antimatter15 / kindlespark Goto Github PK

I started this on January 26, 2012. A Thursday, mind you. It was, quite simply something I made out of personal necessity.

I had prototyped an earlier version of this application but then, regrettably, when the time came that Thursday night when it could be put to use, I failed to locate it. (The last one was written as a series of things meant to be pasted into the chrome web inspector followed by a few bookmarklets)

I decided to do it again, but this time, I needed to do it right. I needed to make an app that quite probably would never get published that was designed well. I needed it to embody the ideas I had of utility development, with the right mix of modernity and minimalism.

So the first idea was just big user interface elements with nice animations. For example, the main user interface element is a text box. A "Go" button fades in if and only if the text box isn't empty, and while it is empty, the text area flips through examples of stuff you can time into it.

The state is communicated by color, light, undersaturated colors that smoothly transition over a quarter second duration. Then everything is replaced by a nice, huge progress bar which slides across the screen  and once it's done, the page gets replaced with text, and it automatically sends it to my kindle.

And now it's on github, for nobody to use.