Author Archives: Nancy

About Nancy

I love to program. It's been my raison d'etre since I opened my first basic book circa 1980. 30+ years later, I still have to drag myself away from the computer. A few years ago, I was inspired by Ray Kurzweil's book "the Singularity is Near," which entails how Aritificial Intelligence is going to change the world. I was inspired to go back to school to get my Ph.D., specializing in A.I., so I can continue to be a part of the ongoing waves of change that the digital revolution is bringing. I was born at the right time. As one journey ends, another begins.

What do I think of Sencha Touch

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Sencha Touch seems like a great idea, but I was totally not able to fall in love with it. It feels like I’m writing JSON code, lots and lots of configuration. And really difficult to figure out why things do not work. The official tutorials are buggy and miss key pieces of information that are required to get the samples to work.

So I will be keeping with maintaining three separate code versions for Hotelplanner: IOS, Android, and the Web App. We are using Sencha Ext for the real-time downloading of hotel offers. To do the entire search before presenting a web page takes over 10 seconds! Ouch. With Sencha, we can start downloading immediately, and replace existing entries in the DOM with better offers since we check about half a dozen sites for these offers. Owen is working on doing the same for the mobile web version with Sencha Touch. I will happily leave the Sencha code in his talented hands.

Brain Rules

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I just finished reading Brain Rules by John Medina. This is a very well written and fun to read book full of things we know about the brain, primarily from psychological studies. What affects our ability to learn and memorize things? What happens to our brains when we sleep? How the brain processes vision and smell. Fascinating stuff that is written in a style that evokes the wonder that it deserves!

Unlike “How to Create a Brain,” which I love but mainly appeals to computer scientists. And unlike “Connectome,” which would appeal to anyone who loves science. I think “Brain Rules” would be fun to read for just about anybody. But then my brain is wired completely differently from yours, so what do I know?

AppStoreRankings.net

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Every Friday I get Dave Verwer’s iOS Dev Weekly newsletter, and it often has useful information in it. This week he turned me onto appstorerankings.net.

AppStoreRankings.net is a really cool site for SEO. It lets you compare your App with your competitors in reference to ranking for a particular keyword. It gives lots of great stats on keywords, such as how many people are searching using that keyword and how difficult it is to rank highly with that keyword. It gives you suggestions on how to improve your rankings based on keywords. It lets you see your competitors’ keywords.

And it does all this in an intuitive interface with nice charts and graphics.

For example, here is a graph of how our HotelPlanner app fares against Booking.com in the travel category:

Here is an example of how well we rank with regard to the keyword “Hotels.”

This screen compares the keywords used by Expedia with those used by HotelPlanner:

This page shows how we’ve ranked for the keyword “Booking” over time as compared with Expedia. Notice that it also shows that 952 iphone apps use the keyword “Booking.” The traffic value of 6.8 tells you a lot of people search with this term. The difficulty of 5.1 measures how hard it is to place well with this keyword on a scale from 1 to 10.

There’s a keyword optimizer, a keyword suggestor, and the paid version lets you track multiple apps and multiple competitors, among other things.

Overall, this site is very well done. I think it is going to be very useful for improving our rankings. I’m looking forward to putting it into practice.

WWDC

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I was so excited Wednesday when my boss said he would send me to WWDC! Oddly, my Safari browser shut itself down at 5 minutes until 1:00. I fired it back up and tried to log back on, but the screen said the site was down for maintenance! So I sat here refreshing the WWDC site until it said “Sign on to get your tickets!” which I happily did. The next screen I saw said ‘Sold Out!’ Unbelievable. So bummed out.

Posted in ios

Connectome by Dr. Sebastian Seung

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I have just finished what is probably the best science book I have ever read… Connectome by Dr. Sebastian Seung. Dr. Seung is professor of neuroscience computation and physics at MIT. He is also a brilliant writer, explaining complex research in easy-to-understand terms. Filled with analogies, metaphors, poetry, history, and the kitchen sink, Dr. Seung ties a tremendous amount of information together perfectly. It was a delight to read.

Utlimately, Connectome is about how neurons are connected… what we know, what we conjecture, how we know what we do, what we can expect to know with future developments. He speaks of the 4 R’s: Regeneration, reconnection, reweighting, and rewiring as fundamental processes of connectomics. He conjectures about “connectopathies” of certain diseases. He describes the tools used on living and dead brains, and the resolution of the information gathered by each. He even delves into the fantastical realms of Kurzweillian brain uploading.

I cannot begin to recommend this book enough to anyone with the slightest interest in how the brain works. Get it. Read it! Thank me later.

Posted in AI

Sencha Touch

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I have declared the next few weeks Sencha Touch Month. I just completed reading “Sencha Touch Up and Running” and it seems like a great book. One of our other senior developers uses Sencha Ext. extensively, so it seems only natural to explore this route for the mobile site. But first, I will develop a personal app with it. I am going to create a “promo” app for my dancer and writer artist friends. It’s simple, reuseable, and data driven. It’s high time I start a new app also.

Sencha Touch is a MVC framework that leverages HTML5 and CSS3 webkit. You can package the website as an iPhone or an Android app. So this is my plan for the next few weekends.

Oh… and I still loooovvveee my Dell hi-res monitor.

External Monitor for Macbook Retina for Development

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My new Dell U2713HM-IPS-LED monitor came in last night and I am thrilled!! I can make things as tiny as I want and the text is still crystal clear. The difference in a 1080 versus a 2560 resolution is whether you want to magnify your existing screen, or whether you want the same size windows with more desktop space. Since I am a developer, I have lots of windows and emulators and browsers up and running, and I needed more space. The Dell is beautiful, really well made, non-glossy, and the stand adjusts in all directions. For me, this is total perfection. The resolution is gorgeous. I love this monitor.

I bought a thunderbolt adaptor for it so I could get the highest resolution, and once I realized there was a menu that you activate with the side buttons to select your input, it worked right away. No issues. It comes with several cables, but not one that would give the Macbook hi-res.

External Monitor for Macbook Retina Display

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I’m in love! After making myself crazy comparing specs over the weekend on different monitors, I stopped by Best Buy on the way home today and walked out with an LG 1080p 27″ IPS Cinema Display monitor. I simply connected it via HDMI to my macbook and had instant mirroring. I pulled up the display settings in the settings, and changing it to side-by-side displays was very intuitive, giving me more than twice the desktop space. I should have done this long ago. The 17″ macbook was barely sufficient. The 15″ is hard to work with when you are developing. Plus it’s very nice to have a matte display back. More later…

Update: The next day I returned this monitor. It turns out that a 1080p monitor doesn’t give you more desktop space because it magnifies your windows much bigger than you would like them. When I use cmd-minus to make text smaller to see more of it, it is so pixelated I cannot read it at all. So today I ordered a Dell U2713HM-IPS-LED CVN85 27-Inch Screen LED-lit Monitor from Amazon. I’ll let you know how things go Tuesday when it arrives.

Ray Kurzweil – Director of Engineering at Google

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I admire Ray Kurzweil. He is one of my greatest inspirations. Ray is the author of “The Singularity is Near,” and more recently, “How to Create a Mind.” Google has just hired him to see what he can do with natural language search. Here is a ten-minute interview conducted on his second day on the job, discussing his vision.

Ten-minute interview with Ray Kurzweil on his new position at Google

You can sign up for Ray’s newsletter at KurzweilAI.Net. It is always full of amazing state-of-the-art research.

Posted in AI