Quote from Paul Wilkinson on February 4, 2022, 12:04 pm

Quote from Snappy on November 13, 2021, 7:10 pm

Hey all, I hope to steal a second of your time and get some feedback on an idea I've been having.

I threw together a rough (rough) prototype that helps you get the gist of things, check it out here:

https://www.snappiness.space/old-digital-camera-catalog/

The idea is a tool that lets you navigate information about old digital cameras in a format more similar to shopping. You could discover totally new cameras this way just by searching for cameras that are APS-C and under $150 used, for example. I often find myself digging through old websites or wikipedia articles to even see what kinds of cameras Olympus made, and then have to go search how much they cost, were there any other models that had different sensors or whatever. This would make it much easier to find gems.

The full idea has much more features than that but I wanted initial thoughts before I spend more time on it.

Would this be something you would use?

How important is the ability to search using attributes (like the kind of search that is traditionally found on a commerce site)?

Does keeping this tool specific to old digital cameras provide value to you over making it for all types of cameras?

I'll ask about more things later, but I wanted to check these assumptions first and get some feedback. Feel free to leave any other random comments as well. Thanks!

 

I think it's a great ideas. Like you, I've spent a ludicrous amount of hours searching from cameras with unique features or sensors, then even more hours looking for used models and great deals. This would be a fantastic starting point! 👍

Quote from James Warner on February 4, 2022, 12:44 pm

Quote from tristancarlos on February 3, 2022, 9:14 pm

Quote from Snappy on February 3, 2022, 12:40 pm

Quote from tristancarlos on February 3, 2022, 9:13 am

Looking good!

Do you want "user stories" as feedback from a real-life BA? 😀

Actually, yeah, that'd be great. Might help me organize the chaos that is how I do projects 😁 Your perspective will be good. I think I'm only a few steps away from getting it in some of y'alls hands. There's a few things to tweak and then I have to figure out how to configure the test harness app that I've never used before but looks promising. And like I said all you'll be able to do is search, but since that's the core functionality and the main value proposition then that's MVP for now.  I think even that's really helpful though without any fancy integrations, because otherwise I use my own excel sheets of cameras and specs and prices to figure out what cool gear to chase.

 

 

Here are a couple ideas on top of my head:

MVP

• As a user, I need to be able to search cameras by brand
• As a user, I want to be able to select multiple brands when searching by brand
• As a user, I need to be able to search by release year
• As a user, I want to be able to select  a range of release years when searching by release year
• As a user, I want to be able to search by sensor types (i.e. CCD, CMOS, etc)
• As a user , I want to be able to search by viewfinder type
• As a user, I want to see the brand, model name, release date, sensor size and type of each camera on the result page

Phase 2 - extra features

• As a user, I want to be able to search by camera style
• As a user, I want to be able to search by dimension
• As a user, I want to see a random camera of the day
• As a user, I want to see the "snappy" score of a camera and be able to search by score (the idea here is that there's an algorithm that sets a score of how unique or quirky the camera is? 😀 What do you think? )

Phase 3 - user area

• As a user, I want to keep a record of all cameras I own
• As a user, I want to store how much a bought and sold cameras for
• As a user, I want to add a camera I searched for to my wishlist

This is actually really good! Right along with what I was thinking. I might tweak some of the priorities for phase 2 and 3 but those are all ideas I've thought about (the snappy score is an original idea, though!).

I've also thought further down the road about comments/individual reviews. That will allow us to create a really more comprehensive database of these older cameras and how users feel about them, tips and tricks to use them, etc. More than I could do on my own.

The random camera of the day is definitely something I've thought about that would be fun and drive engagement. And I also thought a "camera shelf" section of a user profile would be a fun thing to collect cameras and share, once again to drive engagement.

But let me not get ahead of myself. xD

Last night I spent some time adding more cameras to the database for testing purposes, and fixed some alignment issues on the page. Getting closer to a demo I can share with y'all... thanks for the feedback and push. It's hard to have motivation to do something even if I'm really excited about it for my own sake. I tried the easy route to use a prefab website builder but none of the options I tried could do what I wanted, so I knew I had to write it from scratch. Harder, but it will pay off in the long run I think.

Quote from denniscrommett on February 8, 2022, 4:31 am

This really does sounds like a cool project @james-warner-b! Apologies if this idea has already been added, but just as a brainstorm/suggestion, I wonder if it'd be possible to have some way to see sample images from each (or some) cameras; whether that means a link to Flickr, or people could upload/download, I'm not sure. I feel like I've spent so much time trying to trick Flickr into showing me exactly the camera/lens combo I'm looking for... could be kinda handy. Anyway, fun!

Quote from ahoyhere on February 16, 2022, 12:29 am

This would be a lot of fun to play with. I think you might be able to build an initial version in Notion. Its templating is really powerful and it's a lot faster than custom development, plus the wiki format lends itself to the item pages.

Quote from James Warner on February 16, 2022, 4:53 pm

Quote from ahoyhere on February 16, 2022, 12:29 am

This would be a lot of fun to play with. I think you might be able to build an initial version in Notion. Its templating is really powerful and it's a lot faster than custom development, plus the wiki format lends itself to the item pages.

Cool, I'll look into that! Although now that I've started into it I'm not sure it would help much at this point. I did initially do a lot of searching into anything that would have a reusable template, but to no avail. They were either good wiki's either good search filters like I wanted, or good search filters but not good wiki features. But I prototyped something out on this website enough to think it was a good idea, now custom building it. I think in the end I'll be glad to have the custom built so that I can build some cool features into it. But would have been nice to have something for the rapid prototyping.

The update right now is that things have stalled these last two weeks while I wrap up a course I've been teaching. I work a day job and teach online at night. Will have more free time to work on it.

I need to add a few more filters to search by, and maybe I'll tweak the CSS a little so it doesn't look as sloppy. Still trying to figure out the best way to get it into y'alls hands to test. The test harness app I thought of doesn't work the way I thought. I don't want to deploy an initial version to the app store because it's expensive. Might try hosting it on the same web server this is hosted on. I would really like everyones hands on feedback though. That's really helpful to find things as a developer I overlook.

Quote from ahoyhere on February 17, 2022, 7:01 am

Sweet, I’m excited to try it out! My friends joke that I’m the world’s best software QA so you may regret asking for feedback 😂 Things spontaneously break around me. It’s helpful tho (I run a SaaS).

Definitely don’t think it needs to be an app store mobile app. Not a lot of vintage camera emergencies.

Quote from James Warner on February 17, 2022, 3:32 pm

Quote from ahoyhere on February 17, 2022, 7:01 am

Sweet, I’m excited to try it out! My friends joke that I’m the world’s best software QA so you may regret asking for feedback 😂 Things spontaneously break around me. It’s helpful tho (I run a SaaS).

Definitely don’t think it needs to be an app store mobile app. Not a lot of vintage camera emergencies.

One of my internships was in software QA. It's a very important job & skill to have, even if it can be painful as a developer sometimes 😁 Better to find out now than later...

Quote from Carl on February 17, 2022, 7:24 pm

Quote from Snappy on February 17, 2022, 3:32 pm

Quote from ahoyhere on February 17, 2022, 7:01 am

Sweet, I’m excited to try it out! My friends joke that I’m the world’s best software QA so you may regret asking for feedback Things spontaneously break around me. It’s helpful tho (I run a SaaS).

Definitely don’t think it needs to be an app store mobile app. Not a lot of vintage camera emergencies.

One of my internships was in software QA. It's a very important job & skill to have, even if it can be painful as a developer sometimes Better to find out now than later...

Even tho i am a developer, and not a QA professional, i love pushing QA in Projects, it helps find and prevent bugs (and is great fun to annoy my coworkers when i tell them they need tests. especially if the tests then find errors xDD)