Free Auto Currency Converter Now Available On the Android Market

Dear all,

I am happy to announce that as of now, my first mobile application Auto Currency Converter is available on the Android Market (totally free of charge).

Taken from the description there:

Automatically convert currencies! Just start the app, and see immediately the conversion between your most probable currencies. A totally simple and easy to understand screen handling.
Further features:

• Support for more than 170 countries and more than 130 currencies
• Automatically maps your native and the current country to a currency
• On app start, automatically provides conversion between your most probable choice
• Keeping track of your most recent conversions, and thus providing even better suggestions
• Capability for offline conversion (NO Internet required)
• Fully automated update of all exchange rates
• Conversion in both directions (from base to target currency, and vice versa) at the same time

Thanks to your feedback, I was able to improve the user interface a little bit. The final version looks like this:

First screen of Auto Currency Converter

If you have Android, you might want to check it out.

Each comment and rating on the market would be highly appreciated. Thanks for your support!

Progress Report: My First Mobile Application

A couple of weeks ago, I made a bold claim on this place: I want a tiny little piece of the mobile development cake. So, three weeks later, how am I doing with my first mobile application? Time for a quick update!

As I indicated in the last post already, I'll try to sharpen the knife on a simple, yet maybe useful application: a currency converter. Unlike other converters, though, on mine it is NOT required to select base and target currency yourself. Instead my converter has the ability to automatically "guess" your most probable conversion (based on your native and current location), and consequently I call it Auto Currency Converter.

Key features are:

• Support for more than 170 countries and more than 130 currencies
• Automatically maps a country to a currency
• On app start, automatically provides conversion between your most probable choice
• Keeping track of your most recent conversions, and thus providing even better suggestions
• Capability for offline conversion (NO Internet required)
• Fully automated update of all exchange rates
• Conversion in both directions (from base to target currency, and vice verse) at the same time

In order to get feedback from potential users as early as possible (remember, I want to fail fast and fail often), here is the first draft of the user interface:

First draft of the user interface of the Auto Currency Converter

Even if you are not interested in my self-estimation of the progress and don't continue reading, I want to ask for your first impressions on that draft. You like it, you hate it, you would never use an app with such awful a background color, or you would love an icon of an unicorn in the upper right corner - whatever it is, please drop a comment below.

I'll describe the progress against three different dimensions: 1.) State of achievement; 2.) Problems encountered; 3.) Future activities.

1. State of achievement
I familiarized myself with the development environment (Eclipse with Android SDK). Running the device emulator is a bit slow at time, but it's doing a fairly good job.

The Android documentation is pretty good either, and for all the things that are not fully covered there, odds are that somebody else encountered a similar challenge already. For most questions arising I found an answer on the web very fast.

Accessing the Yahoo Finance service for exchange rates is not a big deal, either. I am happy to say that all calculation-related modules are in a proper test harness, as simple as they may be.

What I'm really impressed about is the great, flawless, built in SQLite database in Android. Easy to use and just working! I'm using the database both for the exchange rates and keeping track of the user's last conversions.

So, most features envisaged are in place. Also, I managed to provide a first draft of the user interface.

2. Problems encountered
As expected, the biggest challenge for me will be the user interface.

For a small application like this, providing the required functionality is a piece of cake; providing a good-looking user interface for me is not. Not only are there some challenges unique in mobile development, but even more, it is simply time consuming.

Ensuring the application

• looks good several different devices (imagine a smartphone vs. a tablet screen) and
• different operating system versions (most smartphones still run Android 2.x, but some nice features were added in 3.x, which I want to use if available)
• supports both landscape and portrait screens (and ideally, also the transition between those two)
• finding proper free icons
• supporting different user-languages and preferences (what should be displayed as "08.02.2012" in most European countries should better be "02/08/2012" in the US)

etc. ... it simply sums up.

Some of the other potential challenges I did not face up to now (such as marketing and the likes), simply because I did not yet publish my application.

3. Future activities
Most features are in place; what remains to be done is polishing up the user interface.

What I have not yet decided, is whether to include ads (the easiest choice probably being Google's AdMob) in that first application, or not. I guess users are most likely much more opposed to ads if they are introduced later, compared to having seen them from the very beginning.
On the other hand, if I keep seeing this first app as a pure learning field, and may be a "reputation builder", there is no need for ads at all.

Oh yes, and then, finally, I should publish the app as well, and make people aware of it.

Apart from that, there is another thing that concerns me: I think that I totally lack any vision of what exactly I actually want to achieve (not with this first application, but with the others yet in the pipe). What can I provide?
Even though I know I should have a clear picture on that upfront, I hope it will work the opposite for me and will evolve over time.

For the moment, I'm just interested in getting my first mobile application done, and I feel that I'm on a good track. In order to progress further, I need your help. I would be very grateful for a brief comment about your first impression of the screenshot above.

Keeping Your Mind On Fire

As I mentioned in my memories about Mexico, among the things I value most during travelling is having time to think about topics apart from my daily routine. In his excellent essay How To Be A Free Thinker, Scott Berkun recognizes that  "... many of history’s great spiritual leaders chose to step away from their cultures and their worlds for a time." Clearly, there aren't too many things more inspiring than foreign cultures and environment.

For the good or for the bad, however, most of us are more or less bound to their place of living, and their daily routine (which, I guess, for most people is working, unless you adopted a 4 hour workweek). So, that made me wonder, what can you do to keep your mind on fire, even in a potentially mind- and idea-suppressing environment?

In the last week, I paid close attention to what does inspire me, and what provokes me to think about issues that really matter to me. Of course, people care about different issues, and consequently, for many of them different approaches might work out.

However, here are my thoughts:

• Reading, ideally about a variety of different topics. What I'm onto these days is Mindfire (again by Scott Berkun; obviously a primer for this article) a master thesis about the political and economic transformation in Central-Eastern Europe, Management 3.0 (Jurgen Appelo) and I just finished novel price winner Ivo Andric's masterpiece The Bridge on the Drina. 
• Physical exercises. Long hours of sitting in office do not only cause pain in the back, it's also pain for your brain. After jogging, swimming, skiing, mattress-sports or maybe just a walk my mind is not only open, but actually even full of energy for new stuff.
• Wandering around with open eyes and open ears. I'm trying to re-invent the curiosity which I used to have as a child (pretty much to the sorrow of the people facing my constant questions).
• Make notes. Since a few weeks, I don't leave home without my pocket Moleskine anymore. Whenever something interesting catches my attention, I write it down to came back to the issue later, or to discuss it with somebody who might be interested as well, or may be even offer some explanation. Since I'm doing that, I'm also surprised myself about how many questions are around in that brain over a day. It simply doesn't stop anymore once you've started!
• A beer. Or maybe two. I'm fairly certain that this is absolutely necessary to re-adjust your body every now and then, and I think there is more than one example of a great thing that was initiated over a couple of pints in a bar.
• Discussions with other curious or passionate people. Ideally ... well, see the point before.
• Theater and exhibitions. Totally diving into another time or place might have impacts similar to travelling. Just that it's much cheaper, closer by, easier to reach, and in the morning you'll still wake up in your own bed again.

In case you look for some inspiration or idea on anything, you might try one or two of these approaches. 

Of course, there might be many and more approaches ... so I wonder, what are yours?

13 Top Habits of How NOT to Manage

There is always plenty of advise about how to do things. How to bind a tie, how to lose weight, well even how to get pregnant. Also I described a few ideas recently, for example, how to improve your communication, how to motivate children, and how to fail.

Well, sometimes it's more helpful to see how NOT to do things (as described by Scott Berkun in has essay Creative Thinking Hacks, section "Inversion"), in order to come up with a clearer picture how to address things properly.

For instance, you might think about how not to do business. Part of doing business is also managing a business. Perfect examples of how NOT to manage can be seen in the great TV series The Office (UK), and it's US and German adoptions.

"I'm similar to God. He's not that visible all the time either, yet has a good image". Source: http://www.az-online.de/nachrichten/stars/buero-ekel-stromberg-seine-fiesesten-sprueche-fotostrecke-458009.html (translation mine)

Thus, I kept an open eye about what annoys me about bosses, what I hear others complain about, what I hear leaders and managers consider wrong (or they consider good, and I added it to this list nevertheless) ... I think in pretty much everybody's daily routine there are plenty of opportunities to witness something similar.

So, my Top 13 Habits of How NOT to Manage list is as follows (not in order):

1. Leave your subordinates in permanent uncertainty, about future projects, their position, their task
2. Threat them as resources, and ignore their personality and feelings
3. Just talk about yourself in a showing-off way all the time
   
4. Only contact them when something is wrong, but never praise them
5. Disturb them all the time when you have nothing else to do (preferably in order to talk about yourself in a showing-off way)
6. Strictly follow a Theory X approach of motivation 
7. Don't respond to their requests on time
8. If you do, by all means avoid a clear message, but rather use some cloudy (also relates to the "uncertainty" mentioned above)
9. Express yourself in a super arrogant, self-praising means in general
10. In case of immediate threat of one of your dear fellows leaving your company, simply suggest a raise in payment instead of asking for the underlying reasons for her dissatisfaction
11. Break your promises
12. Closely observe whatever they are doing, on a very frequent basis (that is, micro manage them)
13. Give unclear instructions

If you are in a managing or coordinating position yourself, do your colleagues the favor and think for a minute or two whether you might be guilty for some of the aforementioned. It does not mind that doing the opposite makes you a good manager right away, but it will definitely contribute to some improvement.

I'm sure I forget something, and there are several others absolute don'ts for managers ... so please let me know, which ones are you aware of? What annoys you most about your bosses or colleagues?

Just a Tiny Little Piece of that Tempting Cake

Every now and then, when I hear about some major invention, two things happen: First, I refuse using it altogether - I don't need this, nobody will use it, and so on (pretty much a non-early adopter as possible). Second, I finally yield, and then I cannot stop wondering myself why to hell that invention didn't come to my mind earlier. After all, it's that obvious that exactly this is needed by millions!

I remember that was the case when Google became big 'all of a sudden' (which I initially rejected in favor of that vintage thing called altavista.com), it was the same with Facebook (which I was very convinced I would never need), and it was the same with Twitter (which I'm still proud of not using!). All of them build on a fairly simple technical foundation, yet their usage and impact was straight amazing. I promised myself not to let it happen again.

When I was in Prague for New Years Eve, I was surrounded by my friend's smartphones all the time. Over a sample size of 14 heads and shoulders, smartphone penetration reached about two thirds. And the applications, holy crap! For example, you can make a panorama picture of your friends, whose heads are then automatically detected and used as moving targets for shooting (well, you can argue about the usefulness of that). And of course, games like Cut the Rope, Angry Birds or my colleagues' successful poker. Not to mention the actually useful applications. GPS sensor, camera, ... millions of possibilities.

And millions of users, too. Namely, over 200 million on iOS, and most likely by the time well over 200 million on Android, too. A few more impressive numbers from byterevel.com:

• 15 billion apps downloaded from the App Store
• 200+ million users of iDevices worldwide
• $2.5 billion has been paid to developers

So there we go ... in total, some 400 million mobile users ... or should I rather say, potential clients? As you might have anticipated by how surprised I am about the various possibilities and these amazing figures, I am totally new to the smartphone world. I am about adopting very late once again ... but I hope it will not be too late. The pot is simply too big and too tempting. Ladies and Gentlemen, let me hereby announce that I claim my appropriate share of the mobile development cake!

As a starting point, I already purchased a tablet, an Acer A500, for what a developer do I make without any equipment (ha, finally found some proper excuse for myself to buy a tablet!).

I am totally aware of the fact that the aforementioned claim is totally naive and without any serious thinking. It sounds like a child having big plans to become a music star or actor once she's grown up. Well, I don't care. I simply feel that now is the right time to give it a shot, against all odds, so that's what I'll do.

I'm inclined to make some simple calculation:

400 million users. If, by any chance, I hit the jackpot and one of my apps turns out to be a super-super hit, and I reach only 0.1 % of the users, and if each of them only pays 1$ ... that's still some 400k!

Well, I already found it's not quite that easy. Furthermore, from a technical point, I'm starting at essentially zero. I do have some knowledge in Java and programming in general, though, so I expect this to be the smallest problem (I decided to start with Android first. For Apple development the initial investment would have been an additional development machine).

The major challenges I'm prepared for are as follows:

• Design, User Interface, Graphics ... I know that this is one of my weak points. Think I'll see how it goes, ask for advice here and there, and maybe look for a helping hand in case this turns out to be necessary
• PR, Marketing, and more specifically, buzz marketing. Literally, zero experience there. Contacts to magazines, blogs, online stores, Web 2.0 measures, psychology of the masses (animal spirits) and so on ... well, if I reach that point, I'll know I have reached a lot already, but then the real challenges begin.
• Though competition. Naturally, a huge pot attracts many others either. Roughly half a million apps on App Store speak a clear language.
• Ideas. I strongly feel that's the key point. There are several idea-provoking approaches, and I had a few ones already. For learning purposes, I decided to start with a simple currency converter. There are tons out there already, but as far as I could see up to know, none of them has that particular feature ... so stay tuned here if you're interested ;-)
• .. plus of course all the other unknown unknowns

So, TL;DR, why am I writing this at all? First, I wanted to let you all know about my new tablet ;-). Second, that's some form of PR either, right (even though I don't doubt any real PR guy couldn't stop shaking his head over what I'm writing here)?

Third and most of all, it is self-commitment! Ever since I stumbled upon Leo Babauta's 7 steps to turn your self improvement desires into reality (3. Commit thyself, big time), I found that it really helps me to stay focused onto something once I told others about it, which is what I'm doing now.

And staying focused and committed I want ... in order to get at least a tiny little piece of that tempting cake. If nothing else, I'm looking forward to facing all those challenges, and you are invited to join me on that journey.

P.S.: What do you miss most on your smartphone? In which regard do existing apps and games suck, where do you see some potential improvement? Got any other funny or useful idea? Just let me know!

Nothing Is Ever What It Seems - An Alternate View To The Globe

Recently I was given an atlas as a present by good friends. May not sound too surprising - unless you take into account that this atlas does not represent the world in the way we got used to since we were kids, but in a slightly different format. Something like this (source: petersmap.com):

Confused? Maybe even more so if you contrast it with the more traditional world map (source: maps.com, combined by the author; click to enlarge):

As you see, some areas on the traditional map (on the right side), appear bigger relative to others, when compared to the Peters map (on the left side), which presents areas exactly in the ratio they actually are. A few highlights of how areas are over-presented in the traditional map (all numbers: wikipedia.org):

• Europe appears only slightly smaller than Africa; in fact, it's only one third (10,180,000 km² vs. 3,221,532 km²)
• Greenland appears similar to Brazil, whereas actually it's only a quarter (2,166,086 km² vs. 8,514,877 km²)
• The three Scandinavian countries Norway, Sweden and Finland combined appear even bigger than Mexico, whereas the very opposite is true (835,216 km² vs. 1,972,550  km² )

So, what's wrong here? Well, the problem is, that we are apparently trying to represent a round, three-dimensional ball on a flat, two-dimensional sheet of paper. Kind of similar to squaring the circle, which is known to be rather difficult a task either.

Thus, inherently all representations of the world on a map are wrong.

Each representation is a trade-off between keeping

• distance equality
• angle equality
• area equality

Unfortunately, you can only preserve two, but not all of them (for more background information, please refer to the Wikipedia article on map projection).

Since maps were originally mainly used for navigational purposes, it was rather useful to keep both distance and angle, and disregard area equality. (Just imagine where important sailors like Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Marco Polo or James Cook might have ended up on their long journeys home without proper cartographic and navigational equipment)

However, this "area inequality" is more severe the closer you come to the poles. Therefore, areas closer to the poles are more stretched and appear bigger relative to the ones around the equator. As it happens, this representation extremely favours areas like the USA and Europe - the western world, at the expense of Africa, Latin America, ...

This is not to blame "westerns" of using a "wrong" map - as I said before, all maps are wrong to some extent. Yet, I think disregarding economic power and political strength, it is fair not to draw any short-sighted conclusions based on a misleading representation of sizes.

Call me paraglider ... ehm, officially tested paragliding pilot!

Several weeks ago, I joined airdrenaline, a local paragliding club. During Monday's annual meeting of the club, I was awarded the "Diploma Pilot paraglajdera", rendering me an officially tested paragliding pilot!

In the weeks between, I got to know some of the guys from the club fairly well, and it's hard to describe how great a time I had. In the meantime, I

• scared away a cow which was calmly eating when I approached it from the air
• scared away a farmer who was taking a dump in the field
• literally found the pretty worst landing zone on the entire hill (some coppice)
• literally found the only tree on the entire hill

It's definitely no exaggeration to say that a big share of my amazing year 1 aftermath is due to you, dear colleagues from the club.
Admittedly, the ratio between effort and actual enjoyment is fairly high, similar to, say, surfing, or ... well, I guess you can imagine one or two more similar activities.

For those of you who are not familiar with paragliding: Basically, the only equipment used is a wing, to which you are connected with an awful lot of lines. Unfortunately, these lines have a tendency to get tangled whenever they can. This wing is made of ultra-light fabric such as polyester, and typically around 25-30 sqm. It is constructed in a way that it would fly without any external powers - as soon as it is inflated properly. Once in the air, you mainly control it via a left and a right line (brake). Pulling the left brake deflates the glider a little bit on that side, resulting in the air streaming faster through the right part of it. Consequently, you turn left.

Typically, you start by spreading your glider on a hill and turn your back to the hill, looking towards the glider. Under normal conditions, the wind blows up hill. Therefore, once you start pulling the lines, the glider inflates and, since it's constructed in a way to fly, it starts ascending above your head.
Something like that:

Useless to say, it also starts showing its own will, too. Thus, the first two days of learning how to handle a glider only consist of getting to know what the glider wants, and how to enforce what you want. Pulling it up. Glider going down. Pulling it up. Glider pulling you five meters in one direction. And pulling it up. Glider all of a sudden trying to take you off, and concerned instructor trying to hold you back. Packing glider. And again.

However, the moments where you gain control over the glider become more frequent and longer.
Until, one day, you are considered to be ready for takeoff. In order to do that, you pull up the glider until it is directly above you, turn, raise your hands in order to release the brakes ... and then you run. Remember, it's still takeoff against the wind, so you must run and pull really strong:

... until, all of a sudden, the wind just lifts you up, and you are flying .. woohooo!

Similar to some of the other activities from above, it's hard to describe it to somebody who never experienced it himself. For me, it's an awesome combination of freedom, calmness ... well, you best simply try it out yourself!

Even though I obtained the diploma now, I know there is so much and more to learn ... and I can't tell you how excited I am to spend some more time out there in the Bosnian mountains, together with some nice guys, doing something that is simply awesome...

P.S.: If you are interested in more pictures, check out the club's Facebook page. There are also some cool videos on youtube.