Yep this is another one of those update posts. It looks like I have finally turned MarbleMice into a proper blog about my programming life rather than attempting to write articles.
I released a new update to my little Days Until app for android and then promptly wrote a small throw away app and promptly released that. Days Until is gradually growing into a nice little app, there is so much to add to it and it continues to get a reasonable number of downloads each day.
Throw away apps for android are not really worth the effort from the point of view of getting downloads or advertising revenue. They are good for practising programming with android and having a bit of fun. They are simple todo and only take a couple of nights create.
So far I am noticing a correlation between effort put into an app and its success. No surprise there then!
My throw away apps are very specific apps so there is not usually any way to gradually upgrade to gain more users. They do very specific tasks. Because they are created very quickly they have, how should I say this, very limited visual appeal. One area I would like to explore is taking something close to a throw away app and give it a real good polish and glizz to make her pretty. Would she then get more downloads? I guess I am thinking 7-10 nights working on the app rather than two. The theory to test is how many people consider the look of the app to be very important before downloading. I suspect the answer is obvious but it is nice to try different things.
That is going to have to wait until at least next month as I am about to start on another version of Days Until. Basically I am alternating between throw away app and updating Days Until. At some point I am going to have to commit to do another large app.
In the world of haskell programming I am finally back into writing code after reading the Road To Haskell, Maths and Logic book. I enjoyed the book a great deal and recommend it if you enjoy that sort of thing. The code I am writing is to do with sound synthesis.
I have had a fascination with sound synthesis for quite some time and have played with ideas when I was learning Java a while back. I am slowly constructing a DSL in Haskell that will let me mess with ideas. My particular interest is in using sound synthesis to generate real world sounds. It is certainly at a beginner level in terms of knowledge and feel the need to get a bit rigorous with the maths but am resisting the temptation while I play with the basics. Time for this stuff is fairly limited and much of it is done during my lunch hour as a fun diversion from work. It is like haskell has been designed to make it easy to do this sort of computation, although I am sure my implementations are sub optimal and have crazy space requirements haskell really lets you prototype rapidly without getting in you way.
