cluttred

You’ve probably guessed by now, but it doesn’t look likely that uncluttr will return in its previous incarnation. I do have some ideas about taking the concept in a different direction – one focused less on shopping and more on organizing your stuff, but that will have to wait until I have some time again.

The system is down

As you may have noticed, uncluttr is no longer publicly accessible.  We hope that this restriction is temporary – rest assured, we are doing everything we can to open it back up.

Updates

I spent the last week and a bit replacing the XML parser. REXML proved to be too slow, and it’s replacement (libxml-ruby) is faring much better. For example, the searches that used to average ~4secs now take about 1! I’m also rewriting the item model and most of the javascript dealing with it. That should fix the unclickable recommendations as well as allow for a whole host of features like wishlist, Listmania, and my new feature: personal lists! But I get ahead of myself. Just a couple days more…

Bug fixes

Pagination now works mostly as it’s supposed to, and review stars have been added to all items that have reviews. I also tweaked some of the layout to try to make it a little less messy.

What they’re saying

Uncluttr: A cleaner Amazon – Ajaxian

Shop via drag and drop with Uncluttr – Lifehacker

Publicity is nice – it’s just a little embarrassing with an unfinished alpha site. Time to get crackin’…

onAIR conference

I found out about the onAIR bus tour the night before it arrived in Seattle and learned that it was happening right across the parking lot from where I work. They were advertising Ignite-inspired sessions after dinner, so I thought that this would be a good opportunity to present uncluttr. I threw together a Powerpoint deck in the afternoon, and that was it.

more photos from the conference

alpha

After weeks of procrastinating and tweaking, I’ve finally decided to just launch uncluttr as an alpha.

These things works:

• searching/browsing for stuff
• searching/browing for stuff in a specific category
• adding products to the cart
• browsing reviews
• viewing more information about an item
• proceeding to checkout
• linking to a list of items

That said, there are still a lot of bugs, such as:

• search pagination is broken
• you can’t yet add ‘You May Like’ items to the cart
• customer info lookup doesn’t work
• help/FAQ needs flushing out
• no support for products not fulfilled by Amazon
• annoying widget behavior (like dropdowns not going away, etc.)

And these are the things in progress:

• fixing everything listed above
• wishlist/registry support
• more product categories
• international Amazon.com stores

introducing uncluttr

uncluttr is a clean and green way to shop at Amazon.com

• Clean
  Search, browse, and manage your cart all from a single, easy-to-use, page.
• Green
  Reduce your environmental impact at no extra cost. I will donate a portion of proceeds to CarbonFund to offset the greenhouse gas emissions generated from shipping.

uncluttr is built on prototype.js, script.aculo.us, Ruby on Rails, and Amazon Web Services.