What is null?

Your friend points you to a room and tells you there's a box there with marbles.

a box with 5 marbles is "5"
a box with no marbles is "empty" or "0"
no box at all is "null"

Approximate string matching cheat sheet

1. Levenshtein distance : if the pattern is coil, foil differs by one substitution, coils by one insertion, oil by one deletion, and foal by two substitutions.
2. Damerau–Levenshtein distance : Like Levenshtein but including transpositions among its allowable operations.
3. Jaro–Winkler distance : designed and best suited for short strings such as person names.
4. Smith–Waterman algorithm : performs local sequence alignment for determining similar regions between two strings, instead of looking at the total sequence.
5. Needleman–Wunsch algorithm : divides a large sequence into a series of smaller problems and uses the solutions to the smaller problems to reconstruct a solution to the larger problem.
6. Soundex : a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English.
7. Metaphone : improves on Soundex by using variations and inconsistencies in English spelling and pronunciation.

more

A note to designers

• Your job is to make things simpler, not cooler.
• Restrain the product people from adding unnecessary features.
• Save time for the engineering team, not make their lives harder.
• Make sure that form follows function.

Forgive the early adopter

This is a letter to my friends and my colleagues.
I'm truly asking your forgiveness.
Forgive me for switching between messaging apps every few weeks.
Forgive me for forcing you to use my unfinished apps and services.
Forgive me for being mad at you when you buy the "wrong" phone, laptop or TV set.
Forgive the early adopter in me :-)

I really appreciate the fact that you're willing to go through all the beta phases and stick with it.
Your devotion will not be overlooked when our robot overlords take over us and appoint me as one of their liaisons.

Stop Complexity Insanity

Whatever you're doing, stop, breath, and listen to these folks:

• Isaac Newton - "Nature is pleased with simplicity. And nature is no dummy"
• Leonardo da Vinci - "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication"
• Antoine de Saint Exupéry - "Perfection is attained, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away."
• 1 Corinthians 14:33 - For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints.
• Bruce Lee - "It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials."
• Oded H. Breiner - "Remove to Improve."

Apprenticeship-based education system

• Each person will be allowed to choose his "master" and be his apprentice (e.g. a high school student can choose an experienced software developer as a "master").
• In exchange for education, the master will get cheap labour (e.g. manual QA, or even personal help like cleaning).
• Down to this point, it is very similar to the apprenticeship model that was common in the later Middle Ages and came to be supervised by craft guilds and town governments.
• Here's the difference: back then, a master had high motivation to make his apprentice a good craftsman because he would often get him to work for him later on. Today, this model is rare because of the wide volatility in workplaces, and because of big companies.
• So as an extra incentive, masters should get a cut of their apprentice's wage for a few years after the apprenticeship is over, but only if a certain wage level is achieved.
• Benefits
• Cheaper education to be paid by students in the future and only if their education was successful.
• Higher quality education achieved by one-on-one sessions.
• Dangers
• Misuse of students by charlatans.
• Hard to measure quality of teachers (masters).
• Solutions to dangers
• A rating system measured by the amount of money transferred from graduates to masters.
• The more money that is transferred, the better was the education because the apprentice earns more.

Android wear SDK impressions

Android wear is extremely tied to intents and notifications.

Everything is managed using NotificationCompat API. If an app has standard notifications they will appear in the watch, and all the buttons in the notification will be available in the watch.

Everything in the watch has to be pro-active, besides apps that can register to a closed set of voice intents.

It has a few of interesting tweaks to notifications:
1. You can add a button to a notification that sends voice2text into the app.
2. You can stack multiple notifications.
3. Notifications can have pages for added data.
4. Notifications can have an image background.

why Android's search bar is dumb

Pardon the rant but...
Google's idea of a search bar is pretty darn useless.
A search bar is supposed to be ready for text input the second you touch it.

But no! it is too complicated for all-mighty G to create such a simple thing.
Instead, when you touch that widget up there, it just opens the search app!
Why waste so much space for what is essentially just a fucking icon!?!?!?

I've been waiting on Google for 3 years to fix this, but now I'm putting my foot down!

Google - you don't want to fix this?
I'll fix it myself!

Hello mrQuery
mrQuery is a home button replacement that takes the solution to this problem to the next level.
When you set mrQuery as your launcher it makes your android act like it's on cocaine.

• Tap the home button, and get the keyboard open right away, start keying a name of an app and it launches immediately.
• Access your favorite contacts and various system settings from the same box.
• Every app you launch is added to a small "history" view above the search-bar for even faster access.

Check it out on the play store.

FAIL entrepreneurship

F.A.I.L entrepreneurship:

Fail
Analyse
Iterate
Learn

Fail
As soon as you can, you are nothing without failures, they are the fuel for everything: motivation, learning and change. more...

Analyse
Analyse! Analyse! Analyse! set sensors on every possible data and decision point, every user click, tap and interaction. more...

Iterate
Repeat and try again, get into the FAIL loop, do the shortest iterations possible, every time you do a long iteration it's like running with your eyes closed. You have to zoom-out and re-iterate. more...

Learn
From your analysis and failures, commit to learning ahead of time. "If we fail at this, we learn that". more...

Adding a jar to Android Studio

Should be pretty simple right?
Well, the UI doesn't support it right now but it is pretty simple to handle manually, so you'll have to open your build.gradle file that should be in:
/projectName/

And add the following:
dependencies {
    compile files('libs/jarFileName.jar')
}

Example:

buildscript {
    repositories {
        maven { url 'http://repo1.maven.org/maven2' }
    }
    dependencies {
        classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:0.4'
    }
}
apply plugin: 'android'

dependencies {
    compile files('libs/android-support-v4.jar')
    compile files('libs/MixpanelAPI.jar')
}

android {
    compileSdkVersion 17
    buildToolsVersion "17.0.0"

    defaultConfig {
        minSdkVersion 14
        targetSdkVersion 16
    }
}

Android layout shadow without 9 patch

Applying shadows to android layouts without using a 9-patch on android 4.3 and below! (4.4 changed toast design)

Using a 9-patch is (sometimes) too much of a pain in the buttocks, when all you want is just a simple shadow, CSS has it, so why doesn't android??? Grrrrr...!

I found a hack.

While working on Mr.Query, I was looking for a built-in android icon because I was too lazy to design a new one.

Then, I stumbled upon:
                android:background="@android:drawable/toast_frame"

                android:background="@android:drawable/dialog_frame"

I tried it on a few different layouts and buttons, and it's not bad!

Here are a few examples:

<TextView
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:text="I am a simple textview with a shadow"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:textSize="18sp"
            android:padding="16dp"
            android:textColor="#fff"
            android:background="@android:drawable/toast_frame"
            />

    <LinearLayout
            android:layout_height="64dp"
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:gravity="center"
            android:background="@android:drawable/toast_frame"
            android:padding="4dp"
            >
        <Button
                android:layout_width="fill_parent"
                android:layout_height="fill_parent"
                android:text="Button shadow"
                android:background="#33b5e5"
                android:textSize="24sp"
                android:textStyle="bold"
                android:textColor="#fff"
                android:layout_gravity="center|bottom"
                />

    </LinearLayout>

    <LinearLayout
            android:layout_height="64dp"
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:gravity="center"
            android:background="@android:drawable/toast_frame"
            android:padding="4dp"
            >
        <TextView
                android:layout_width="fill_parent"
                android:layout_height="fill_parent"
                android:text="color textView with LinearLayout shadow"
                android:background="#f2eee8"
                android:textSize="18sp"
                android:padding="4dp"
                android:textColor="#111"
                android:layout_gravity="center|bottom"
                />

    </LinearLayout>

Made with hilite

Run Lint on Android Studio

Android Lint is a tool that scans Android project sources for potential bugs.
For example, it can find unused resources.
To run it on Android Studio:
Top menu-> Analyze-> Inspect code

To run it on a specific module, make sure the specific module is selected in the Project tab.

Re-enable smart app banner in ios after clicking x close button

It is pretty simple actually, to re-enable smart app banner in ios after clicking the x (close button), just click "Clear Cookies and Data" in Safari settings under iOS settings.

Sustainable engines of growth

Sustainable engines of growth in startups are ways in which old customers bring new customers

There are 4, according to "The Lean Startup":

1. Word of mouth.
2. Side effect of product usage (viral).
3. Funded advertising, acquiring a customer should be lower than its revenue.
4. Repeat purchase or use.

PixMIx in the AllJoyn proximity competition

Check out and please vote for this amazing new app:
http://pixjoin.com

PIXjoin.com