app – Sean Shadmand

GoGong: An open-source, non-SaaS, screen capture & share platform

There are many awesome Saas-based screen capture & share services in the market today. Typically they offer a client-app that, when installed, listens in the background for all your screen captures. Once a screen capture is taken, the app seamlessly uploads the image to the cloud and provides the user with a URL (added to their clipboard) that they can easily share with others. (For example, you can checkout two captures I’ve taken with Sketch and CloudApp.)

I love those apps! 99% of the time they fill my use cases perfectly. However, recently I was working on an intranet with hundreds of users and no access to a public internet. Of all the capture & share services I knew of, none could accommodate a closed network system. Do to that environment, I was forced to manually upload my screenshots as attachments when massaging my peers – which was a real PIA!

Enter GoGong.

I created GoGong as an open-source project to provide those working on a closed network access to a screen captire & share system; without concern of having any copied material exposed to the outside world. You can read more about the project, download the server and mac DMG, and contribute to the effort here:

https://sshadmand.github.io/GoGong/

In short, GoGong provides:

An installable DMG OSX client
A server to receive and host your uploaded captures
A completly open-sourced project
A platform that do not require a public internet connection

Hope you find it useful!

TuneTime: This Game App Takes Music Trivia to the Next Level

Now that I’ve learned how to natively develop for iOS, I’m starting to have some fun with it! In this case I’ve built a piano based music trivia game.

How it Works:
Each team attempts to play a secret song on the provided keyboard (via a simple play-by-numbers music score). The player gets no indication towards the timing or rhythm of the song, just the notes. The team must figure out what the name of the song is before the 30 second timer runs out.

Updates/Feedback

First time use of app user is very confused as to what to do next. Usually they click solo first, and skip over instructions.
1. Potential Solutions: A intro screen and walk through of the game would be helpful. Though that could be skipped too. So offering an “easy” version of the game that grows in complexity over time may be more helpful. e.g. less keys, keys to play light up etc
2. Note: Users wanted to keep the keyboard as the point of interaction.
Even when the instruction are read there is a lot of confusion on how the workflow of the game works. This was expected as Jackie and I even got confused playing it ourselves. Just didn’t have ideas yet.
1. Potential Solutions: One user used the game in a way that gave me an idea. Before I thought the lack of providing a rhythm would make the game fun, ergot I set it up so the player didn’t know the song name before playing (this add to a very complex workflow).
  This user wanted to know the song name they played ahead of time and seemed to have a lot more fun trying to communicate the song name through the keyboard, to the other players. This workflow would be MUCH easier to present and understand. I’m just not sure if it would be too easy. Maybe there are other ways to add complexity over time (per #1)
People who have never played the piano have no idea what “#” means. Though I suspected it wouldn’t matter since all the keys are labeled, it was to much information to digest on a first time use.
1. Potential Solutions: per #1. A “how to use the kayboard and music sheet” before presenting the keyboard would help. As well as lighting up the keyboard for first time game use.
Keyboard was a bit too small
1. Potential Solutions: Not sure how I can have many song with few keys. The original keyboard had bigger keys but couldnt get much out of it. This could again play into harder level, more songs and smaller keyboard.
When the game got going people had some laughs and fun, so the potential is there, just needs a much smoother and well informed experience.

BitLang: My First iOS App

You may have read how I recently learned to develop in Swift for iOS. Well, here’s a link to the app (BitLang) I set out to build during that learning process; now available on the iTunes AppStore.

More About the Inspiration and Background for Why I Chose to Build BitLang:

While on our “year long trip around the world” I found myself going back and forth between Duolingo (a language learning app) and Google Translate (a phrase translation app). While I love both products, they had a few shortfallings when it came to a couple of specific needs I had.

First, I wanted to learn from a pre-organized set of phrases that pertained to my immediate needs. I would then want to build upon that set of phrases with custom phrases of my choice.

Although I enjoy the general Duolingo-made learning process, it is built with a long-term lesson plan in mind. I am required to learn phrases like “Your horse ate my apples” to get familiar with the grammar of a language. What I want, however, is to learn phrases I can use for my one week tour through France. For example, due to travel plans this weekend I may just want to prepare myself to say, “May I have a local beer on tap?”, “Check please”, or “Two more red wines.”

Of course, I can accomplish my phrase-by-phrase translation needs using Google Translate, but it doesn’t do a great job organizing the translations by category or language. Also, it isn’t built to help me practice the phrases once I’ve looked them up.

I was frustrated by those gaps left between my favorite products. So, I posted feature requests to both product’s sites and got a “[not in our roadmap]” answer. (Which I completely understand and respect.) At first I was disappointed, but then I realized, “Hey, wait a sec, I know how to build things. Maybe I should just create a solution myself.” And so, BitLang was born.

The app is still a work in progress and is growing from its humble MVP beginnings. Here are the designs I mocked up for the first few iterations. Currently it just looks up phrases and allows the users to bookmark them into a single folder. It currently only translates for three languages: French, Spanish and German.

In the next few versions users will be able to login, view pre-made translation packages, and bookmark those packages. Beyond that I will start digging into deeper learning based workflows (quizzes and tests) as well as some community based features.

You can read more about the iterations I took in fleshing out the BitLang concept below.

Phase I

At first, I focused heavily on the learning part of the concept. Trying to simplify the lessons into premade (but pertinent) Q&A with very simple phrases. Users would translate a phrase one word at a time.

Phase II

Phase I became very complex, and the questions ended up getting pretty redundant. Also, I was missing the whole aspect of being able to generate a list of phrases that interest the user the most. For it all to work, the system would have to be made up of a custom lesson, not UGC. So for the next iteration I focused more on the “looking up of phrases” side of things. To make things even more challenging decided to build it while learning Polymer 1.0.

It was starting to come together, but as I mentioned in my key learnings for iOS development, I was forcing a web app model in what was obviously better suited for a native app. My lack of skills to develop in iOS has annoyed me for years so I figured it was time to make the move. That is when the BitLang app became to be.

Updates/Feedback

Is really looking for a tool that provides gender along with translations. e.g. spanish: Cup -> Taza … should be … La Taza
Is looking forward to the helpful learning side. One users suggests getting notifications for any words looked up. The interesting thing he asked here is: why should I organize things – If i’m looking it up I want to learn it so assume it.
Big win: Tons of people find the same holes in language learning tools. I’m not the only one. People urn for crash course mixed with lookup.

Product Review: Duolingo a free language learning app

Based out of Pittsburg Pennsylvania this app was created by the founder of reCaptcha and has taken a truly new approach to learning foreign languages. For one, as compared to other tools like Rosetta Stone that costs its customers hundreds of dollars per language, Duolingo is free to use!

Beyond just being free, the app has done an excellent job in gamifying the language learning process with daily challenges, points, and levels. One simple feature that caught my eye was they option to “test out” of individual levels avoiding the need to review an entire section you may know. I’ve been using it for the last three days and have thoroughly enjoyed it.

Here are some screenshots of gameplay:

There is a second mission to Duolingo’s story that makes the app even more unique. In the backend, while you are using the app to learn a language, their algorithms are simultaneously using your answers to help improve translations for websites and other documents!

If you are interested in picking up another language Duolingo leaves you with few excuses not to start today. Adios y gracias!

Augmented reality: Nearest Subway

Latest coool app that takes augmented reality and makes it practicle for the everyday user using GPS and the New York City Subway.

Augmented reality uses your screen to superimpose CGI or digital media as an overlay to a real life realtime backdrop. The first big example of comercial use I know was by GE who did thier own version of augemnted rality for thier website. On the site GE asked its users to print a pattern out and hold it up to the camera on thier computer. The site would recognize the pattern and place digital graphics, of a wind mill for instance, on top of that pattern but using the computers camera. They also added an audio feature so that when you blew on the microphone the windmills would start turning. Here are some other exampes of augmeted reality on youtube.

Now the latest augmented reality product is out on iPhone and allows users to not only see the nearest NY metro stops to them but it overlays a marker in realtime over the video functionailty of the camera so that you can see the marer over the landscape in fornt of you. With teh camer faced town arrows are placed on the ground, through the camera, showing you the direction you need to walk to get to the metro of your choice. Check out more iformation and a video on crunch gear showing off how it works here and learn more about the comapny that produced it called AcrossAir here.