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Show HN: My weekend project - a baby naming app

by iamds on 7/29/13, 8:45 AM with 6 comments

We were finding it hard to come up with a name for our soon to be born daughter so I decided to make an app to help us find one. Let me know what you think!

www.namemeababy.com

  • by jayrobin on 7/29/13, 10:36 AM

    A bit of feedback:

    * Nice and simple design

    * I can't select the "Contains" or "Ends with" fields (this may be intentional)

    * I'm pretty sure it should be Boys' and Girls' rather than Boy's and Girl's

    * As Ecio78 mentioned: needs to be case-insensitive

    * If I type too quickly in the "Begins with" field, it only matches the first one or two letters (e.g. Begins with bor returns Byson, Byrum, Byron...)

    * I could eventually select the "Contains" and "Ends with" fields after messing around with it, but then couldn't sort by "Popularity" until reloading (at which point I couldn't select the text fields again)

    * It turns out that I can only select all the buttons and text fields if the browser is maximised. Looks like div#myModal is covering a number of interactive elements and preventing clicks at a certain screen height and below

    * Popularity graphs are a nice touch and make it far more interesting to play around with, but I didn't realise I could view them for quite a while (thought I could only see the tooltip)

    * Disappointed with the lack of "Bort"

  • by wikwocket on 7/29/13, 3:10 PM

    This is technically a neat app, congrats for launching it.

    However, I don't think many parents look to browse names based on prefix/suffix/infix. You may wish to add additional filters (based on what sort of census data you have).

    Some ideas:

    * Show only popular or only unique names

    * Show modern names (recently popular)

    * Show traditional names (long history)

    * Show names with recent rising popularity

    * Show names with historical popularity (that may have fallen out of use)

    * Show names with similar histories (this would allow you to add a very important feature: "I like this name, show me related names!")

    Finally, your graph feature is very nice; some of my favorite baby-naming books show this. But it's not very discoverable. You could make the name look more like a link, or show some graphics in your header as a demo.

  • by Ecio78 on 7/29/13, 9:55 AM

    You should use case insensitive matching for filtering, if I put "K" on the "begins with" it shows nothing