Serendipity35

Ok, so we all don't live in Great Britain, but the available space to get an iPhone App reviewed is so limited that Ian Bruce of The Lottery Company sent his iPhone app information overseas to get a little cyberspace notice.

First, let me say that I am no participant in gambling of any sort.  I don't have any deep belief (other than considering them potential metaphysical evils) about games of chance  --they just don't interest me.  My only visit to a casino was in Atlantic City in 1995 and that was only because that was where I took the Jeopardy contestant tests (I went 2 and out).

I'm currently teaching an iPhone Application Development class online and I have a great bunch of fully engaged students and, like many an instructor before me, I took a task and turned it into an opportunity for students to provide their feedback.  My thanks to the students who allowed me to use their submissions, here.

From Maria:

Concept - The idea for this application is very good – it tells you the last results of the lotto, as well as past results. You can even check your numbers against older lottery results. Other features include a random ticket generator and an archive of results since 1994.
It is a very good concept, and would translate very well to the iPhone, however the design has many flaws:
- Starting with the icon – this is something very small, a detail, but in a way it can be very important when designing an app. The name of the program, when purchased from the App store, is “National Lottery – Lotto”; the icon says “Lottery”; once you open the app, the title says “Lottry.co.uk”. The author will want to standardize the title of the app.
- The main menu has a good design, but the font chosen is very small for the buttons. Also, it is important to use the iPhone patterns (navigation bar, arrows, etc), in order to facilitate the user interaction. People are used to those patterns, so it makes learning a new app much easier.
- Throughout the whole app, the font has to be made bigger. The results are very small, very difficult to read.
- Under “check my ticket” is where most improvement is needed. It is very difficult and irritating to enter the numbers one by one, waiting for the keyboard to pop, close, click on an other field, etc. A use of the slot-machine pattern here would be ideal.
- When you check the archived results, it needs to be organized better. If I want to see the results from January of 2000, I have to click through 27 pages.
Overall, fixing those little design flaws would make a much stronger app, and it could become very useful for British iPhone owners.

From Drew:

I did a walkthrough of the screens and features and found the following:
- Under Check My Ticket when I go to input my numbers it gives me the ascii keyboard with the letters (and not numbers) displayed. I would recommend setting this to number input (for keyboard type). For each lottery number field the keyboard changes back to letters so it's an extra button for each number you enter.
If I hit "go" without specifying any numbers I get errors telling me that each field is empty. But then after I touch "ok" to acknowledge this, the app crashes.
Other than this, things worked great. The user interface was easy and straightforward to use. And it seemed like a very useful app for lottery lovers.
I would definitely recommend it.
The only idea for an enhancement that might be nice is when going back to results of previous years you could perhaps index the results by month so that to get to January you don't have to go back through the other 11 months of results (unless I missed the way to go in both directions). But this is a small point given that I don't imagine people do historical research on a daily basis or anything.

I'm a function-over-form kind of guy and I care less about the appearance of a program than I do about how it works, and using that "function" judgment, this seems as though it is a very capable iPhone app.  For those interested in details from the provider, you can visit: http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=313319153&mt=8   (It will open in iTunes) or you can get it directly from Apple's AppStore.  The Lottery Checker is free for the first 6 months you have it.  Further details are available on their web site.

If you fired up your browser (or newsreader) to read the latest in Serendipity35's offerings in the world of Ken and Tim's Excellent Adventure, you might have noticed that the address of the blog has changed.  Don't Panic, you are still in the same place you've always been; it just has a new address.

When Serendipity35 first came online in February, 2006 it was as a sidebar to a presentation in which Ken and I participated.  As the blog (and readership) grew, the server that the blog was hosted on (devel2.njit.edu/serendipity) became far more busy hosting the blog than it was designed to be --the devel in devel2.njit.edu  meant development and it was designed (by me) to function as a testing ground for the good, the bad and the ugly software packages that I was working on.  Last September Serendipity35 was moved to a production server at NJIT that had plenty of horsepower to drive the expanding blog.  Two other problems remained, though, and one of those problems was all of the devel2/serendipity links that existed on the internet, the other problem was that the blog was no longer a single function of the NJIT environment --Ken had moved on to a writing position at Passaic Community College. I think we've, at last, solved both problems.

In December I installed a new high-powered server on my own private network (South Monmouth Software Design) and began the slow transition of the Serendipity35 material from the NJIT host machines to the serendipity35.net domain.  After a LOT of testing, head-scratching, editing and (some) swearing, the www.serendipity35.net site was ready to launch this morning.

Almost everything about the site is identical to dl.njit.edu/serendipity though we have added Google AdSense advertisements to the sidebar.  The advertisements are content-relevant and non-intrusive to the subject matter of posts, but since this is now a wholly privately funded blog, a few clicks on the advertisements from our gracious readers from time-to-time will help us keep the lights on at serendipity35.net.  Enlightenment can be difficult in the dark.

During the time we developed and hosted this blog at NJIT, NJIT never once attempted to edit, censor or influence our content in any way and for that I am, of course, grateful.

If you still have the old devel2.njit.edu/serendipity or the dl.njit.edu/serendipity  bookmarks in your browser or newsreader, those addresses will continue to work.  You'll  be sent to www.serendipity35.net, automatically.

Here is to hoping that everyone will find this transition to be as seamless as I find it to be exciting.

Of course, all of your comments, brickbats, bouquets and bug reports, are still welcome as well

Managing a public-access wiki is a little like trying to grow a garden in a land fill.  Every time you go to check on how things are doing, you find another pile of someone else's refuse piled on top of your stuff.  While digging the Wiki35 out from under a recent mudslide of online pharmaceutical and college-degree-purchasing spam scams, I found this page:

Sunbonnets
NOTICE: This page was created by a program as part of the Graffiti Network research project at Brown University. We have removed the data, but are unable to remove this page. We apologize for any inconveniences that our actions may have caused. For more information, please visit http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/info/.

Our education wiki was spammed by Brown University's studious attempt at random vandalizing of public web sites.  What that spamming represented was more than just an attempt by a computer science's department to explore the feasibility of using random public sites to share distributed data.  It represented an arrogance that exceeds the skills developed by that department's faculty, students and staff.  The "information" web page that the embedded link points to claims that the defaced pages would be removed by April 11, 2009.  It also provides instructions for system administrator to remove the pages themselves in case the Brown University crew couldn't figure out how to undo what it had already done.  April 11 is long past and the page remained: the arrogant and ignorant Ivy Leaguers at Brown should probably have Hacking listed as their major areas of study: computer scientists they are not.

Hacking can take many forms and disguises.  When I did a DNS lookup on the offending host address, it did resolve to a Brown University listed address.  Maybe I should report the vandalism to ntg@brown.edu, but in a properly run network environment I shouldn't have to complain to their listed technical contact.  If Brown isn't aware of what its departments (or wayward students) are doing, they have little business being plugged into any external network.  While I realize that suggesting that Brown unplug itself from the internet is more fantasy than proposal, I am suggesting that using --or allowing to be used-- academic departments to exploit public resources harms the flow and availability of information.  Purposely defacing a website, despite the after-the-fact mea culpas, is the academic equivalent of burning books.

The next time I receive some heinous spam in my inbox or on my website, I'll wonder if it came from Rhode Island.

Like the scary guy at the left (the NJIT mascot, the Highlander) is demanding, we want to review new iPhone applications.  The explosion of new apps in Apple's iPhone store has left one developer to comment as a guest lecturer in class:

"In order to get new iPhone applications reviewed, developers often now have to pay a site to review their software"

Paying to get anything reviewed is fundamentally appalling. The notion that fledgling (or veteran) application entrepreneurs have to shell out cash to get someone to evaluate their efforts is an unmitigated affront. It is also a POLA violation to the spirit of independent open source developers

Okay, so Apple's development/deployment process for iPhone applications is a far cast from real open source software development, but the process does intersect at points with the open source model:

The iPhone operating system is partly BSD based and inherits that open source license

The Software Development Kit (SDK) from Apple is free to download and use

Apple includes the iPhone Simulator to test features (not all) during development

It isn't the Free Software foundation's approach, but it certainly isn't Microsoft's approach, either.

Apple does, however, require that developers register (currently $99) if they want the ability to deploy their apps on real hardware devices.  Along with a rigorous review of candidate apps designed to ensure that uploaded software meets the Apple standards, Apple also requires a single point of sale for developed applications (the AppStore), a 30% cut of the gross sales, and a Spring blizzard of paperwork to participate in the for-profit distribution of applications.

Though it is relatively easy to jailbreak your device and bypass Apple's restrictions and use third party means to deploy and distribute applications, that ability hasn't slowed the deluge of apps that developers submit to Apple.  Foundering in that flood are developers who can't get their software reviewed on its merits by independent third parties.

It is time to change that.

Developers in search of a review may submit their apps to Serendipity35 for review, sans payola.  We have the necessary credentials to install applications on devices and publish honest reviews.  Interested developers can contact us at iReview at serendipity35.net.