lessons learned through writing a facebook app

a long time ago, when facebook opened its api, i wrote a Quran application for facebook [see my previous post, here]. however, it was a hack, wasn’t fully featured, it didn’t look great, and, most importantly, it wasn’t put on the facebook application directory. sometime later, someone launched a Quranic Verses application - it was much nicer, more feature rich, and, most importantly, it was in the application directory.

feeling a bit competitive, i spent most of my past weekend rewriting, adding viral features suggested by my friends, and polishing the app. after three days of hard work, i finally launched. its been one day now since i launched, and here’s what i learned:

1. being first to market is a huge competitive edge - i started out with around 40 user, whereas the other app has about 24,000. regaining the lost share of users will be extremely difficult.

2. on the same note as the above, it seems as though getting to the market first is more important in some ways than what you bring to the market. if your product is the only one out there, people will use it, even if it has problems. once they start using it, the chances that they leave yours and use another one are slim. even if a competitor comes out, you can just improve your app and keep the market share.

3. features aren’t always what you think they are - some features that you think are critical and awesome won’t be used by anyone at all - other features that you think are useless will be used a lot. its actually pretty odd, the one feature that i thought would be the selling feature of my app has gotten no usage by anyone except me, and the one feature i left out is the only one anyone asked me about.

4. connections are important - a person who knows how to spread a viral app can do it, and can work wonders for your app and users. a solid and passionate user base can help your app grow, but without it, nagging can only take you so far. also, your connections can give you really good ideas and valuable user feedback that’s hard to get otherwise.

5. its amazing how much you can get done in such a short period of time when you have a burning desire and passion to get something done.

6. from a technical stand point, certain things may seem daunting at first, but a solid will to succeed makes these technical hurdles surmountable.

7. even if something didn’t turn out quite the way one expected, there’s always some benefit to be taken out of it - so take the benefit, learn from the negatives, and move on :)

so yeah… i guess that about covers it… i still have a hope that the unused feature will be used and i can start a wildfire of users adding the app, but at the same time, i am being realistic and sticking to point 7 above by writing this blog post and consciously thinking about these matters.

my thoughts on the iphone

so last thursday, i had the fabulous idea of purchasing an iphone, especially being that i was already in a cingular 2 year contract. so i picked up the 4gb model. after having used it for nearly a week now, here are my thoughts:

pros

• the screen is amazing.

• it has wifi.

• safari on it is awesome.

• the whole means of navigation (zooming with your two fingers in safari and google maps) is off the hook.

• visual voicemail rocks! why wasn’t this available before!?

• pull based email is good for personal email accounts.

• the screen rotates when the device rotates which is really cool (accelerometer).

cons

• no 3g. edge is slow! i guess usually, this is not a problem because you have wifi in most places these days, but still, in places with no wifi, 3g would be nice.

• the phone voice quality is not that good - if you turn the volume on calls to maximum, the voice doesn’t sound right. the speaker phone also doesn’t get too loud.

• the web browser has no arabic support!

• no cut and paste… come on, this one should be obvious!

• while one can supposedly play quicktime videos from within safari, i couldn’t play m3us or mp3s off of an ftp on it. not sure if that’s just me though…

• no custom mp3 ringtones! you can only use one of the handful of preloaded ones.

• no custom alarm tones! you have to use one of the handful of preloaded ones.

• no games! what, so i have to be on the internet playing javascript games?

• it comes with a youtube application, but only a fraction of all videos are available because they have to be encoded in a certain way. this is supposed to be fixed soon though.

• no api! i want to write my own apps for it, but i can’t. people are working on it, but still…

so that’s my review in a nutshell. overall, a nice phone, but if they iron out some of those issues, it’d be incredible. a lot of those issues could be fixed by releasing a software update and opening up their api, but whether or not they’ll actually do it, only time will tell. in the meanwhile, hackers have done a good job playing with th internals of the phone, and its only a matter of time until we get unlocked iphones that will run custom applications.

tweaking your driving route using google maps...

someone from the yahoo maps team did this last hack day (a month+ ago), but for whatever reason, it hasn’t been released by yahoo yet. very useful feature imho (basically, you can drag and drop on the map to change the route, so if you want to avoid a particular road, you can).

scraping websites...

many times, i find myself having to scrape a website for any particular reason. now a days, if i need to do it, i’d probably do it with some version of mechanize (www::mechanize in perl, hpricot in ruby, etc). when i was looking for a bug in one of the scrapers i’d written a long time ago, what took me by surprise was that i’d written a lexer to do it.

i guess this was shortly after i’d taken “languages and interpreters” in college, in which we used [f]lex and yacc/(bison). i just figured it was interesting, after working with a technology, that we try to utilize it. its not necessarily a bad way to do things, i just would do things differently now…

quran facebook application

i figured i’d play around with the facebook api today, so i wrote a little facebook quran app for displaying verses from the quran on your profile page. not very polished if i should say so myself, but… it works (at least for me). if you try it, please let me know if you find any bugs or have any feature suggestions.

you can test it here: http://facebook.cafesalam.net/quranapp.

zomg lolcats ftw!

this is off the hook!

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
PLZ OPEN FILE "LOLCATS.TXT"?
	AWSUM THX
		VISIBLE FILE
	O NOES
		INVISIBLE "ERROR!"
KTHXBYE

they actually have a few test interpreters for it and more examples here.

scratching my head over a c problem...

today, i wanted to try out my test arabic gtk program to see if behdad’s new changes to pango magically fixed the renown arabic shaping issue [in short, it had nothing to do with it]. anyway, i discovered that i needed to install libquran, and to make a long story short, my test program, which used to work before, segfaulted. i ran gdb and valgrind only to find the segfault happening within libquran at the closing of the configuration file (noting this libquran code hasn’t been changed in 3 years now).

i looked at the source, and discovered that the file pointer was becoming null after a call to getline. i tried to see if i could reproduce this in a smaller test program, and i discovered that i indeed could -

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void){
   int n = 0;
   char* tmp;
   FILE* fp = fopen("./testfile", "r");
   getline(&tmp, &n, fp);
   printf("got a str of: %s\n", tmp);
   printf("now fp is: %s\n", (fp==NULL)? "null" : "not null");
   fclose(fp);
   free(tmp);
   return 0;
} 

the program displayed the first line from testfile, but unexpectedly displayed that fp is null and segfaulted at the fclose. checking the return from getline, i see that it returns successfully (the number of characters it read).

while i got around this problem by modifying the library to do a malloc followed by an fgets, i am just confused -this library code hasn’t been touched in 3 years, it used to work before, and i just repulled it from cvs when i discovered this. so why is it broken now? the only thing that i can think of being different is that my box now runs a 64 bit version of linux, but would that break it?

any ideas?

arabic answers rip off

one of my coworkers sent me this today. pretty funny that they blatantly ripped off the images and such. on a similar note, it seems as though there’s way too much red tape to go through in order to get something like this officially done.

taxes on softdrinks... what next?

today, i went to the supermarket to buy some stuff, and i picked up a 12 pack of pepsi on the way out. when i looked at my receipt, i noticed that there was an additional tax of $0.48 for the pepsi, separate from the overall tax at the bottom (not sure if it is included in the overall x% tax that you pay at the end or not, but regardless, it is more).

oddly enough, i could buy 1.92 cans of pepsi for the amount of the tax. actually, for the total of $3.98, i could have bought 15.92 cans from the vending machine at work… (although ideally, i should stop drinking pepsi altogether).

ruby and rcairo

i’ve recently been playing more and more with ruby and i really like it. at the same time, i’ve been loving launchy, an open source application launcher for windows (currently using it on my work laptop).

since i love launchy so much, i started to wonder, “why not write something similar for linux?” - now i know one will say that deskbar does the job, but its not quite the same. so anyway, because i wanted transparency and so on, i decided to look into cairo, and the rcairo ruby bindings.

here’s a screenshot of what i’ve been playing with so far:

note the very right side is the part showing of my open gvim window. while i have yet to organize the code and start writing it for real, the ruby file i have is a proof of concept of all the required pieces i can think of (cairo wise anyway) working together.