burden gradually as your project grows.
...
All of these cases may be true if you are the 0.01% that wants to do it to learn or have some very special business need that calls for it. For the other 99.99% of the time, it just keeps you from focusing on the stuff you actually need or want to accomplish.
> Really it's very easy to build your own car these days
Wow really? Hold my beer while I go build some car and a database! You learn something new every day!
But for user-facing stuff, designers and PMs want to tweak everything about the interface, and by the time you're done, you've rewritten most of the CSS and you actually spent more effort doing so than had you just written the CSS yourself the first time.
Also, the way you wrote it ends up being a frankenstein-esque collection of style overrides. Zurb foundation is notorious for requiring hyper-specific CSS rules to override their default styles.
Bootstrap has made some progress towards making it more tweakable, but if you're maintaining/customizing an app long-term, you're better off writing your own css for the most part.
Edit: to add to that, the biggest problem that bootstrap solves IMO is a standard grid system, of which there are now many, more composable grid systems to choose from. Grid systems are so basic that its probably fine to pull one from the shelf, but with flexbox its really not that hard to write your own anyway.
Then, bootstrap added what I want to call widgets: small functional units that can easily be reused. Here, as well, browsers have changed dramatically. At the time bootstrap came out, these widgets required browser-specific, inscrutable hacks like negative margins, spacer pixels, and other crimes against htmlanity. Relative to 10 years ago, all of today's browser engines are identical, and CSS has added all these typical use cases.
What remains is more or less a skin changing html's defaults to something that may be prettier, or just not weighed down by the stigma of being the default.
That format seems to work for the #2 company on the Fortune 500. Not that their website is beautiful, but sometimes it simply doesn't even matter.
Bootstrap just works, so I stay with it. I don't even want to learn the new one because BS3 already solves my problems.
If I'm making a content-website (where the "killer app" is the content and not presentation) I use bootstrap - its definitely cheaper than a web designer.
Why should somebody who is technically proficient or even highly skilled in developing on the backend bother with becoming equally skilled enough on the frontend to not "need" these frameworks? Especially when it matters very little.
Browsers are not so consistent as people think. CSS is difficult to get right. UI/UX is hard if you are not a designer. Interactions between DOM, CSS, and JS are hard to test.
With flexbox, media queries and SCSS i dont find any need for a CSS framework anymore. My codebase without Bootstrap (and JQuery) feels so light, flexible and maintainable nowadays.
BUT, bootstrap is still awesome for the design elements.
Layout and such is easy. UI components, forms, etc, take a lot longer.
<div class="row">
<div class="col">left sidebar</div>
<div class="col">content area</div>
<div class="col">right sidebar</div>
</div>
Tachyons [2] is another CSS framework that basically takes the component approach to the extreme and makes all styles separate, like bootstrap being made of only utilities.
Something like this also needs the ability to delay shipments - old people are more likely to be admitted to hospitals or similar.
We'll probably keep the Premier plan but need to rename the others.
I noticed your changing text of names. If you do international, the choices are huge.
My kids haven't seemed to figure out how to make babies. I've even tried bribery, to no avail. So, I'll send your link to all my old people friends. They can then send the link to their children and guilt them into using your service.
Maybe a HN launch would be good? Pardon me, if I missed it and you've already done it. Still, I'll forward it to the appropriate old folks for you. Good luck! It looks like a brilliant idea and the name is fantastic!
Edit: Also, the price for 100 is really, really low. I don't know about the math, but that's impressive. If you're able to profit at that amount, great. However, I expect a much higher price for that number and, if actually wanted, would pay more - assuming the pics are on good quality stock and well done.
I could also see some value added services. Touch ups, fancy text, maybe frames at holiday season, border themes, things like that.
For fancy text you may need to license fonts, by the way.
Edit again: A second opinion says your top two package prices are too low and she says the price 'makes her suspicious.' I asked why and she says it makes her think they are of poor quality.
I asked her about pricing she said, "The first one is $0.79, so $0.69, $0.59, $0.49. Something like that."
That's official Old Lady pricing suggestions. In other words, your highest package would be closer to $49.99 per month. I kind of agree with her - it would be more valuable than the price listed, of only I had a use.
She also suggested marketing it to the grandparents. Here is her quote, "Just market it to the grandparents. They will pay to have their kids send them pictures. It would be even better if they could choose a big package and let all their children send in pictures using the same account."
That's close to verbatim. The grandparents would have an account and their multiple kids could all send in pictures to the same account.
Err... She also suggests $X.XX/picture after X-amount of pictures. LOL It probably would have saved time to just give her the keyboard. She's very optimistic about your service.
HN launch could be fun. We haven't done that yet. Andy left this comment a couple hours ago on a whim and all of the sudden we're getting tons of crazy feedback! Right now we're just focused on trying to make the service solid for a handful of people.
The feedback on pricing is helpful. I'd actually like to get the prices down to half of where they're at now. 6-month stretch goal :)
Hadn't thought about the font customization over the images. Great idea.
Thanks for sharing with your old folk friends. Best of luck with the creation of Grandchildren. I'm rooting for you.
P.S. We called my grandmother on my Mother's side Mimmie before she passed away years ago. Scratching my head why I missed that one and thank you for the reminder.
On pricing, just want to confirm that you're seeing the price of $7.99/mo for 10 photos and not $0.79/mo for 10 photos?
That said, if you have to explain your joke, you've failed :) It was too long!
Creating a web application framework that handles your needs can be incredibly easy. I can, and have multiple time, done so in Perl for a quick project in the distant past. It takes about 20-30 lines or so on top of loading the modules you would probably already want available for a system like that. Pull in HTTP::Daemon, pull in the HTTP modules, tie them together with a little regex foo for route parsing, done. In the very simple case, it's easier to do this than pull in a framework. In the very complex case where you need intricate control over odd parts of the process that frameworks don't usually give you, it's easier if you had written your own from scratch. In all the other cases, which I feel I was being generous in saying was only 99.99% of the time, you're better off having offloaded the concern to someone else.
Creating a database is also very easy. In the simplest case, you choose a record structure and write to disk opportunistically or on every change. Again, for the very simplest case, that's actually easier than even pulling in SQLite. In the very complex case, you can do interesting preprocessing and specialized storage techniques to store your data in ways that aren't amenable to anything except for a custom format.[1] Again, the vast majority of the time, you just use SQLite, Redis, or a RDBMS and it does a passable job at dealing with all your data integrity and warehousing needs. If you're a company trying to manipulate a dataset in a heretofore unseen way (either much faster or much more detailed that before), you might actually need to do it from scratch.
Creating a car is also fairly easy, if you have the prior experience (about as much or less as expected above). Like above, you're largely throwing existing parts together and the hard work is knowing what goes where and shaving off the pointy bits that prevent it from fitting really well. If you need to race something (because why else do you create a car?), in the simplest case you might just grab some cheap broken down beater and put a little work into it where needed and you have something that goes in a circle and you won't care too much if it barely finishes. If you have the money, you can buy a pre-built race-ready car and compete as am amateur. If you're an F1 team, you build the whole thing from the ground up to exact specifications.
This is, of course, all presupposing that the people involved actually have the knowledge and ability to do the really simple or advanced things. Often, they don't, or at least don't have enough to make it even feasible. For example, I know how to read and write CSS, but I'm not very good at it. Similarly, I know how to write HTML and apply CSS fairly in an amateur manner. I'm not a UI or UX designer. Does it really behoove me to learn the intricacies of design layout instead of using Bootstrap? I either don't care about how it looks at all, in which case I'll make it text/plain or at the most a couple of header tags, or I care enough that to make it somewhat passable visually I'll use Bootstrap. In what situation am I better off using CSS? In what way does that apply to more than 0.01% of the people out there?
No one will take your argument seriously when you say ignorant stuff like "Creating a database is also very easy", or "Creating a car is also fairly easy".
No matter how you spin it, it is FAR from easy to build any of those, and the only people who think it's easy are those who don't have real experience.
Holy shit, did nobody read the last sentence of the original comment? I'll spell it out. The first three things were meant to be similar statements to the comment I was replying to, and the final sentence was explaining how they, plus the version in the comment I was replying to, were bullshit.
I then went into excruciating detail in the next comment on why, for each specific case, and capped it with a paragraph summarizing my point.
> No matter how you spin it, it is FAR from easy to build any of those, and the only people who think it's easy are those who don't have real experience.
Which is fully in line with exactly what I was saying.
We're talking about a bespoke just-for-my-project sort of thing. That you think it's not even worth it unless you can get tons of users is part of the point. It's just a distraction just like your bespoke CSS framework.
> to add to that, the biggest problem that bootstrap solves IMO is a standard grid system, of which there are now many, more composable grid systems to choose from. Grid systems are so basic that its probably fine to pull one from the shelf, but with flexbox its really not that hard to write your own anyway.
Bootstrap was sort of a pioneer in the generalized responsive framework space. I recall Zurb Foundation close behind and Skeleton a short time after that...although my time line might be a bit screwed up.
Now with flex box it is certainly easier to roll your own...and that reduces the value (somewhat) of using a framework like Bootstrap or Foundation or (insert other responsive framework here), but it doesn't make it 0 (IMO).
Frameworks are for the 99% of projects where not all of those are true. I’ve had good results limiting gratuitous changes that way: “do we want to pay to change this and test all of our supported browsers/accessibility/RTL?” is a lot better than “No”.
Sorry - I switched to a laptop, as it's easier to type this out.
Now, 10 pictures is $7.99 is $0.77 each.
To keep that in mind, and do some quick math...
Package 2 is 25 pictures. If we use the $0.69, then $17.25, which can be rounded down to $16.99.
It's not major until you get higher.
Package 3 is 50 pictures. Using the same progression, now at $0.59 per image, we get $29.50.
Package 5 is 100 pictures. Again, that's now $0.49 which works out to a price of $49.99.
If you wanted...
Package 1 could be $7.99 for 10 (each additional is $0.75)
Package 2 would be $16.99 for 25 (each additional is $0.65)
Package 3 would be $27.99 for 50 (each additional is $0.55)
Package 4 would be $49.99 for 100 (each additional is $0.45)
Something like that. 100 well printed pictures each month? That's well worth $49.99 for many of us.
That's also a lot of pictures - so the idea comes into play of having a single recipient who can have multiple authorized senders. So, the grandparent's three kids could all send pictures to the account. (There's a number of ways to decide if only x-amount get printed, perhaps the final choice is done by the payee.)
You can just email me, if you want. uninvolved@outlook.com is certain to be seen and responded to, eventually.
I don't want to derail the thread too far. I'm just trying to share some quick and dirty marketing data.
If each of my kids made me a grandfather, I'd buy a package of 100 - if they can distribute it between them. If not, I'd buy two packages of 100 - and I'd do so at the $49.99/mo price, no questions asked.
I kinda like the idea of X-dollars for X-number of pictures and then X-number for each additional pictures.
I guess if you were to do that part, you should do the ethical thing and automatically charge them the less expensive price if, for example, they want to send 25 pictures in one month. If they want to send 25 pictures that month, you might as well just charge them for Package 2.
It'd be more ethical and probably encourage people to try higher packages - and then commit to keeping that same level of shared pictures.
And, as said before, there's ton of value-added services that you could toss into this.
Feel free to email, if you want. I'll throw some time at you. I wasn't doing anything better and HN is always good at helping me out when I have a question.
Edit, I typed a number wrong.
She's remarkably interested in the product, if that is a signifier for you. We are old, in our fifties, and financially secure. The vast majority of our friends are in similar positions.
I add this because it may help your marketing choices and, while anecdotal, she does seem intrigued and excited.