Hi, I'm one of the partners at Athletics. We originally developed the timeline custom for Forbes and have wanted to push this a bit further at some point, hence the repo. Really glad you liked it.
Where credit's due: The Forbes team developed the GoPro feature using our toolkit as a starting point. (We did the timeline in Lewis D'Vorkin's post that you referenced.)
Hi, I'm one of the founders of Actual Objects. It's great to see this show up on HN – our target audience for this collection! – but I'm concerned that your headline might be a little misleading given that the collection is more geared for iOS projects (we worked directly with an iOS dev to get the sizes right).
That said, we'd love to talk to an Android developer about what the ideal graphic format/s are on that platform. Feel free to reach out to me here on HN if you're interested in working with us.
This is really wonderful. Our design studio is constantly posting PS comps for clients. We spend a significant amount of time outputting JPGs, building little galleries, loading the files to our servers, then sharing links to the designs via Basecamp.
Over the years we've come up with a few clever hacks to speed things up. For example, we keep our designs in svn and can quickly push updates live to our servers using a commit hook. But this is all sort of complicated, and I'd much rather use a web-app like this.
Dropmocks is very close to being the perfect tool for our workflow, and I suspect many other design/photo studios would feel the same way. A few features that folks like us would want/need: ability to pw protect galleries, ability to maintain revisions of designs, commenting (by both designer and client), and a way to export images to PDF.
Not sure if you'd target Dropmocks for businesses (such as ours), or if you'd like to have it open to the world and ad-supported. If the former, we're the kind of people that would sign up.
We just ran a few campaigns. Here's what we found.
The Deck - http://decknetwork.net/
We received roughly 4300 uniques across 2 weeks. We got about 9x the clicks from daringfireball than any of the other sites in the network (37signals, A List Apart, Kottke, FFFFound, etc.) If you email them they are open to negotiating.
Fusion Ads - http://fusionads.net/
Very similar model as The Deck. We ran one of the $400 one-week "bursts" that they offer. Received about 1400 uniques.
Before we ran either of these campaigns we experimented on Facebook to see what sort of graphic/copy produced the greated CTR. We found that a very simple graphic, and simple copy always did the best.
After we ran the campaigns we also realized that Facebook advertising is a great deal. You can run really targeted ads on FB for cheap and get great results. I would definitely experiment here before spending big money on one of the larger networks.
Regarding art/copy, I would see what you can come up with on your own. Unless you're running a massive campaign, not sure a designer/copywriter is worth the expense.
Finally, it should be mentioned that a clever blog entry or two can generate far more traffic than a banner ad campaign.
Yes, we ran this for AO, which is for the most part a B2B product (most of our customers are ad agencies and design firms). I'm not sure how this compares to your product.
Where credit's due: The Forbes team developed the GoPro feature using our toolkit as a starting point. (We did the timeline in Lewis D'Vorkin's post that you referenced.)