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[Q] A consumers prayer about good App design

Designers, programmers, managers,
Lets say You have an App in which after you have completed a demographic search you are to pick at least 3 Cities that begin with the letters "Mel" from anywhere in the world. The search report display output contains 1,000 cities in no particular order.
Question: How long would it take flipping from page to page on your phone or tablet to locate those 3 Cities that match your criteria?
If you could take the time loss multiplied by the number of similar apps multiplied by minutes wasted multiplied by total number of people using apps like these then you're going to be talking about major league waste of time and effort.
Question: Allow those same cities to be sorted in Ascending order. How long will it take now? You get the picture.
Such an extreme example is to illustrate a somewhat bothersome trend in recent application design. That after a team or individual has gone through all of the time and trouble of creating their masterpiece of an application that they abandon the final phase which involves presentation of their output/display data from in an unruly, unsorted mess thereby doing their clients, customers, fans and themselves a major disservice.
The productivity hit from wasted time can be major.
Designers, programmers, managers please remember that computers are meant to bring order and harmony into our lives not disarray and hardship. Adding suitable sorting controls and filters can help do that in a major way and lends itself under the category of best practices.
The people who use your apps on a day to day basis will be ever grateful for your thoughtfulness.
Your comment appreciated.
T.

Interesting observation/comment.......... a bit convoluted ........
In simpler terms, make an app, make sure you understand how the end user needs it to be laid out vs how you the designer thinks it should be laid out. Remember the end user Always needs to rule this argument if success is the goal

oka1 said:
Interesting observation/comment.......... a bit convoluted ........
In simpler terms, make an app, make sure you understand how the end user needs it to be laid out vs how you the designer thinks it should be laid out. Remember the end user Always needs to rule this argument if success is the goal
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's just good app design on any platform... know your user; understand how the user interacts and what the user needs.

Sorry for all of the convolution. I just seized on the pet peeve of the moment and went with it. Sometimes I forget that the very act of software development can be a black art all in itself and the wizards who perform all of the designs are but mere mortals

So How Easy Is It to Develop an App?

With the NHL season coming up, as well as Mango, I was wondering how easy would it be to develop an app?
Would like to do something simple (in theory) with schedule, favourite team: live score/stats. Score Push/Toast/Tile notification. Maybe team news, or league news.
Heres is the stupid part, I have no experience ever developing an app, nor have any programming knowledge.
Thanks in advance for any help.

I assume you will need Visual Studio 2010 and will have to know .Net 4 and use VB or C# as a choice of language.
Not really sure about anything else past that.

there are plenty of tutorials around which will help you with that. the designing bit is not difficult at all: it's very intuitive in fact. you'll need to go through some basics of coding though. I recommend the dev education resources in the app hub (create.msdn.com). Best of luck with the app!

Thanks for the replies. I look around and yes as mentioned the designing process is a pretty intuitive and the coding seems like something I can probably find help with.
Question that I have now, is how would be able to get the actual data? Are there services to which I can connect to have live scores, stats, news, etc?
I know these are newbie questions, and I know I can probably just find the info on various websites, but I am the type that like to get a conversation going and perhaps find someone that can help out..... in return I promise to make an awesome app!

N0MN0M said:
Question that I have now, is how would be able to get the actual data? Are there services to which I can connect to have live scores, stats, news, etc?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's the hard part. I considered doing something similar previously but there don't appear to be any free services for sports scores. I remember stumbling upon FanFeedr but didn't really look to deep into it.
I kind of figured ESPN would just update SportsCenter with Mango features that add everything I had in mind eventually.

Best of luck with your NHL app! I can help if you have any questions I’ve already written a multi-league football app that does the things you mention (and a few things you didn’t )
Probably the best way to start is to try and write some code that reads RSS feeds; that way you’ll be writing your team and league news functionality which will immediately make the app useful. You could then e.g. have a page that displays news for each NHL team such as using the following RSS feeds:
http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/rss
(note the terms and conditions on the Yahoo one say not for commercial use; but if you’re looking to make it a paid app there will still be plenty of sites that let you use their RSS feeds for free).
To start coding it there’s a tutorial video on how to write a simple RSS reader using visual studio and expression blend here:
http://www.windowsphonegeek.com/videos/creating-an-rss-reader-for-windows-phone-7-in-5-minutes
For getting the live scores data (e.g. as an xml feed) you’re most likely going to have to pay for it (and people who provide it charge wildly different prices so have a good shop around). E.g. these people seem to be popular and do NHL (although they’re not the company I use so can’t comment on what they are like – mine only do football)
http://www.xmlteam.com
http://showcase.xmlteam.com/index.php/samples/showfixtures/8/l.nhl.com
Also note that getting access to data from a provider is only the first step – you’ll also need to write some code on a web server somewhere that transmits the scores and other data out to users of your app. Most sports data providers will not want each individual app user to download from them; so they’ll expect just you to download from them, and your users to download from you (i.e. for that you need to write a ‘web service’ on your web server/hosting company, probably attached to a database).
If that all sounds too scary, and/or you’re not looking to spend any money yet (which is probably wise) why not make the main focus something other than the live scores? e.g. perhaps you could make the news reporting better than other apps out there - e.g. lots of different news feeds for each team - really in-depth background on each team, perhaps a way for fans to talk to each other, ability to post things on Facebook about their team, tv schedules, toast messages for news headlines as they come out, player profiles, pictures… etc. etc. You could even type the scores in yourself if you still want them or just provide links to websites from within the app. Have a hunt around though as you sometimes find fan sites that put live scores and stats into free RSS’s.
You asked how easy it is; mine took about 3 months (and I’m a developer with 14 years’ experience of Microsoft technologies) but it all depends how many features you’re trying to write, and how professionally (I wanted to write the best). There’s so many great forums and examples of code out there you’ll be up and running in no time.
Hope that helps,
Ian

How to create a wordpress theme easily

Tips on how to Create your Customized WordPress Page Design template
The right Word Press Theme Guideline
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Dude this forum isn't about wordpress themes!! Mod delete this thread

Android for Windows - BlueStacks

Good day community,
Over the past several months, a few of us have been working on a projerct some may be familiar with. We have bundled an add-on to specific BlueStacks versions to allow for a complete Operating System environment, full of communications tools.
We didn't "develop", any of it. We have taken the time to scour the internet and primarily this site to garner the education, information and knowledge to actually bring it to fruition. We would like to say a big THANK YOU to the entire community here. We feel this is am important piece to a software life-cycle where developed information is compiled into a fully functioning system, exposing your people's craftsmanship.
The motive here is a moral one. I have been a communications engineer for 22 years and have seen and done things I thought weren't possible. I have been tasked with trying to develop an education platform technology matrix for schools. Specifically using my innovation abilities to solve problems. I am not a coder, I am more of a script writer. I have found success in making disparate hardware and software work together, and producing middle-ware scripts and functions to technologically solve challenges. In every sector.
I believe I have identified one of the major issues related to student success rates. Basic communications is hindered in many schools, internet cut out, and dictator like classroom regime. I feel communications is the king of industry and whomever has the information the fastest, cheapest, and accurate, wins. This is proven time and time again in capitalism. I feel students should be able to sms, or exchange pictures and peruse social networks, both to each other and their teachers. These are real-world tools, and the primary back-bone of a child's social life. But students need to learn to be accountable for they digital actions,
This "OS" changes things ever so slightly., not every student can afford the gear required to have that type of communication. If every kid could afford an iphone and ipad, than I don't need to do this project. Android on the other hand, little or no cost at all.
I will be deploying Android for Windows across the board. Students will have to setup a Google account and online storage. Copies of AW can be had for their home computer. The environment is the environment kids all love and use, the emulated touch interface is "cool" and the kids can support it and maintain it mostly themselves, and sync it to their PC phones or other devices, but those are NOT required. And no need to upgrade the PC's for a while, BlueStacks is Linux(ish), it's hardware demands are low, and I can keep the PC's at there current level.
I distribute it on thepratebay, another long story for another day, but this is the best way to ensure it stays out there, and the price is right to be able to push it out to the world. We have tirelessly worked to ensure compatibility with the apps the devs release and I know this particular release of AW has restored many of the items BlueStacks cripples
We have started a mini marketing campaign to drum up interest, although modest. And for you devs, this open an ENTIRE new revenue stream you didn't even have before. Making Android the primary OS used.
---------------------------
That's the agenda, I would like to open a support thread for it somewhere on here. I have an armada of info, tools, rootkits, tricks and troubleshooting information that we feel can be valuable to the community. I'll get things posted here ASAP. Anyone that has played with this at all before will be able to appreciate all of the challenges we had to solve.
We did not knowingly disassemble or modify any of the original distribution files of any applications, staying in accordance with about every license agreement on earth.
--------------------------
Looking for some feedback, questions, thoughts, ideas.. have to get 10 posts or something anyway...
Thank you to everyone!
-js

What's the difference between your project and the Android x86 project?

syung said:
What's the difference between your project and the Android x86 project?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
AFAIK Bluestacks has its own VM, so you doesn't need to install Virtual Machine any more.
I used this for a several months and it helps me to try an application without to send it to any Android device.
If you use Android x86 project, yo need to install it inside a Virtual Machine or make a USB Bootable, and as far I know it has limitations in the Play Store. Only some application that supports the architecture can be downloaded..

The Android x86 project is a piece of this absolutely. What BlueStacks is and what they have done is this:
Taken x86 gingerbread and ad an arm translator inside there. This is very unique, all of the other arm emulations fail out there after you even try to put them to the test with heavier use or apps. Basically the compatibility is just not there.
BlueStacks then added the vm player which is the most sophisticated player there is. Network mounts to shared fordler without installing drivers, and opengl support for limited HD graphics.
What we did
BlueStacks also crippled the hell out of the original ROM. All kinds of things missing that had to be put back in piece by piece, and still ensure compatibility. Some things fine to leave out, other maybe useful.
poring over the information, rooting bluestacks came easy, so we rooted every single v7.x of bluestacks, and began the mountain task of building compatibility. The winners are 7.4 for SD and 7.8 for HD. 7.8 handle the interface scrolling operations WAY better than later revisions. I can tell it was after this rev they forced on Surface Pro support, not back checking compatibility. And 7.4 installs on any machine but drops the arm translator. Still a nice product to put on an old machine, but little support for modern apps, and there won't be
Then doing a fair assessment of applications to do all the tasks one needs, file manipulation, printing, music, calling etc, We've spent over 200 hours trying to get a reliable lock screen, failed on that But we got most of it.
Finally adding and getting gapps to fully function was about like trying to drink a beer while standing on your head, it was like a marathon game of whack mole, we'd fix something, then something else friggen slam us over the head. Then we got to writing script, and adding widows apps like virtual keyboards and mouse to basically be able to run the entire OS with 1 finger as if you were Stephen Hawking.
We had an excellent response to the initial concept stuff version 1.1. It held on to around 400 seeders and 1000 user swam for about a week then began to fizzle. We expect that to triple and estimate 100,000 downloads in the first week. It is my opinion thepiratebay is the most accurate source for demand of anything digital, people that keep a copy and seed, actually really like something, versus an artificial "like" that other sites have and profit from. That's all Trip9d0zen stuff, about removing fake values and replacing it with real information exchange freedoms, so actually all financial can get to a creator, don't want to digress to far in this thread, but there is an ideology we have in common with thee twitters and thepitatebay's who have just the extreme basics of censorship, only to ensure safety, but never manipulated the information. We have evidence and models to change current businesses, and put the devs out in-front of these projects (or the artist selected agents). The more systems Android runs on, more success one can have. And Windows being the biggest, hands down, why not?
We feel this is by far the most compatible Android environment one can use, and can actually be used by anyone as an effective tool.
We know full well that once released, the ungodly amount of app work requests will be at its highest, but that's why I am here, where the devs are.. is this a revenue stream they want to suppport,?
I am personally using it exclusively for all my communications, social media and document creation, I only use windows for video playing files.
Hope that helps answer, here is the info to commercials for it, as our lil-1337s eloquently cranked out, smartasses...
youtube search for js99912
-js

It looks interesting, i'll check that up!

Dexcellium said:
It looks interesting, i'll check that up!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Me too. Thanks

Android for Windows 2.0
new version just went live..... can someone reply with a hot-link, thanks
thepiratebay.sx
/torrent/8440340

Adding Game Data / Mount SDcard.sparse BlueStacks
Ok, I have been asked about this more than anything,
Used to be the SDcard was a .fs file and could be manipulated easy, now it's a bit more involved, but none to difficult.
You need to download:
thepiratebay.sx/
torrent/8453985
This will get you to be able to mount the SDcard.sparsefs as a drive letter in windows... Nothing new, just consolidating info as I have been requested for this more than anything else. Enjoy!
-js

Laymans description of xlog?

Hello all, I am looking for a bit of help with an explanation of what an xlog is, more specifically by what process could this file be created on an Android Phone's internal storage... Preempetive thanks to anyone with some answers!
P.s. The reason for my inquiry is that I am facing a situation where I am being compelled to find the explanations to a multitude of questions of the almost investigative sort, that basically all revolve around android and windows, that I frankly am not educated enough to answer. With a short history of rooting and basic android tweaking under my belt, I am not new, yet cannot explain some things sufficiently enough to allieve the worries and wonderings of someone special in my life. For that reason I have returned to the very birthplace of my android customization experience to call upon the crowds for a helping hand.....

xLog is a lightweight and pretty, powerful and flexible logger for Android and Java, can print the log to Logcat, Console and Files, or anywhere if you like. It's mainly used by app developers for debugging purpose.
More info here:
GitHub - Polidea/xLog: Android logger, simple and pretty, powerful and flexible, all you need is here (updating)
Android logger, simple and pretty, powerful and flexible, all you need is here (updating) - GitHub - Polidea/xLog: Android logger, simple and pretty, powerful and flexible, all you need is here (up...
github.com
.xlog files are typically used for logging data associated with XML databases but when it comes right down to it it's just a plain text file that can be created by just about any app and contain just about whatever they want.
FYI: WhatApp creates .xlog files, for example.
.xlog files can almost certainly be deleted without consequence but my concern here would be finding what's creating them in the first place. Malicious or at least unscrupulous apps have been known to use similar techniques as a buffer until they can upload the data they contain to their servers for example. But since they most likely just contain plain text it should be fairly easy to open them with a text editor and hopefully find out what they're being created for and shed some light on the situation.

Thanks for the reply. The facts about what an xlog is I guess don't really matter, She has no interest in being wrong, only being right. Spray and prey tactics when there is not an obvious target...