Selling softwareOctober 1, 2007
After finishing university, I spent a few months writing a fairly polished piece of software to allow moving companies to create professional looking PDF quotations. I had a real sense of accomplishment when I was finished... the program was very efficient to use, had a simple UI, and the end product PDF looked great. There was a one month window between finishing the product and starting my real job search, and during that time I made a modest effort to sell the program to a few moving companies. The first agent I showed it to liked it and bought a one year subscription, but the next two seemed pretty unenthusiastic. I also learned that just because a Windows program loads up ok on a few PCs, doesn't mean it will open for the customer. Talk about frustrating! Anyway, from time to time I've thought back on my experience, and I wonder whether I could take a second stab at and marketing the program. It just doesn't seem right to have a great product that only a couple of people are using!
fitday.comSeptember 8, 2007
I tried out
www.fitday.com today which is about the best UI I've seen for entering what foods you ate in a given day and then having it give you stats on how many calories you consumed, what the fat/protein/carb breakdown is, etc. Still, the UI could use some work. Ideally, it would be cool if you could enter what you ate into a text area and have a system smart enough to parse it, match the foods, etc. One potential way to implement this would be to use the
language I have thought about using to implement a domain-specific search engine. In other words, you should be able to say:
"2x white bread"
"2x bread, white"
"2 slices of white bread"
etc.
... and the software should be able to accept either one and match it against the same food. To use a complete example, the software should be able to take a day's food log such as the following and do its calculations without any additional clicking:
4 slices of white weight watchers bread
2 tbps of 50% fruit jam
2 tbps of peanut butter
3 medium chicken breasts (breaded)
0.3 cups pork tenderloin
3 pieces of pizza
4 handfulls of Lays Ketchup potato chips
3 glasses of orange juice |
|
Processing satellite imageryAugust 6, 2007
One of the limitations of MS Flight Simulator is that the highways and buildings in the game are often "auto generated". ie. The computer randomly places roads and buildings on the ground since it doesn't have actual data. I had a brain wave this morning: Build software to process the high resolution satellite imagery that now exists (ex. Google Maps) to recognize the individual buildings and houses, including the slopes and directions of roofs, and if the satellite imagery was taken from an ever so slight angle, hopefully the height of a building could also be ascertained. If this approach worked, you could build a flight sim that contained highly realistic roads and buildings. Let's face it, half the fun of flying is being able to look down and recognize things you know, so this would make it that much more fun.
older >>
