BargainDesk - Another way of browsing Ozbargain and other daily deals

LBargainDesk on 25/10/2010 - 15:06

Hi all,

For the past few months me and a mate have been working on an application that would display bargains from Ozbargain and other bargain communities.

We also integrated the daily deals from Zazz and more.

The application is called BargainDesk ( http://www.bargaindesk.com.au )

I hope I can get any feedback from you so I can improve the application.

Please take a look at a short video on the ap .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJag9mMJ-Nc

Thanks Scotty for your permission to use your feed.

Cheers,
Mehrdad

General Discussion

Comments

  • h4lcyon on 25/10/2010 - 15:20

    The site layout and presentation is nice :)

    • BargainDesk on 25/10/2010 - 15:56

      Thanks. Any feedback on the app?

  • ESEMCE on 25/10/2010 - 15:50

    Sounds good.. Might be time to upgrade my phone to Froyo for Adobe AIR support…

  • djones145 on 25/10/2010 - 15:52

    nice
    u going to work on a iphone app?

    • BargainDesk on 25/10/2010 - 15:55

      Thanks. Yup we are working on the iPhone app. But some friends told me to focus on Android instead.

  • zhenjie on 25/10/2010 - 16:06
    +1

    Very nice concept and program.

    Thumbnail logos seem to be mismatched on my program. (Ozbargain has the Mysavings logo,etc)

    • BargainDesk on 25/10/2010 - 16:11

      Sorry about that. I'm still working on improving the caching of images.

  • retiredfeline on 25/10/2010 - 16:08
    +1

    Why do you need Adobe Air for this which is yet more download bloat for the user? You can do it with something like GWT which is cross-browser cross-platform and easy to tie in with AJAXy features.

    • BargainDesk on 25/10/2010 - 16:16

      Most of my work experience was in Adobe. And when I started this, Adobe was promoting easy migration of apps to iPhone. So it sounded like a good idea at that time.

  • neil on 25/10/2010 - 16:48
    +1

    Looks good, nice job and the video is very infomercialish (you must have gotten tired saying the word bargain). I like the alert feature.

    Some things of note,

    as mentioned before, logos are not matched up.

    • Making the images crisper (Buckscoop and the $ magnifying glass are most noticiable)
    • Categories?
    • Removing "Removed deals", for example the $129 phones were removed as it was a duplicate. Not sure how you would do that though.
    • Popup notifier of new deals. I currently have Trillian set up to do this but would be cool if this did something similar to Yammer's Air App.
    • Maybe add Group Buy deals in there?

    Keep up the good work.

    • BargainDesk on 25/10/2010 - 22:03

      Thanks Neil for taking time in making those notes:

      #1 Making the images crisper…
      I'll try to capture Ozbargain images better.
      #2 Categories -
      This might be difficult. I think I might need to categorise manually.
      #3 Removing "Removed deals"…
      I plan to automate this. But I might need your help on this.
      Is it safe to recheck the item after 2hrs?
      Meaning that the item would either be marked as spam/duplicate/etc or a valid bargain.
      #4 Popup notifier…
      Currently I just change the icon image if BargainDesk is minimized to the system tray (by clicking the close button)
      I'm sorry. I haven't used Yammer's Desktop App. From the Yammer website, it says you will get notified of new messages when the app is minimized. Is it like a balloon notification at the bottom?

      • scotty on 27/10/2010 - 12:14

        With removed posts — I think the biggest issue right now is with FeedBurner that caches the RSS feed items, even after we no longer serve them in our own feed.

        Quick solution for now would be not bouncing your requests for RSS to FeedBurner if user-agent matches (which would probably increase the load for my server, if your app becomes popular). Or an unpublished item feed that you can poll to remove the items from the main feed.

        • BargainDesk on 27/10/2010 - 19:40

          Hi Scotty, the unpublished item feed would be a good solution.

  • samfisher5986 on 25/10/2010 - 22:38
    +1

    Very cool, but I probably only use it on my Android phone.

    On my computer I just click on my bargain folder which does ozbargain and the daily deal websites at once.

    • BargainDesk on 26/10/2010 - 16:28

      Fair enough. Now two request for Android and 2 for iPhone. Guess I think I need to make a survey on which to prioritise =)

      • acidburn02 on 26/10/2010 - 21:21

        make that 3 for iPhone!

      • hfhf on 27/10/2010 - 15:48

        Go android!

  • JPNx on 25/10/2010 - 23:13

    Great idea, Will you be allowing an RSS Feed connector from your BargainDesk..

    The only problem i have with the OzBargains RSS feature is that in Office 2010 you get a new Feed for a Post/Comment/Vote Up.

    • BargainDesk on 26/10/2010 - 16:30

      Not at the moment. But I'll list down that request too.

  • CyberMurning on 26/10/2010 - 09:06

    iphone apps, please :)

  • EggMan28 on 26/10/2010 - 21:07

    Nice app ! This will make my obsession with bargain hunting much worse though :-)
    Rather than build an iPhone app and a separate Android app, I recommend you look into using a cross mobile platform to build your app eg http://rhomobile.com, http://www.phonegap.com/

    • BargainDesk on 27/10/2010 - 10:55

      Thanks eyew! phonegap looks very impressive.

  • pauldegab on 27/10/2010 - 07:19

    great idea!! thanks for this. makes it a lot easier to find bargains.

  • ShortyX on 28/10/2010 - 11:05

    Why do the little logos not match up with the right sites?

    • zhenjie on 28/10/2010 - 16:59

      Already answered. His fixing up the image cache.

  • BargainDesk on 23/11/2010 - 10:23
    +1

    Hi,Just a quick update.

    I have fixed the image cache problem. Little logos are now correct.

    I also added the popup notifier that Neil has requested. Similar to Yammer.

    I also noticed last week that some of Ozbargain deals were missing in the app. This has now been fixed too.

    You can install the latest version of BargainDesk by restarting your current BargainDesk and clicking on the update.

    or you can just go to www.bargaindesk.com.au.

    Thanks for all the feedbacks.

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join