Bobby Chan

A lot of people tend to sleep in and have several alarms to force themselves out of bed. Over the past few months, Abdulla Al-Shurafa and I have been developing an iOS alarm clock called SpinMe Alarm Clock to help people wake up.

The alarm for iPhone and iPod Touch was made to force people out of bed by standing up and spinning around in two circles. At first thought, many people think they can fool our app by rotating their phone in their hands or rolling around in bed but nope, it doesn’t work that way.

SpinMe forces you to hold your phone with both thumbs at the bottom of the screen without moving them. Moving your fingers, even slightly, or taking them off the screen causes the spinning motion to reset. The alarm has no snooze either, and will still blare at you even if you’ve killed the app. I mean, if we made it any easier, then what would be the point?

Today, there was a rush of adrenaline as we had discovered that our 3-month old app had been featured on TechCrunch!

Neither one of us ever thought this could even be possible, but it happened. It exploded on Twitter and we witnessed SpinMe rise from ranks of the low 100s to top 5 paid productivity apps in the United States. Before, we weren’t even ranked in the overall paid apps category, but at the time this article was written it was ranked 105th in the United States top paid category.

This is pretty crazy considering that only less than two weeks ago we released our awesome new website www.spinmealarm.com. This is obviously very new territory for us and is very exciting at the same time.

So for those of you who need a more interactive alarm, try it out, give it a spin, and tell us what you do to wake up.

Pinterest, a website that lets users pin collections of images on a pinboard, has recently gained a lot of popularity of the past few months. Especially with women.The majority of the pins are just image of wedding dresses, cakes, clothes, etc. Sometimes they have links to Amazon so you can buy the product. But overall, the support for purchasing products isn’t really there yet. There is a lot of potential revenue lost due to lack of support for individual sellers or shops.

Most people have probably not heard of The Fancy. It is similar to Pinterest except it is much less cluttered, more designer-oriented, and the target audience is both male and female. Images are much larger, and of higher quality and the interface is much simpler than Pinterest’s. With significantly less clutter than Pinterst, The Fancy website is just a breeze to browse through. It’s like a photo magazine-styled wishlist. It recently has become more shopping friendly. So you can buy many of the items listed on Fancy. What’s also nice about it is that you can get deals from retailers such as ThinkGeek just by Fancy-ing an image of a ThinkGeek product.

These two new websites are certainly worth a try.

Pinterest link

The Fancy link

You can see my Fancy profile here.

Which do you prefer, Pinterest or Fancy? Let me know what you think in the comments section below!

My archive of some of my previous website and programming projects is now up in the Project Archive page, which can be found here.

I finished my TRON painting which I should have been posted long ago when I actually finished it in late August. Continue reading

Watch as my acrylic TRON painting develops day by day.

Day 2 of Painting: Painted in the wheel and the glowing light.

Continue reading

The Android SDK Emulator can be quite slow on some systems, which makes Android app debugging especially painful for those who aren’t in possession of a physical device to test their Android apps on. Thankfully there is a solution by the guys at Android x86. Continue reading

For those of you who have been here before, you may have noticed that the website looks drastically different. A new theme has been implemented. Continue reading

It was really hectic yesterday, but today I’d say was even worse (in terms of the stress). It was an extremely busy and stressful day. There was just so much to do, and I probably ran around the school at least 20 times making sure everything was going well. At first I started with the business report template, then I let Corina and Natasha take over that job. Instead I had moved over to help Ahiney, Patty, and Shannon with the accounting. At this point I was trying to figure out the actual prices of products, materials, items, and other costs we needed for our museum space exhibition. Continue reading

The Global Enterprise challenge started today and it’s been undeniably hectic. First we had to do the photo-shoot. Once the competition started at 7:00pm EST, we had get the planning done. I won’t go into details as we do not want any of the other countries/teams reading this information.

Update: It looks like they uploaded the photo. Check it out at http://www.globalenterprisechallenge.com/2011/participating-countries/canada/43-team-canada-profile.html

Update 2: Unfortunately, they cropped it.
Here’s the full version.

Today John, Alex and I finished and submitted our computer science summative. The result of one and a half months of hard work, dedication, restless nights, and intense coding, produced one of the best summatives Mr. MacDonald will probably ever get in his entire lifetime teaching the course. We built a game in Java (not coffee but the programming language), code-named “FighterGame”. Although as Alex had said, “FighterGame was so much more than a game”, and it truly is much more than just a game. We all learned a lot from developing this game, but Alex and John undoubtedly learned much more than I did as I was the one teaching them the techniques and skills used in this ambitious project, while leading the it towards my vision.

At first it started out as a simple space invaders game from some tutorial scavenged off the internet. As time passed (rather quickly) it evolved into a 2-dimensional, side-scrolling, visually aesthetic, game fully featured with animations, advanced algorithms, sound effects, music, menus, and much more. A complex game like this is too difficult to describe until it is seen by the human eye. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a 1000 words.

Main Menu

The fog actually moves! Though, you can't really see that in a frozen picture.

Controls

This screen shows the corresponding action to each of the listed keyboard keys.

Credits

The credits scroll upwards, and at the same time, the fog is also moving.

In-Game

A screenshot of the game during the first cutscene where Ettin steals the player's girlfriend.

An in-game screenshot

An in-game screenshot of the player fighting with Ettin and Tick.

That’s all the screenshots I’ll put up for now.

Even after working on it for so long we still never gave it a name, haha.

The source code and repository can be found at this link: http://code.google.com/p/ics4u-summative/