I have created this application as a simple tool to show the Planetary Hours for pure informational purposes. Instead, I see more and more users seem to use it for something else so I’ve decided to remove it from the app store.
The app
Planetary Hours is an iPhone application that I developed and which is currently in the App Store. I developed this initially for myself, I didn’t plan to sell it or anything. I just wanted to have it on my iPhone and be able to use it. I had developed it before in J2ME, running it on a Nokia phone with Java support, so when I switched to the iPhone, I had to have it back.
After running the application on my iPhone for about 6 months, I decided I should post it in the App Store, just in case there were others who wanted to use it. I didn’t plan to make a fortune out of it (and I didn’t 
) as I was pretty sure there are not many people who know what the concept of Planetary Hours means.
After having a few other people using it, I received some suggestions on how to improve it. Like for example automatic GMT and Daylight Savings, the name of the symbols, etc. I liked the application just the way it was so I didn’t think those were urgent improvements at that time. The application was simple enough and very easy to use.
The lesson
Though the application by default was configured to show the Planetary Hours for Bucharest. Meaning Latitude and Longitude and GMT offset for some point in Bucharest. If you bought the application in US for example, the first time you’d have launched it you’d have seen completely wrong values. That’s because the GPS would get the Latitude and Longitude for the location in US, and use the default GMT offset for Bucharest. That’s a completely wrong set of input values for the algorithm, so the results were unpredictable. Of course, the fix was really easy: you just had to go and configure the right GMT offset and you’d see the right values. But that’s something that only some of us would do. Probably most of us would just close the application and draw the conclusion that it’s crap.
From those that learned how to use it, the application got only 4 and 5 star reviews. But there were also a few 1 star reviews with no explanation, which I suppose is because people saw the wrong values, didn’t go to the configuration page, closed the app, removed it and rated it with one star. I will keep in mind that even when an application is simple and easy to use, some people won’t use it because it’s not working as it should from the beginning.
When the user first sees your application, it doesn’t matter how great your app is or not, it doesn’t matter how smart your app is or not. What matters most is the first impression the user gets. And if that impression is a bad one, the user won’t go on and try to find anything else about that app. He’ll just give up. No questions asked.
The fix
After understanding what the problem was, I decided to improve the user experience. So I added automatic GMT and Daylight Savings, which was a really easy update to implement, but I can say it can improve a lot the user experience, it does improve the first impression. If the user launches the application, he’ll get the right information from the beginning without any action needed from his side. Hopefully this will make the user happier and he’ll want to use the application.
Something that’s good enough for me or you might need some tweaks to make it good enough for everybody else.
Looks better than the previous version. I’ll probably start posting shorter posts from my iPhone just because it’s so easy.
I decided to forward my own domain, sergiutruta.com to my WordPress blog. It looks better as sergiutruta.com than sergiutruta.wordpress.com, so I’m sticking with this solution for now. Maybe at some point I’ll go back to having my own hosting for it, but for now it works fine and trouble free .
Disclaimer: I don’t know Perl, I’m just using it to run a local process in an application.
I had to upgrade my perl libraries after upgrading to Snow Leopard, which installs Perl 5.10. More specifically, the perl process didn’t connect to the MySQL database anymore.
Searching on the net, I found suggestions that if you have installed mysql in 32 bits, the DBD::mysql library won’t work. And it didn’t. Using this article I uninstalled mysql. And than using the instructions from this other article, I installed mysql in 64 bits.
On my iMac, the installation of mysql Perl library went smoothly, using these instructions (from our Perl guru):
1. To start the cpan shell:
sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell
2. In this shell, I ran:
install Bundle::CPAN
install DBI
install DBD::mysql
On the MacBook, just because I messed around with CPAN settings or something, the DBI failed to install.
To solve this problem, I had to erase the following folders:
1. “.cpan” folder from my user’s root folder
2. the following two folders used by Perl 5.10: “/Library/Perl/5.10.0/” and “/Library/Perl/Updates/5.10.0″ (most probably the second one is not a must).
After erasing these, I started again the CPAN shell and run the three commands from above. Voila! All working well.
UPDATE: After installing the 64 bit version of the mysql Perl library, and upgrading the MySQL local installation to 64 bit also, I had trouble running the mysql ruby gem which was compiled in 32 bits. After trying different options, I’ve come to the conclusion that installing Snow Leopard from scratch is the best option, so I did a clean install of everything and now all runs smootly!
I’ve just submitted my first iPhone app to the App Store. You can find the post describing this app by clicking here or on the “Planetary Hours” link from the Sidebar. Yupiiiiii! ))
It’s more than an year since I’ve written my last article here. I’ve been very focused on Ruby on Rails for more than 2 years now and for 6 months or so I’ve been playing with the iPhone SDK. We live wonderful times, indeed . I have an application ready to go to the AppStore and I’ve been thinking about having some support pages for my iPhone apps.
I’ve chosen to use this blog, so I’m back. Not so much with philosophical articles, but with support for my apps.
Since April 2008, I’ve started working from home. And by “home”, I don’t mean only home, but anywhere I am. As I love traveling, I take my MacBook with me and work from wherever I might be. I like this flexibility, though I work more than I used to when I was an employee.
Someone just made me an interesting proposition to join a US based start-up, but I’d have to go in the office every day and work side by side with a specific team. I like working with smart people, and I like working at exciting projects. Though I won’t go back to working in an office any time soon.
So it got me thinking: is it better to work in an office, or is it better to work from home? Both these approaches have advantages.
Working in an office
Probably people like to work in an office for different reasons: if you have kids, it’s definitely not easy to work from home if your kids keep distracting you from your work. Also, working in an office helps you stay focused when you’re there, and you can forget about all those things when you get out of the office.
Working from home
The advantage is that you can work whenever you feel like it. If you have an idea, you can start working right away. If you’re out of ideas, you can just stop working, and do something else. If you’re sleepy after lunch, you can take a nap. If you’re very productive in the morning, or late in the night, you can work during that time. No one tells you when to work and how much to work.
These two situations, match exactly two profiles: employee and entrepreneur. An employee likes to think about the job when he’s in the office, while an entrepreneur thinks about what he has to do all the time. As an employee, you probably prefer to have a job life, in the office, and a personal life, at home. As an entrepreneur, there’s no distinction between these two. You’re working all the time, you’re thinking all the time how to improve things, you’re always thinking how to grow your business, how to find more customers..
None of these situations is better than the other. It simply breaks down to what you want to be and which one suites you best.
Are there people that cannot learn? No. Are there people that do not learn? Yes. Why is that? I’ve asked myself this question many times. The only answer I’ve come up with is this: people do not learn because they do not realize they have to learn.
It’s not enough wanting to evolve. We have to realize what we do wrong and what we need to change. The biggest step is realizing what we lack. The problem is always in ourselves.
Let’s talk about people who do learn. During life, they keep evolving and transforming themselves. How can they evolve? By learning. They learn, they gather information, they gather feedback, they gather reactions to what they do, and they sum all these up. Then they gather their desires and their aspirations and they sum all these up. Using the sum of these sums, they have enough information to transform themselves and become better and brighter.
Let’s also talk about people that do not learn. They want to learn. Most of them do. But they do not use the information as they should. And so they never know what to learn. They keep trying to understand where the problem is, but they will not find it until they understand how to use the information surrounding them. And they have all the needed data, more than enough, feedback, reactions, desires, aspirations, but they don’t understand how to use it. And so they don’t evolve and they stay the same.
What type of these two are you? What type do you want to be?
