Everything Else

I've seen a few Microsoft Surface ads on TV recently and the first few I saw, I thought what were they selling a car? Home-wares? What?
Newspaper web sites have Microsoft surface ads all over them... I went to a retail store and people were standing around the Windows8 products like zombies.. although I didn't see anyone camp outside in the cold like they do for Apple products..

I had a look at Google trends with the keywords, Window8, Android and iOS and what is really interesting is that Windows8 is big in Japan and China.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q= ... oid,%20ios

Now I am thinking...I should do Windows8 apps in Chinese and Japanese..? Then I get confused by the Microsoft crap WindowsRT on surface vs Windows8..What is a free SDK and what you could actually do with it compared to why you would want to buy Visual Studio 2012...for an arm and a leg... and maybe your first born if you want extras... and hear rumors about the Windows Market place such as...

http://themissingbit.blogspot.com.au/20 ... p-try.html
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12 ... dows-store

... and I've been burnt by MSFT several times before and then all the history with Zune and other failures...

Makes me wonder should I crank out iOS apps like a crazed ferret on acid or diversify... and reuse resources like icons, background image files, etc... and do Android (with its rampant piracy, multiple app stores and other issues...) and Windows8 versions...

I worked for Samsung and I was a bada expert teaching people how to code for bada and these days no one has even heard of bada. Heck I was even approached to write a book on it which I ended up self publishing.

The main question here is... Am I going to miss the boat or are these other platforms dead-end distractions and the money is in the Apple app store....?

R.

Can't speak for Japan but I can tell you about China :

Horse Crap.

I'm coming to believe that the self-proclaimed "journalists" who write this shit never venture out of their mom's basement. Even the pirate stores aren't bothering much with Windows 8 and when they do, it will be for nine yuan per CD. That means Windows 8 will cost about a buck and a half.

Not much profit there. None for Mickey (hooray !!)

I think they write this garbage about China because so few foreigners actually live here that they think they can say whatever they please and no one will contradict them. Which is true - you see the most egregious nonsense printed about China. We haven't progressed all that far from 1492, obviously.


Not for money, in Chinese. With rare exceptions we don't pay for software.


That's the funny part ... people have been burned by Mickey for decades, yet they still believe that this time it will be different !


We all missed the boat. The money is in being a financial services con artist. If you aren't a hedge fund manager, you ain't shit. They now own everything. I wonder what they plan to do with it ?

You are probably right on most of the points.. That first link is something called Google trends... ( http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q= ... oid,%20ios )
Data on searches for "Windows8, Android, iOS" ... go down to the bottom of the page and there is a graph "by region"... Japan is a much darker blue than China so they have probably searched for it more in Japan and I didn't see much pirate software in Japan compared to elsewhere in Asia where it is rampant..

I am going to try selling 60Y apps in Japanese and see if anyone buy them... Still thinking about platforms to sell on though..

R.

For me, the lack of DataSets and non-existence of TPL in the WinRT Framework turned me off from doing development for it. I brought this up to the Program Manager of .NET and apparently they are working on it, so who knows.

The one good thing about Windows 8, more specifically WinRT is that there are no more interop calls when referencing say a C# WinRT in an unmanaged C++ Application. It's all handled cleanly. I've gone down this route to make my calls to WCF Services painless in my Win32 C++ apps (ie created the WCF proxy in the WinRT Library and then referenced the WCF calls in my C++ code).

Other than those points I don't have a real desire to make a Windows 8 native app in my free time, Windows Phone 8 however I am very interested in. We finally get multi-core hardware to play with.

Are you writing an app to write a mee-too app with functionality that exists elsewhere? or are you writing an app to perform a useful and novel function that people will buy? Or are you trying something to make a couple extra buck$$$ ? Because no matter what, you have to make something people will want to buy and use. If you make something that already exists in some fashion already, how will you grow users? advertising? exclusive features?

Looks like a cricket scoring app. Great, I know less than nothing about cricket (we don't play that here).. but if this is what it looks like... good luck CryWhy... if it works, get on a daytime TV show and promote it. If it doesn't work, get on a daytime TV show and promote it. Beware that others exist http://www.google.com/search?q=baby+crying+app so you need to make yours better (cheaper, nicer interface, whatever works)

We (me who bought designed and built all the hardware, and decided on what the ios app should do; and one partner who did most of the ios stuff itself, he took the sample SDK app from our transceiver and added a few lines to it ) developed a footstrike monitor device and we were considering producing a finished product and marketing it... it turns out that because it is a thesis project, the university keeps all the rights, and later this summer nike came out with the same thing that you can buy for < $300 and works just as well (even better TBH) without any of the headaches that comes with a roll-your-own student project, so why should we bother? Could we make it better than they do? No... cheaper? No... Any reason to use mine instead of nike at all? No.. Would I use my own creation or the nike TR1 ??? take a guess I've used the nike 2 or 3 times in the past few months which isn't a lot, but more than I've used ours which hasn't been touched since we finished school. Our app was on the app store for free because we wanted to try out the submission process but we let the account lapse because we didn't need it and the app was especially pointless without our shoes. One pair exists in the world and they aren't that exciting. If we had all the rights to the project we probably still wouldn't have gone through with it just because you can't compete with a multinational giant who everybody likes, and can do no wrong, and has 5 million + users (myself included, username guardian452)

Apple app store is the place to be. I (still!) like my zune (30gb) but it never reached critical mass and the sharing features are useless without a friend who also has a zune. Windows phone is IMO a ruined zune. Apple makes it easy for users to spend money$$$ on apps. I would wait and see about windows8 and not worry about jumping on the bandwagon too early. Making a killer hit app on mobile nowadays is like having a youtube video go viral. You need luck more than anything else. Angry Birds didn't exist for a few years after the iphone came out and they had no trouble exploding.

The only person I know who has bought a surface so far works at apple and is on the ipod nano team. Microsoft makes very good hardware (mice, xbox, zune, joysticks, etc) and I bet their tablets will be the same... they just ballsack it up with their shit microsoft software. Hopefully that will change. The fact that they changed the start menu for the first time in forever may be a sign.

I too have had a Zune for several years now and love it, have you actually used a Windows Phone extensively? It's been a breath of fresh air since I switched from an iPhone back in November 2010.

Having developed at least 2 native apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7 each, I can safely say in my opinion, Microsoft definitely has the best tools and if you already do C# (especially if you had done Silverlight and/or WPF previously) you can get yourself up and running in a day. I haven't seen the WP8 SDK, but I can imagine with VS2012 support it will get even better.

No, but it almost was. My next phone may be. Said partner (see above) had a windows phone and said it was shit. I sort-of took his word for it, and they were not available in the verizon store, and the salesman there said I didn't really want one anyways. I don't have anything to complain about with the iphone as it does everything I need. I've only been using the iphone since this summer and I miss the small size, durability, wireless range, and battery life of my Nokia 6010. When/if my iphone dies I'm threatening to go back to a basic nokia phone like that. It is nice having a music player and cellphone and camera all in one, with email; I sometimes browse the web with it but other than that, not-so-much. Oh, and Skype. Skype is useful

I will be the first to admit, the first year (November 2010->November 2011) was tough if you loved apps that you had on your iPhone. It really wasn't until about a year ago that Windows Phone finally got a lot of the banking and other useful apps with 100% of the same functionality with that of the iPhone version. The good thing, as with many things, the wait was well worth it. The apps on the Windows Phone I find much more attractive and aren't just carbon copies of the iPhone version.

It's definitely not perfect for everyone (as no phone is), but definitely check out the new Verizon Windows Phone 8 devices, I believe they have an exclusive Samsung ATIV Odyssey coming their way to replace the Windows Phone 7 2010 model that's been on Verizon's lineup since launch.

mee-too maybe, no, not quite... useful and novel function maybe, no, not quite... Yes, I am trying to make a few extra $$$ and gain marketable skills... If I get say a dozen apps into the app store and I learn about polishing things and marketing and stuff then maybe I can do freelance work for companies that want an app for their products and services, failing that if I reply to a job ad for iOS developers the recruiter says... how many app do you have in the app store...A good answer to that usually gets you a lot further in the recruitment process..

I am not giving people what they need or want... I've been giving them what they ask for... CryWhy was Dr Wife's idea... Cricket Score Sheet was a recruiters idea. The recruiter wanted something that looked like the real score sheets they use to score club matches and children's games. I hate and loath and despise Cricket, I ended up playing cricket in school for a semester when I did the windsurfing sports elective too many times in a row and they demanded I pick something else. Cricket at an international level is boring and stupid, test matches go for 5 days and the result can be indeterminate after 5 days or can be decided pretty much by the second day... it is just like baseball with a bucket full of valium. Thus I don't know the rules that well besides growing up in a culture that plays the game.

I love unsolicited app ideas from friends, co-workers and acquaintances.



My interest with CryWhy also is with audio matching... Most people have heard of Shazam. I can do FFTs and stuff but the libraries I have used suck.. (Chromaprint) I have been was looking for a better way for generating spectrograms and pattern matching...

Cricket sells. CryWhy doesn't.. Strange that.



I don't ... I put a feedback button so that users tell me what they want. I don't decide anything. I don't even like it. If possible I try to get users to design things.



Most universities have clauses like that... BSD has a copyright the regents of the university of California, Berkley all over it.. There was a campaign "Free the Berkley devil" or something like that in the 1990s.
I've known people who claim their PhD thesis would slay Google but they are working this dumb-ass dead end job because the university won't let them commercialize it..





I got sucked into bada because I thought it might be the next thing coming. I am often wrong, I though hype around WWW would last about 6 months when I first saw a web browser.



I have met two guys who absolutely worship Gates, MSFT and Redmond. One of them was a colleague a poker machine company and he is convinced that Apple is dead in the water. I'm still trying to figure it out. I've seen a lot of people looking like lemmings or zombies hovering around the Windows8 displays at an electronics retailer, but I guess that means absolutely nothing.



I am trying to figure things out... I am looking at an Ad version of another app and a paid version. Revenue off ads, annoy users enough they might actually buy the paid version without ads. Localization, marketing strategies, etc... Its a puzzle. What I think will sell like hot cakes doesn't... What I try but don't expect to sell especially well actually does. I know nothing but the market and end users know everything.. if only they would tell me.


R.

I had a very simple idea... put a wii fit in a shoe... it worked well for what it was. I didn't have users except for myself. My partner was not the user, my professor was not the user. The app did what I wanted to do, it proved that this is possible and we made it. A few months later a commercial product came out so now I personally use that. We never intended to commercialize it. But our project was demoed May 17th and TR1 came out mid July so Ours is technically more accurate/precise, and the battery lasts longer, but our app didn't do much more than what the bootup screen in N+ does. (see pic) Sorting out the data turns out to be the hardest part, which we didn't spend much time working on. We have a group from OSU who is developing new algorithms using our hardware as a base. Before we had the ipod, we had neverball working on a computer and USB transeiver, which was more exciting but the goal was mobile development. It took maybe 45 minutes to get that working...

If cricket sells than work on it. To me it looks like you need a Ph. D. in Spreadsheetery to run it but if that's what cricketters want then polish it up, add facebook integration (which may work well?*) and a bunch of other gee-whiz features to make people want to pony up 5 or 10 rupees or whatever people pay for things with in cricketland.

*(Your user posts his score tallied with your app to his facebook, then his cricketter friends see that and maybe try it too)

One word: cool.



Version 1.4 will have that and some other features that users have requested.. The email and twitter stuff works well so far.
It makes about $3 a day or maybe a little less, by my calculations so I am not going to retire on it.

R.

That's generally where the actually-useful applications come from ... someone has a need and creates a program to solve it. Not the "someone wants to make money so what programs can they write that might sucker in the rubes ?" stuff.

So here's a freeby idear because I'm never going to get around to it :

Fish keeping is a popular hobby. Biotopes and breeding are a significant subset of the hobby. In the real world, the sun doesn't rise instantly every day at 8:30 and go down instantly at 9:45. There are now LED lighting systems that are small enough to arrange in an arc over a fish tank.

That's the ingredients. The product is a controller wherein the fish owner can enter a location and a date. Now the sun rises on time and travels in an arc across the tank before setting at the proper time. We have seasons and days in the fish tank. Diurnal rhythms, seasonal this and that, lots of fodder for marketing gloop. It might even be partially true.

Fish think they are living in Belize, owner gets off on how cool this is (maybe helps with breeding ? worth experimenting), Pymble is happy raking in the filthy lucre. Okay, ten bucks a month but that's enough to buy a decent hot fudge sunday; still better than nothing.

Future updates, temperature control and lunar cycles and random feedings customized to the fishy environment.

Needs to be small and hardened and waterproof.

This one has a potential market. Sure, people will copy it but you just have to be smart about that.

Another : water chemistry is often done by color comparisons. Chemicals go into test tube of fish water, react then compare to the colors on a chart. But having done that, I can say it's not very accurate. There are some people who go nuts over these things. Low cost colorimeter (such as Pantone Huey) that gives an accurate reading in a little stand. Viola, Product # Two.

If you have a hobby, then you're going to have good ideas for computerized products. "iApps" suck. Basically they are nothing more than a way to stroke yourself .. hey ! wait a minute ! I have it ! the iStroke Counter ! and its followup, the iShoot for Length graphing app ! Where to download an sdk, I'm gonna get rich !

I'd buy that. I have one of those fancy-shmancy day/night LED bars, but you have to manually flip a switch to move between them. It's essentially pointless to have a manual switch when 90% of aquarists just stick the thing on a timer anyway. A controller board + software would be a nice little combo.

I'll attest to that. It sucks, especially when the color difference between 80ppm Nitrates and 160ppm Nitrates is practically nothing to the untrained eye. What I'd like more than a colorimeter app is a digital probe of some kind that can give me discrete values and not leave me guessing half the time.

And a lot of the iApps really do suck. People push out a hobbyist app that claims to be the answer to all your problems when all it does is put "Feed fish", "Turn off lights", "Change water" events on your calendar. But in addition to microcontrollers and fancy new hardware, I'd also like to see an app that will keep track of water changes, track your NH3/trites/trates over time, help you cycle new tanks, all the number-heavy stuff. Less record-keeping = more time watching my loaches dance around in circles.

Something that can be done with arduino in two or three evenings. The amount of hoops that you would need to jump through to make it work on an iphone (to do anything casually/hobby-related on an iphone) make it not worth it. i.e. apple developer membership etc. If you want to use the dock connector you have to get a t-cable for debugging. etc. No idea how it all works with lightning.

And who's gunna turn off the lights when you're yaking away on the phone? On the other side of the world with no wifi ?

However I muchly prefer visiting the microsoft store vs. the apple store on the other side of the mall. They have x-boxes

Might be true. Nevertheless, I find all these belittling comments about sucking iApps simply ridiculous [most cost next to nothing, although all of them needed some work anyhow]. Why don't you just sit down and develop that one killer app you're after yourself? In a week or so, customers will be satisfied and you will get rich overnight...

That last part is the one that gets me. For the last couple weeks I've been publishing a new app to the Windows Phone store (all free without ads) each week just to get comfortable with the different API calls (Lock Screen, Live Tile, OAuth, Push Notifications, offline storage etc). It will get to the point where I'll be comfortable with every component, the problem will be coming up with the next big thing or even a big thing.

Jesus, guys. Are you blind ? the guy is a spammer. He found a post that mentioned L E D lights and reworked it to fit his "subtle" clickthrough advertising scheme. Go look at what he did.

No wonder google has "safe browsing." Wakey uppy, kids !!

Indeed. I've deleted the URL references (including all those in massive requotes) and banned the spammer.