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What Isn't There an App For?
An anonymous reader writes: "There's an app for that!" It's been both an educational comment and a joke for years, now. There are so many small, single-purpose pieces of software available that it's impossible to keep track of everything apps can do. Indeed, when I'm looking for more usefulness out of my phone, I tend to browse the various app stores for interesting software, trying to figure out what more the phone can do for me. But a recent article turns that around and asks: for what tasks does the software have yet to be written? Though most of the article itself doesn't focus on that subject, it got me thinking about apps I'd like to see. (Which was harder than I expected.) I'd like an app that'd help me diagnose bad noises my car makes. I'd like one that can aggregate all my communication channels into one screen. I'd like one that can easily pick up program states from one PC — like an IDE session — and carry them to another PC. What apps are you still waiting for?
At least on the iOS platform part of the reason is that Apple does not approve some types of applications, mainly for political reasons.
There isn't an app for telling you what there isn't an app for. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
If the issue is just location, and not resources (needing to move to a machine w/ more memory, better CPUs for compiling), then you can just use remote desktop technology.
Of course, some IDEs also let you save the state of your project (what files are opened, how the windows are organized, etc), and if they save it to a file, you might be able to move that between systems, but you'd need the files laid out the same on disk so that it'd find everything again. If all of the files are in some version control system, it shouldn't be too difficult.
(I'm a Mac user, so can't comment on PC IDEs ... and I don't really use an 'IDE' per se. I use BBEdit, which is more a text editor with some IDE-like functionality)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Dashboard camera app that scans license plates and alerts when police ghost cars are immediately ahead or behind. Connects to a user-maintained database of known ghost car plates.
May not be legal?
they are made to collect your data for later liquidation by means of selling or exploiting them. While usage statistics (with opt in!) are ok, for app improvement and good, I don't think there is really an user respecting app for everything.
I'd like to be able to take a picture of a plant or mushroom and have it identified for me. Bonus points if it tells me if it is edible. Bonus Bonus points for preparation instructions and recipes.
I'd like to see that too, unfortunately the walled gardens of the industry seem to make this impossible. For everybody wanting to have such an app, I'd suggest to only use non-walled-garden communications: app developers should be abled to develop compatible apps for certain services.
I would like to see a reliable app that identifies a piece of music from various forms of user input such as lyrics; whistling, humming, or bad singing; or other fuzzy information. Google does a reasonable job with partial lyrics, but it good luck identifying instrumental pieces.
Just because you are paranoid does not mean that no-one is out to get you.
Maxima/Xcas/Octave functionality, only with an actually usable interface?
Ezekiel 23:20
The idea of filling up my 'device' with a large number of nefarious, insecure, data-thieving, location stealing, mutually incompatible, crash causing, cross-selling little craplets that put me in touch directly, without choice to corporate hell, fills me with horror. What was wrong with the 'web' and 'choice'? Oh, I know, choice, although, in principle one of the tenets of capitalism is so annoying, much better to press the button on the craplet and get a Big Mac directly.
Actually, my mobile is normally switched off and in my kitchen drawer, anyway.
I had a friend who was very quiet but one hell of a programmer and made his own circuit boards for his programs. I pushed an Amiga digitizer for him on my BBS. It was freeware, unless he constructed the board himself.
He was always asking if anybody wanted a program they needed, I got a printer buffer that showed how much was left to print, this after I printed some 200+ pages (dot matrix) and no clue when it would end.
He was working on car sensors, one would plug in a serial cable to their computer and it would show defects or problems, as far as I know he only used his car for this. I've noticed that this is a commercial product now (not his).
Last I talked to him he wanted a 3D map of Mt. Rainier, and was at a loss of how to do it; not with contour maps, nor a 3D printer (not out then) but how to scan the Mountain itself, just a tad eccentric.
I'd be very interested to know what he's up to now.
So for him a mountain scanner :)
A GPS app lets me get lost in safety.
I go to a place I never knew, take a route nothing like the one on the GPS and can find all sorts of stuff. Because I know that I'll then take the most-direct route to my destination anyway, no matter how far I wander.
It's not unusual for my gf and I to get in a car, drive for an hour at random, and then let the satnav drive us back.
Quite frankly, I don't care about small single-purpose apps. The UI on phones and tablets aren't designed to help us find one app among dozens. In most cases, you bump into limitations as soon as you start using it. In many cases, you'll use it a handful of times then never use it again.
If you are looking for anything that is even moderately sophisticated, chances are that no one has made an app for it. There will already be an app in many software categories, but they provide basic functionality at best. Consider what passes for word processors and spreadsheets, or even web browsers and email clients these days.
If you are looking for anything that doesn't lock your data into an unsupported proprietary file format that is hidden in some unfathomable directory on your device, or forces you to use a network service to access your data -- well, good luck. While there are usually options for content consumption, content creation is hit-and-miss.
There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one is profitability. Very few people want to make a cheap app that takes a lot of time to develop. A lot of people want to translate the sale of cheap apps into more profitable online services. So what we tend to end up with are a bunch of apps that go after the low hanging fruit and sound revolutionary, when in reality they are little more than toys that you could easily accomplish with a single generic application.
Not this Luddite bullshit again. When I'm on the road, I'm on my way to a destination. When it's for work, I don't care about new places, I just want to get my appointment via the most efficient route. When I'm on vacation, there's a bit more leeway but I still have a destination to get to. At the end of a long journey, I no longer care about the scenery and just want to get to my hotel or campsite already.
The cost of making a mistake is high in lost time and aggravation. Without GPS I'd have to resort to maps, and have you ever driven solo while navigating from a map? You end up either a menace on the road, or having to stop to consult the bloody map every 5 minutes. Not to mention having to buy the map in the first place.
So if you enjoy getting lost, fine. But stop whining about people using GPS.
As a mobile developer and architect (primarily iOS now), I hate to say that there is much truth in that statement. In 2010, I started developing apps for both myself and corporate. The trend, which became very apparent in the early days, is that even if you have a great idea, you are up against several roadblocks. At the very least, an app/applet/program on a mobile device is supposed to do one thing and do it really well.
In the private, consumer world:
1) You have to set a price point that people will pay. That's typically either free, $0.99 or $1.99. And, it's why some developers people incorporate ads into their apps in the hopes of eeking out a living.
2) Then, you have to get it noticed. For some reason, insanely stupid or novel apps make it on the chart. The apps that provide utility never rank high so they become to find.
3) Then, you have have the copy-cats. They say copying is the finest form of flattery. Great - if it gets one a date with a really hot member of your preferred sexual preference. But, don't cut into my profits with that bullshit because you can't come up with an original idea of your own and then resell mine at a lower cost or give it away.
4) Lastly, there is the app lifecycle and planned obsolesce. You app has a limited lifetime. Any slowness during loading or awkwardness in its UI and it will, likely, meet the squiggly icon of doom rather quickly.
Platform of choice? Android and iOS.
The Commercial world is where the money is to be made. Large corporations have products they want to sell and marketing/sales folks who keep coming up with ways to get their products out there. They also have the money to fund development of limited purpose apps. Most still prefer to use web-based apps as well as they understand the web platform and how it can get their message across and it tends to be cheaper. Done with it? Just turn it off. Users aren't out any money. Typically, doing so is no harm no foul. Their platform of choice? iOS. Android is not making a dent in our industry (Pharma and Health) BECAUSE it is so open.
So, where does that leave us developers? Well, the market keeps evolving. First we had the older BREW and SYMBIAN phones (what a PITA). Then, we got smartphones followed by tablets. Now, through emerging tech, we have wearable devices. That will be the next market - finding the best ways to marry wearable tech with mobile, tablet and desktop technology to give the user something they find useful and affords the chance of making money. People might not like the ApplePhone or Pebble or whatever. But, it's coming.
Case in point - My youngest son, now 15, said he wanted an AppleWatch. Why? He finds reaching into his pocket to see the time (he doesn't walk around with it in his hand all the time, oblivious to the world around him as many teenagers do). Still, he wants something that does more than just tell the time (he's a competitive swimmer...not that the AppleWatch will help him there as it's not, supposedly, waterproof).
I still think a good online service providing utility via the web AND offering a useful web-service API is the way to go. I can build a mobile, tablet or tethered device to it when I am ready and think the market is ready and willing to pay for it.
My sister is a physician (internist, not a dermatologist) and she wants and app that would allow her to take a picture of a patient's skin condition and suggest possible diagnoses. Probably something that would need to be crowdsourced or tied into Watson.
Well, it is your lucky day - at least, it would be if you were a Mac user. They've got an OS X version.
any that mention a certain file used to map host names to IP addresses
But then you don't get to see APK lose it again. The only person I know who scans multiple forums repeatedly to troll his crappy HOSTS file and engages in personal attacks on anyone who disagrees with him. He's like the Titanic - a lesson in how NOT to interact with people if you want to maintain any credibility.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
There are zero good, classic-style turn-based RPGs like the Exile and Avernum series. Seriously, ZERO! I was as shocked as you were. There's an ungodly expensive Final Fantasy version for Android but that's not really old enough to be "classic." I'm talking like Dragon Warrior and other dungeon crawl and mission RPGs.
There's far more reasons than not getting lost to use a GPS. I use it more so because fuel is expensive and polluting, and so following the most efficient route saves money and the damage to the environment. Of course it's only an estimate of the best route even with a GPS. But it's a better estimate than people make for unfamiliar journeys.
You say that getting lost has the advantage of discovering new places. But so does GPS - it will take you down routes you've never taken before, when otherwise you might stick to the familiar routes. (And either method might take you down an unsuitable route.)
[Citation needed]
That doesn't appear to be true.
There isn't a better mobile web renderer than WebKit. Even Chrome is just a fairly recent fork of it.
Searching for every item you want on the web, or in an app is a pain. But I imagine it gets better as time goes on as products you've bought before are easy to reorder. I didn't persist long enough to find out.
There is not a decent point of sale app for phones or tablets. There are really bad ones, but no good one.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
At least on iOS, this is not possible due to limitations imposed by Apple.
You're mistaken. There's plenty of iOS apps doing exactly that. e.g.
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/pi...
Better idea: Use an online IDE. I've been using Cloud9, and it keeps its state between sessions, up to and including running terminal programs. It's even open-source (to some degree) so you can install it on your private server. Syncing IDE files from place to place is not a very good solution, it's better to either have a central server to remote into. The cloud services can be good ways to take the server management off your hands. It has many of the same drawbacks as a remote desktop, but RD has heavier bandwidth requirements, and possibly other software-related issues.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Ideas are like assholes. Everyone's got one. They're worthless.
The ability, time and effort required to turn an idea, whether new or old, into a polished user-friendly app, and do all the other non-development tasks such as creating content and marketing. Those are the things that are worth money.
On iOS, alternative browsers cannot take advantage of the same Javascript runtime that Safari does, so they end up with pretty lousy performance. Unless they changed things in the last year or so.
Indeed it has changed. Nitro used to be limited to Safari, for security reasons, but from iOS 8 the Webkit available to apps uses exactly the same Nitro engine that Safari does.
And here's the thing - Javascript works the same on in all apps and all browsers in iOS. In Android, that's far from the case. At work we have an app in development that opens a 3rd party web page with a video embedded. On iOS the video zooms to full screen, and plays. Always. On Android, the behaviour is different on different phones. Some zoom to full screen, some don't, and some don't play the video at all.
I should note that for reasons such as this, the development team for iOS is 2. For Android it's 5. With iOS development still always outpacing Android.
As to data-mining, that's also an advantage on the iOS side. CyanogenMod might pull some Google spying out of the OS, but Android apps are far freer to spy on users than iOS apps. Such is the benefit of the "walled-garden".
I want an app that can - possibly with some help from me - take/make a recording of me talking(singing/whatever) and then change it into what it sounds for _me_ inside my head.
I want people to know who I think I am, not what I come across as :-)
(Does that exist? I bet there exists some book/magazine db thing that can scan names and barcodes to both build up a db and tell me if I already own the item I'm currently looking at.)
For example, just the other day I wanted to listen to a sound file on my phone and it was a really long file. Something like 12 hours long. And generally when I am dealing with these files, I split them into 10 minute segments so they can be listened to easily without having to remember where in the giant file I was last time. I just remember I was on file 25 at 3 minutes. Most sound listening programs also don't deal with really large sound files very well. So it makes everything more manageable when they're split up.
Anyway, long story short, I looked for such a program on android and it apparently doesn't exist. Lots of stuff for making ringtones but that isn't what I'm after.
You can't really compete with the wealth of software on desktop OS's They've been around too long and the bars for entry are non-existent.
That said, if someone knows of such a program, then please let me know.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Right. Apple now has censorship rights over the entire internet. The conspiracy theory just gets bigger.
Ah bugger. I've just looked at my iPad's home screen, and I'm not talking about iPython at all, but Pythonista. (Which is a surprisingly good IDE and I was stuck with it as my main environment for a while when my laptop was constantly overheating, but edits were still fairly fiddly, as you'd expect.)
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'