Moritz Haarmann's Blog

qwerted released!

momo — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:56:18 +0000

Hey, good news: qwerted is available on the android market as of now. It’s price point is 0.99$. Related posts:qwerted status update Wow. just wow. The last few days, I received tons... iType becomes qwerted, Google is dominating my life. Hey again. Happy new year. First of all, iType is... qwerted for android has a homepage now! I [...] Related posts:

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qwerted status update

momo — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:33:27 +0000

Wow. just wow. The last few days, I received tons of emails from people who want to beta test qwerted, have been featured on some blogs ( androidguys.com , ignore the code , mobiflip , some other languaged-blogs ), thanks to the all writers, and got a lot of motivation from the positive reactions.

There are some things I’d like to adress in a short here. First of all, iPhone indeed has some kind of resizing of the touch areas for specific keys, but it’s not as extensive as qwerted’s resizing. Just try it ( I did )! Overall, qwerted and all other android keyboards do have a special problem, and that is that screen estate is fairly limited, and at least on my devices ( g1, google ion ) the screen is notably smaller than the iphone’s.

The next issue is word suggestions. Many people approached me with that wish. I’m currently in the process of building “more necessary” things, like a dictionary installer, and qwerted will get suggested words after that. But I guess not in the plain way you know word suggestions. Maybe context aware, maybe something else. But they are definitely on the agenda.

A word on pricing. I set up a small survey for beta users ( If you’re one of those, the survey is on google ), and the results at this point indicate a selling price of about $2.49. I think this is quite fair and reasonable.

I’m sorry if I forgot to answer some mails or didn’t reply to questions, it’s been a few busy days, and I’m still overwhelmed, amazed and thrilled by the way the whole qwerted-thing developed. And it’s just the start.

Finally: I guess I’m going to make the end-of-january deadline!

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qwerted for android has a homepage now!

momo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:45:51 +0000

I just launched www.qwerted.com, so there’s a dedicated project home for this brilliant project now. visit it, tell your friends! Related posts:iType becomes qwerted, Google is dominating my life. Hey again. Happy new year. First of all, iType is... qwerted status update Wow. just wow. The last few days, I received tons... qwerted released! Hey, good news: qwerted [...] Related posts:

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Google Docs to Latex Converter / beta online

momo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:12:12 +0000

Hello friends of the night, I made it to put an early version of my Google Docs to Latex converter online. Please have a look at it and provide some valuable feedback. Related posts:Google Docs Privacy, Latex knowledge, project update Hey! I haven’t been writing here in a while, so... Germany, France against Google ( Protectionism at [...] Related posts:

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Germany, France against Google ( Protectionism at its best )

momo — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 21:14:15 +0000

Have you heard the latest ideas of deeply concerned government representatives in France and Germany? Mastermind Sarkozy wants to raise a Google-Tax, German Secretary of Justice sees a urgent need to check if projects like Streetview conform with german law. While these thoughts are not a week old, the fight aainst Google Books is still present. Well, Google is the new enemy, that is obvious.

The overall public perception of Google in Germany is quite negative, but it wasn’t always. In the early years, Google was seen as a great company, very much like the “don’t be evil”-claim suggests. Over the years yet, this attitude has shifted towards an, in my opinion, overly critic one. The main concerns are privacy and the fear of an uncontrollably huge enterprise with almost unlimited power in the internet. While all of these fears are at least partially reasonable and justified, they are nothing more but a result of an organic development and the business model of Google. This development has only been possible by a number of components working together brilliantly: the idea, the team, the environment, and the time in which all of Google happened.

Contrary to other big players in the industry, no one was ever forced to use Google. Although this is a weak point, it’s still important in understanding why government programs to limit Google’s influence are set to fail. Google dominates the market not by a policy in which all other competitors are either bought or killed, it dominates the market by being the best. This is valid for GMail, the Google Search, Maps and many other applications. The consequence is simple: Users tend to use the best, that is, Google. A very high market share at the end is just a symptom for the lack of knowledge of other players involved, but no consequence of some evil tendency on Google’s side.

What about privacy? First of all, there is a discrepancy. While searching for people and last names is super-popular, this is only valid as long as the own name is not represented in any ( negative, compromising ) way. So basically, Google should fix the stuff people mess up on the internet, be it by uploading pictures or by writing private sex-blogs. Something Google will never do, because it’s simply not possible, and a search engine can’t be replacement for a responsible and conscious use of this medium.

The other privacy concern is the usage data Google gathers. This happens e.g. when you use GMail, the Google Search, Google Documents, and virtually all other products provided. This data is collected to improve the overall experience, e.g. by providing recommendations or remembering settings, by customizing results and so on. But this data is only collected once you start using Google. Google Analytics, using also cookies to track unique visitors, is by the way just a product provided by Google for Website owners. In case you feel offended by that, you should therefore contact the staff of any website in question, rather than Google.

What is clear to me after writing these few paragraphs: the Problem is not Google, the problem is the non-existence of any kind of competitor on this continent. Having been unable to create a sustainable Internet business in the last ten years ( help me if I’m wrong ) on the continent, instead of improving the conditions for IT-Startups, the education, this problem shall now be solved by reanimating the poor idea of protectionism.

The question should be, why we are simply unable to be a successful country when it comes to non-copied, innovative startups and great companies. And how to solve that.. I don’t know.

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bored summary of the past day. / 750words, 1buckapp, java coding tipps

momo — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 09:24:27 +0000

So, on this very exceptionally snowy day here in Stuttgart, i decided to procrastinate a bit and do some fun stuff. Because going outside would have been at least life-threatening, I decided that the most exciting adventure would be to clean the kitchen take a panorama image out of my 3 living room windows. Here it is.

After having mastered the fun part of the day, I had a really interesting skype call with a former colleague of mine who is now enrolled at UCL. We spoke about some projects we have been doing, and of course the upcoming ones. And I guess a sideproject of his, 1bucketapp.appspot.com, is really worth mentioning. I don’t know what to do with it, but maybe you can put it to use.

Another, at first sight, useless site is http://750words.com/, a project where everyone is encouraged to write 750 words every day. The texts are not published nor accessible to anyone else but you, so it’s a private diary for everyone who has a need for one. From my personal attempt to use it I can tell that 750 words is a lot.

The last interesting snippet of the day was a collection of tipps for keeping Java code clean and maintainable. Although the text dates back to 2001, it’s still of remarkabel relevance and definitely worth reading.

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Netbook as PDF-Reader ( Ubuntu )

momo — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 19:41:18 +0000

A buddy of mine made a great script allowing you to instantly rotate your netbooks screen 90°, which enables you to read PDFs more comfortable. You should definitely have a look at it, as its a nice addition to any ubuntu-powered netbook.

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iType becomes qwerted, Google is dominating my life.

momo — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:08:49 +0000

Hey again. Happy new year. First of all, iType is the first project that looks like it’s going to be finished in time. That allows for two conclusions: either, it wasn’t hard to built or I am finally becoming a good programmer. I admit, it wasn’t hard to build then. I expect it to be in the Android market at about 15-20 of Jan, but I’ll keep you updated then. I’m working on a new screencast, for the time being, see iType in old action. Oh, on public demand the name is going to change from iType ( which is, by the way, a name used my Monotype ) to qwerted. Qwerted seems 100% nonsense, so I like it naturally.

Twitter is still distracting me from everything, always. And it will keep doing so, it’s uselessness in perfection. Really great. If you want to follow me, it’s derwildemomo .

The next best thing is stackoverflow, a prototypic kind and polite community very focused on solving problems. If you haven’t heard of it ( impossible if you read this blog ), you should really visit it. Renders almost all programming-related discussion boards useless.

I need a Nexus One. So if you do have a Nexus One: I need it. Stay tuned, more to follow.

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iType Demo Video online – finally getting real

momo — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:03:47 +0000

iType, my project, is finally getting close to release state. But talking is boring, so here is a short demo clip. If you have any questions, please write to itypeapp @ gmail.com

I am looking for beta testers, so if you want to test it, please let me know!

iType Demo Video from Moritz Haarmann on Vimeo.

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RandomAccessFile weirdness explained, no buffers, just pain.

momo — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 15:10:22 +0000

Ola! I’ve been coding a new android keyboard lately, a project for my university degree but also : for fun. While I was doing this, specially while implementing a file-based dictionary containing frequency information of all words stored in there, I stumbled upon a very, very weird Java-behavior.

Let’s explain it. Using RandomAccessFile, you have both Interfaces, DataInput and DataOutput ( and Closeable ) at your service. Wonderful, I thought, and started to use them. Well, two weeks and endless debugging sessions later I figured out why nothing worked the way it should: RandomAccessFile.

This little class is unable to provide the most simple functionality: Write a byte value, say 42, to a certain position, say 11223 in a file, then seek back to 11223, read a byte value, and make sure it’s the same. The reason for this odd, strange, undesired, undocumented feature? No shared buffers. In fact, no buffers, just for the explicit read and write operations ( they are mapped to native methods anyway ). So basically, everything should work fine in an unbuffered environment, with an operating system directly writing everything down on file.

Because virtually no operating system works unbuffered, RandomAccessFile doesn’t work. The working workaround is to sleep for some time or something alike.

By the way, I was only able to figure it out by looking at the openJDK source, an excellent source in case you’re wondering about some Java behaviour. And thanks to Marc Seeger for his help!

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