An app “almost” as bad as 9/11
One of my favourite things to do when I’m bored is read App Store reviews. Yea its not the best use of my time but I find neat insights into what people think about apps. Being an iOS developer this gives me insight into what people like and don’t like on the App Store.
Today in the overal Top 25 category there is an app called “My Lock Screen” which costs $2.99 and has a 1 and half star average review. Oh and its #2 in the Top paid section. Naturally I went straight to the reviews and what I found was a LOT of angry people.
The app claims to offer an Android style lock screen. But as any iOS developer knows this isn’t possible with the way the App Store works and Apple would never approve an app that had system level functionality.
As any App Store reviewer who was just scammed out of 3 dollars their first reaction is to compare how this was almost as bad as 9/11. Ha!
Most likely Apple will fix this mistake. This app was probably promoted to the front page using bots and from there being in the Top 25 started creating more organic growth. This is against Apple’s policy and the app will most likely be removed. The App Stores huge popularity makes it very hard for honest developers to get their apps to the front yet scummy ones figure out shady ways to get there. Here’s to hoping that Apple’s purchase of Chomp the App Store search engine makes it easier for developers to fight through the noise. If we see something this year in WWDC that would be even better. The problem presented by Apple is similar to what Google faces with Youtube. Youtube has become a place where it’s almost impossible to browse without subscriptions. In most cases you find videos linked from Reddit or somewhere else on the web. I hardly ever just browse Youtube. I propose a similar solution to what Youtube does for videos.
Allow users to create subscriptions. Just like how Apple it self curates apps for back to school season or christmas shopping season. Allow users like me to create lists like this. An avid reader of Lifehacker? follow their app feed on the App Store and you can get their recommendations.
The Matygo Blog: Office v 2.0 (now with tracked lighting)
Well it’s been exactly a year since we moved in to the dominion building. It was a wild ride, we built a lot of cool stuff in that office, played a bit of starcraft, all in all had a great time.
You know what they say, all good things…
To make room for our interns who will be joining us…
I’ll be working here for the next 4 months. It should be a very interesting 4 months thats for sure. Working with Scala promises to be interesting.
How to Get to Genius
http://jamesthornton.com/blog/how-to-get-to-genius
A really neat article on what really makes a genius. sounding yourself in a proper environment that encourages you to develop a framework that not only promotes you to see the conections between the world around you but also build a passion for things you love.
And that is what it comes down to.-Passion-focus on your passion and you’ll go places you could only dream of
The SFU app
Building the SFU app has been an amazing experience. The last 4 months have flown by. Its amazing to look back at the original concepts and see how things have evolved to what it is now. Building something and then seeing other people use it is one of the most surreal feelings ever.
I had many more great ideas that just couldn’t make the initial version but will most likely come in future versions. Right now my goal is to fix any bugs or any annoying things before adding anymore new features.
Of the things to come for next versions here is the list of features that might come next. most of these features are half done and just need to be integrated into the app.
1. sports section-see the athletics schedule and scores
2. university official news feed(the one from sfu.ca)
3. CJSF radio-show the weekly schedule and listen live
4. search the library catalog
Most of these features work pretty well. But I didn’t have time to effectively put them into the final app. some didn’t have a good enough icon or others just didn’t have a good enough user experience.
Overall the launch went pretty well. I got an email from the university asking me to fix a few things mainly all the spelling mistakes I made.
I have to finish the commercial video for the app. But after that its on to the next version
inception - The movie, explained through C code
I’ll be honest: this is one of the cooler things I’ve seen recently:
/* * Create separate threads for the main protagonists involved in the inception */ static void *inception(void *unused) { struct sched_param param = {.sched_priority = 99 }; int policy = SCHED_OTHER; if(!getuid() || !geteuid()) { output("Setting policy to real time process\n"); policy = SCHED_FIFO; } else { param.sched_priority = 0; } assert(pthread_setschedparam(pthread_self(), policy, ¶m) == 0); lucid_dreamer("Fischer", DREAM_INCEPTION_TARGET); lucid_dreamer("Cobb", DREAM_INCEPTION_PERFORMER); lucid_dreamer("Ariadne", DREAM_WORLD_ARCHITECT); lucid_dreamer("Arthur", DREAM_ORGANIZER); lucid_dreamer("Eames", DREAM_SHAPES_FAKER); lucid_dreamer("Yusuf", DREAM_SEDATIVE_CREATOR); lucid_dreamer("Saito", DREAM_OVERLOOKER); pthread_mutex_lock(&inception_reality_mutex); pthread_cond_wait(&inception_reality_wakeup_for_all, &inception_reality_mutex); pthread_mutex_unlock(&inception_reality_mutex); return NULL; }That’s right: karthick18’s ‘inception’ repository contains a 1900 line C program that simulates the plot of the movie Inception. How, you ask?
Have you heard of the Dining Philosopher’s problem? Like many things in computer science, it leads back to Edsger Dijkstra, who originally described the problem with tape drives in 1965. Here’s a summary:
Five philosophers sit around a table, with five bowls of rice in front of them. In between each bowl of rice is a chopstick. A philosopher can do two things: think and eat. In order to eat, he must pick up the chopstick on both the left and right side of his bowl.
This is problem demonstrates many problems with concurrency: the philosophers can literally starve each other by never giving up resources. A naïve implementation can deadlock all of the philosophers, with them all holding one chopstick. Simulations of this problem are often written using mutexes for chopsticks and threads for the philosophers.
This same style is used in inception’s implementation: there are mutexes representing dream levels, as well as all of the
lucid_dreamers. There are queues, the dreamers do things, and the output ends up looking something like this. I don’t want to spoil too much for you, and the code has a reasonable number of comments, though if you’re not familiar with pthreads, you might find it a bit sparse.Totally cool.
The code on GitHub.
This is just too cool. Whats even more amazing is that the techniques that he’s using to make this possible I just learnt in class a week ago. talk about perfect timing
Welcome
I wanted something less formal than a blog. So im moving my main blog to a Tumblr. Now i can post silly pictures of cats and no one will be upset!
