Recently at a iOS development meet up the presenters from Qubop showed a powerful slide from their presentation that quantified the mobile app user life cycle. It is estimated that on average after one day of usage, 38% of the users will stop using a mobile application. After a week, the percent of users that will still use the app drops to 50%. After 6 months, you are down to 10% of users still using your app in some capacity.
Because of the half life of mobile application users, app developers are constantly updating their mobile apps. It depends on the number of apps you have on your phone, but if I don’t get the latest apps in a weeks period I would have 15 app updates waiting for me. I update one day and the next day there is another app ready to update. Because apps are updated so often, and they require the users permission to do so, mobile app users have are developing app update fatigue.
For the longest time I’ve used java.rmi.server.UID to create a unique ID in a application. We enhanced the UID class to fit our needs and to format the ID to the standard format but unfortunately we found that within a process, we were generating duplicate IDs if we created more than a certain amount. It didn’t take much to remedy the problem since Java introduced java.util.UUID in Java 1.5.
To create a universally unique ID in Java 1.5 or greater just call the static randomUUID method on the UUID class.
UUID.randomUUID().toString()
UUID has a wider range of possible values that I’m not concern of duplicate values or collisions for my application.
From time to time I just blast tweets about software development, project planning, team dynamics, or whatever else comes to mind. Here is a synopsis of recent tweets and rants. If you want to follow the conversation follow me at techknow and/or juixe.
Software Development
- Being into computers today is not the same as it was in my day when you had to solder chips into boards, now it means you are on Facebook.
- I don’t know why you would fake such a thing but there are a lot of fake self described geeks.
- This holiday season remember to backup if don’t already have a backup system in place.
Thought Leadership
- Life has a funny way to keep you humble.
- Focus on simplicity, complexity is overrated.
- Whether I see the glass half full or half empty largely depends on what is in the glass to begin with.
- To much of a good thing is a bad thing. Not enough of a good thing is also a bad thing.
- No brain, no gain.
- There is no such thing as cheap thrills, only cheap tricks.
Product Placement
- I just realized that I have five phone numbers connected to my iPhone.
- Not feeling the new Twitter app. It feels like it requires too many clicks to do anything.
- Every parking lot should be covered with an array of solar panels. Some parking lots take more area than the base of the building.
- I hate when sites and apps require Facebook Connect to sign up. #pinterest
- I bet that Taco Bell taco shells are made in China.
- Like a true politician, Go Daddy flip flopped on the issue and now claims it does not support SOPA. #WhoDroppedTheSOPA
- Google Grinch: No Ice Cream Sandwich for Galaxy S, first Galaxy Tab, or original Nexus.
- The one feature that had been overlooked in Android is the ability to take a screenshot of your Android device.
Quote
- I’m putting you on the do not kill list. – Bender Bending RodrÌguez
- The truth is often stupid. – Bender Bending RodrÌguez
- Follow the fucking money. When a VC tells you what’s good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers. – jwz
- Let’s go and invent tomorrow. – Steve Jobs
Question
- Who moved my cheese and then cut said cheese?
- Who is doing some last minute shopping?
- How many domains do you own?
- Church’s or Popeyes?
- Ancient Aliens or Modern Morons?
- If you could go back in time and would be stuck in prehistoric time, what skill would you need most to survive?
- If Mr Grinch is so mean what do you think Mrs Grinch is like?
- If the world is flat why aren’t international phone rates flat themselves?
- A touch device is a complicated device with many components, what are the chances that the Galaxy Tab would look identical to the iPad?
Randumb
- Looking forward to the future!
- Old Internet memes don’t die, they go remixed, go viral, and trend.
- It’s rumored that the same maker that built a weight scale with a built it twitter client that tweets your weight is working on a toilet.
- Money can’t buy you love but it can sure buy some lap dances.
- When it comes to teenage love, forever doesn’t last long.
- The surprise is the prize.
- Empty space is the enemy of clutter.
- You are the chaos/cause of you.
- You are the cause of you because you.
- It is what it will be and it will be what has been.
- Happy whatever the fuck you celebrate tonight.
- The Internet was invented for the sharing of funny cat videos and pictures.
- Make a right at the 3rd dimension and you are here.
- The best part of nothing is everything.
- Negative ideas manifest into real feelings
- Gift wrapping ain’t going so merry.
- If there is a way to hurt yourself with a tape dispenser I’ve done it… Why is my lip bleeding!?
- I think that The Terminator is the beginning of a long war against the machines that culminates with The Matrix.
Overheard
- OH: Annoying people are really annoying.
- OH: I would love to enjoy my own depression if I only I didn’t have to deal with other people’s depression.
- OH: I wish my life was an 80′s movie.
- OH: To be honest, I’m not being honest.
Posted in Programming, Rant, Social, TechKnow, Tools | Tagged bender, china, facebook, go daddy, google, grinch, jobs, jwz, pinterest, popeyes, sopa, taco bell |
A family member received the iPhone 4S for Christmas and the first thing she wanted to try was Siri. She didn’t know how to turn it on so she called me, the local family tech support. To turn on Siri on the iPhone 4S go to the Settings app. Once on the iPhone Settings, drill down on the General option. In the General settings view drill down on the Siri option. Once in the Siri settings view, make sure that the toggle button is turned on. You can also change other Siri settings such as the language.
Siri Settings View
Recently I noticed that I had less than 3GB of free disk pace on my laptop. I have and take a lot of photos, in addition to that I download and install a lot of different development tools and IDEs. I also have a lot of music and listen to a lot of podcasts. In addition to all this, I am a digital hoarder and download and save any PDF or image that I find interesting.
When I discovered that I was running out of disk space I immediately started to look for “disk space” apps on the App Store. I found Spacie to be what the HD DR ordered. With Spacie I found that I had multiple version of NetBeans each taking close to 1GB. I had multiple versions of the Android SDK each taking close to 1GB. Spotify was caching over 2GB of data. I found that iPhoto and iTunes was taking the bulk of the space. I easily had 20GB in iPhoto and 40GB in iTunes. In iPhoto, I started to export and backup photo sets older than a year or two so that I could reclaim more space. In iTunes, I found that I had a hundreds of podcasts taking over 100MB each. I pushed these photo sets and podcasts to an external hard drive and reclaimed over 40GB of disk space. Spacie helped me to identify what files where taking the most space and I systematically addressed each folder as best I could.
Spacie finds large files in your hard drive and helps reclaim disk space.
Spacie is available on the Apple App Store. It is currently priced at $1.99 and it’s well worth it since it saved me from having to upgrade to a new hard drive.