You are here: Home » Archives for search

Tag Archives: search

WhatTheFont for iPhone

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on July 28, 2010. Filed under Blog, mobile, production, project management. Tagged , , , , , , . No comments.

42 days, 17 hours and 20 seconds. A conservative estimate of the amount of time I’ve wasted over the years hunting high and low, trying to identify a specific font.

No longer. A dream.

Missing a trick?

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on February 15, 2010. Filed under Blog, Review, mobile, production. Tagged , , , , , , . 1 Comment.

Is it just me or does the App store on the iPhone disappoint? Every time I use it I find it extremely difficult to find what I’m after. It seems that the idea of a stripped down App store for the iPhone platform is fundamentally self defeating for Apple. I look for apps when I am using my iPhone. I don’t look for Apps when I’m at my laptop (My laptop doesn’t use apps!), so it seems bizarre that the functionality of the iPhone App store is stripped right back from the one online. Apparently if I am looking on an iPhone for apps then I am only iterested in what is in the top 25 or what is being featured by Apple. Apple likes to tell us that there are 100s of thousands of Apps on the store but i only get to find out about the ones that everyone else buys, which limits the range to alarm clocks, simple games and expensive Grand Theft Auto type £5 revenue fests. Come on, there has to be more out there than this? I want Apple to have another go at this interface. I want the following:

  • I want to be suggested apps that friends of mine have bought.
  • People that downloaded this, downloaded this too.
  • I want to know what apps people in my city use.
  • I want to say what my job is and have apps suggested to me.
  • I want to subscribe to App alerts that tell me when a new app has been released that might interest me.
  • I want it to show me more.
  • I want Genius to work better. It just seems to suggest apps based on the fact I have one other app like it.

I want…. I want…… iWant.

API go lucky

Written by Andy Weir. Posted on February 12, 2010. Filed under Blog, production. Tagged , , , , , , , . No comments.

API List

Extremely helpful comprehensive list of APIs courtesy of Programmable Web.
Provides licensing info, functionality descriptions, security and support info, along with examples of how each API has been used in various mashups. See the full list here.

Virtual Assistance + iPhone

Written by Robin Wong. Posted on February 6, 2010. Filed under mobile, work. Tagged , , , . No comments.

Siri personal iphone assistantI’m intrigued to try out Siri on the iPhone, after reading Greg Roeken’s post and Dag Kittlaus’s mashable article. Siri is Dag’s little baby, and it brings the whole star trek communicator voice recognition a step closer apparently. It claims to translate requests like “find chinese restaurant nearby” by interpreting this into a web service request that returns data from APIs like opentable and yelp to give you information on where the nearest roast crispy belly pork is waiting for you.

This level of automation – taking the hassle out of simple search tasks – is a great evolutionary step for search and hopefully relevance. I guess the trick is being able to distinguish between different senses of taste and not just firing the same results back at everyone. For those with search/media heads on, how paid for search can have an impact to ensure staying at the top of rankings will be crucial, especially when more personalised taste is taken into account.

I’m going to try it out when it’s available in the UK app store.