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Do you ever end up texting the same group of friends over and over? Isn’t it annoying when you have to type in each person’s name or phone number each time? This process can be time confusing and frustrating.

If you want to solve the above problem, then Group Texting is for you! Group Texting allows you to create groups of people from your address book that you text frequently, and at one press of a button, you can text them all at the same time!

Group Texting has a simple and easy interface allowing you to manage your groups of friends and text them. If you have a group of friends that you usually text on a regular basis, why not buy this app? It will save you a ton of time, and is definitely worth the cost!

In Group Texting you can do the following

• Create an unlimited number of groups
• Groups can contain anyone from your address book
• You can easily add or remove people to your groups
• You can select any group that you have created, and click ‘Send Text’. This will pop up the SMS interface, allowing you to quickly and easily send them all a text message.

Group Texting is a must-have app for anyone who spends a lot of time texting!

Group Texting Pro in the App Store

To play, choose your game pack from a variety of themes. Let’s say you choose “Hot or Cold” . The game presents you an item, like “Ice Cream” and you need to decide, as fast as you can, if that item is Hot or Cold (In this case, it’s cold). Simply swipe the item “Ice Cream” towards the correct answer “Cold” as fast as you can to receive the most points. But be careful, wrong answers count against you.

There are several game modes all with their own high-score boards powered by our friends at OpenFeint.

We’re always adding new game packs, which you can find using on the “Choose a pack” page using the “Get More” button. We get that content from experts and comedians in our Content Network and from user’s like you!

For more information on the app, you can visit thisorthatforiphone.com

This Or That in the App Store

Are you a WordSpy??? Then prove it!

WordSpy is a fun word game where you must find hidden words which are embedded in scrolling text across the screen. As you find more words, the scrolling gets faster and faster adding to the difficulty.

There are several levels that you can play

• Easy – One row of scrolling letters with one hidden word
• Medium – Two rows of scrolling letters with one hidden word in one of the rows
• Hard – Three rows of scrolling letters with one hidden word in one of the rows
• Super-Hard – Three rows of scrolling letters with THREE hidden words total (one in each row). You have to find them all!

There are over 25,000 words included in WordSpy, so you are sure to have plenty of hours of entertainment.

If you are a word lover, looking to find new words, studying for verbal exams, or are looking for some fun and educational entertainment, then WordSpy is for you! If nothing else, you are sure to learn some new words.

For each word that you correctly identify, the words will scroll slightly faster. For each word that you miss, the words will scroll slower. You get three misses before the game is over.

Challenge friends to see who can get the high score!

WordSpy in the App Store

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Prank your friends with LookAlike! The ‘facial recognition’ application that allows you to make your friends ‘Look Like’ anyone!

LookAlike is a great way to play a Prank on your friends and get a bunch of laughs in the process. You can take their picture with the iPhone, and LookAlike will pretend to ‘process’ their facial features, looking for a matching person that they look like…The trick is that you are allowed to configure what the resulting match will be before hand!

Here’s how the application works:

1. Double-tapping any of the hidden buttons in the four corners of the screen will allow you to configure the resulting person for that corner.
2. Single-tapping any of the hidden corner buttons will ‘activate’ that corner. The person configured in that corner will be the result of the next LookAlike analysis.
3. Take a picture and begin the analysis…
4. LookAlike will then take several seconds while it pretends to analyze the face of your friend, then it will indicate that your friend’s face matched to the person that you setup for that corner.
5. A few seconds later, LookAlike will show the image of that person from Google Images (which you can also configure by scrolling to the image you want to use)

You can configure multiple corners, and prank multiple friends in a row for more realistic results! If you make a few of the results believable, and the last result absolutely ridiculous, your friends will be rolling on the floor laughing!

I have tried this on many of my friends, and I have had them all laughing hysterically at the results. Try it today!

Images by Vincent Boiteau (www.studio.es) — used with permission and remixed by Zach Poley

LookAlike in the App Store

Timed Turns  A common challenge for instrument students is often timed turns.  Timed turns require the pilot to turn the airplane left or right a given number of degrees to a new heading using only the turn coordinator, compass, and clock.  The stress created by the simulated instrument failures while under the hood can make doing simple math in your head very difficult.  This flash card trainer will allow you to practice timed turns arithmetic while on the ground so that the mental calculations become more routine and familiar.  Although there will be many things to worry about the day of your checkride, the arithmetic required to accomplish timed turns should not be one of them. 

Buy this Timed Turns flash card trainer and build your confidence today! This application is geared towards IFR pilots and students, pilots in training, etc.

Features of Timed Turns include:

• Randomized calculation questions
• Swipe to transition or click a button to transition to the next question
• Automatic transition after revealing the answer
• Timer to show how long each question is taking you

Timed Turns in the App Store

TimeTrak is a simple and elegant time tracking utility to help you stay organized. A perfect solution for consultants, physical therapists, contractors, or anyone else who has to keep a precise running log of their activities! At the end of the day, with the push of a button, you can have all of your time tracking information emailed to you!

TimeTrak lets you track your tasks like a stop watch. When you start a new task, you simply specify the start time of the task and the tag for the activity. While the task is running, you will see a real-time counter showing the duration time of the activity. When you are done with the task, you simply press a button to end it, and the information is saved. When you are ready to store your task information somewhere else, you can email all the data to yourself right from the application!

You can even use TimeTrak as a calendar, as it allows you to enter tasks that you have scheduled for the future.

In addition to task entry, TimeTrak has multiple ways that you can view your data, including a summary view mode (grouped into future tasks, tasks in the last 24 hours, task in the last week, and older tasks), and a view by date mode. TimeTrak enables you to add, update, and edit the tag of the tasks simply and easily with the swipe or push of a finger.

Here is a list of the great functionality you will get with TimeTrak

• Stop-watch style time tracking with sleek user interface
• View your data either by day or in a summary view. Easily scroll through all of your tasks.
• Email all of your tasks to yourself. You can either email all individual tasks (tag, date, and duration), or you can group by the date and tag
• All previously used tags for your activities are saved for easy entry later. This is great for when you perform the same tasks more than once
• Edit / Delete your tasks right from the views described above
• You have the option to automatically delete your emailed tasks upon application re-start (it will ‘clean up’ your previously emailed tasks)
• An ‘email icon’ is shown on each task row that has been emailed to you. This will make it easier to manage your tasks that you have already emailed.

This application is made for one thing –tracking your time — and it does it very well! If you need a simply utility to track your time, then TimeTrak is for you!

icons created by Joseph Wain / glyphish.com
main graphics created by Zach Poley

TimeTrak in the App Store

I recently started the 7th course in my Masters – Computer Science Program through the University of Illnois’ I2CS distance learning program.  I didn’t plan very well, and I’m down to my final 2 required courses…of course I save the most dreaded courses for last. I’m a Software guy, so the prospect of taking Computer System Organization is a bit scary – and that is what I am taking this semester. I’m not completely lost yet (but it is only the 3rd week of class, so there’s still time), and the material actually is quite interesting so far.

In the last class, we learned about Amdahl’s Law , which is essentially a formula that allows you to calculate the expected benefit of making a specific performance optimization to a computer system.

As a quick example, lets say you have a system and you want to make it faster. You determine that you can make 50% of the system work 2 times faster. According to Amdahl’s law, this improvement will improve the overall efficiency of the system by about 33%.  The formula for the performance improvement is:

Speedup =    1  / [ (1 - p) + (p / s)]

Where p represents the percentage of the process you sped up (50% in our example), and s represents how many times faster you made that percentage of the process (2 in our example).

Amdahl’s law at it’s basics is a very simple rule that can give you a good picture of how much you can improve a process – It can guide you in understanding if improving the process by a certain factor is worth the effort. What is interesting is what happens when you look at cases where you focus on optimizing portions of a process to a very high level – for example, making 10% of the process work 100 times faster. Let’s quickly run this calculation:

Speedup = 1 / [(1-0.1) + (0.1/100)] = 10.99% improvement

To go even further, what if we make 10% of the process work 1 million times faster?:

Speedup (with 1 million times faster for 10% of the process) = 1 / [(1-0.1) + (0.1/1000000)] = 11.11% improvement

Really? So we spent all the effort in making it 1 million times faster instead of 100 times faster, and all we got was making the total process just 0.12% better? Seems kind of pointless to make all that effort huh?

What if, instead of trying to optimize the heck out of 10% of the process, we tried to slightly optimize 15% of the process. So, we will try to speed up 15% of the process by just 5 times. What does that give us?

Speedup (with 5 times faster for 15% of the process) = 1 / [(1-0.15) + (0.15/5)] = 13.64%

Whoa…so we were able to get a better overall improvement by focusing on 15% of the process instead of 10% of the process, even though we only improved that 15% of the process by 5 times (compared to 1 million times for 10% of the process).  What this is telling me is that in CS, it is better to focus on improving a larger section of a process by a smaller amount then it is to focus on improving a smaller section of a process by a much much larger amount.

Interesting stuff, but maybe not that interesting unless you’re trying to optimize some piece of hardware or software, which you probably are not. But I believe that this same idea can potentially help you be more productive / more efficient in your life.

Being a perfectionist is often considered to be a good trait to have in the business world…but there is a limit. Time is valuable, and if you spend too much time making some specific thing ‘too perfect’  (in Amdahl’s law, optimizing a very small portion of the process to a very high degree), then you lose time that you could potentially spend adding value to something else (in Amdahl’s law, focusing on another chunk of the overall process). I’m not arguing here that you should give a half-hearted effort on your tasks…I’m just saying that sometimes 90% on task A is good enough, and your time is better spent moving on to task B.

If you’re anything like me, it is all too easy to fall into the mindset that it must be ‘100% perfect’ (or ‘completely optimized’) before you stop working and move on to the next task – next time you find yourself falling into this trap, remember the simple formula above – sometimes it’s best to accept the 90% and move on to the next task …  squeezing the last bit of value out of the almost-perfectly optimized / completed task is a deceiving — it may not be as valuable as it may seem!

Ryan Graves recently blogged about the best age for entrepreneurship, and the post had some very interesting follow-up conversation in the comments. I agree that age is a very interesting dynamic to look at in startups. Another interesting characteristic in the context of best overall ‘life situation’ for entrepreneurship is an individual’s level of risk aversion. When you have a steady job and steady income, it is a lost easier to be risk averse. Entrepreneurship is obviously not for the faint of heart or completely risk-averse, as there is plenty of opportunity to fail….on the flip side — in order to succeed, you must sometimes take the opportunity when it presents itself.

With the current economic climate, more and more tech workers are facing what I’m calling a ‘forced opportunity’. It’s no surprise that tech workers aren’t immune to the economic downturn and are getting laid off. For most, this is an awful situation to be in — but for a few, this is just the event they needed to get over their risk-aversion of trying to go at it on their own. Many would-be-entrepreneurs probably find it difficult to make the ‘leap of faith’ between part-time entrepreneurship to go along with a steady job and a full entrepreneurial commitment. I’m not saying that being forced into it is a good thing, but there might be some lights shining if we try to look at the bright side.

With that being said, I know that Silicon Valley has been hit hard lately….and because of this, I’m looking for some new awesome startups to come out of there in the next year or so from the talented ex-Yahoos and others. The Software industry is still great — what other industry can say that the most expensive part of the investment is simply your time and passion? – I doubt there are many.

On that note, Ryan Graves pointed me towards two projects already spawned from laid off Valley workers (specifically, Ryan Kruder):

• Purple People Collective – A job / project board for laid off tech workers
• Neighborsville - A location-specific networking / collaboration / news community

Do you know of any more? If so, I am interested to hear about them.

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Learn from your (cube) neighbor – It doesn’t matter if your neighbor is a Junior Programmer or the CTO – run your ideas past them and see what they think. If your neighbor has more expertise then you, then they may have some tried and true advice to get you past the roadblock you’ve been hitting in your code for the last hour. If they are less experienced, then challenging them with a complex problem and discussing it with them may help grow their expertise — something that will surely help your team in the long run.

Keep it simple – This is so easy to say, yet so hard to do. This is the one item that I have to constantly remind myself of when developing software — Software geeks often generate their own requirements without even realizing it (’Example: Oh, I bet they would like it if they could do this this way OR that way!’). Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best – “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” – Ask yourself each day – ‘what can I remove from the software and still maintain the essence?’ – This alone will get you heads above the rest.

Your code must speak the same language as your client - I’ve been reading bits and pieces of the book Domain-Driven Design . The one main message I am taking away is that the language your code speaks and the language your customer speaks need to be one and the same. If your client keeps talking about how the ‘Policy’ can be sold by a ‘Salesperson’, then maybe you should name your classes ‘Policy’ and ‘Salesperson’, and name your method ’sell’ not ‘widgetA’, ‘thingB’, and ‘update’ (OK – this is very over-simplified…but the point is that your code will ROT fast if you need to go through multiple layers of translation to understand the changing requirements…let your code be the voice of your customer!)

Water your brain – If you aren’t reading reference books to keep up to date, then you aren’t doing your job as a Rockstar Software Engineer. I don’t care how sweet your code is…if you can’t pick up a few books a year written by the software gods (even if it’s just for a quick refresher) – then you aren’t doing your team any favors. There’s plenty of great books out there to read (and plenty of crappy ones too — so be careful). Two books that I like to read at least once a year are: Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns and Design Patterns — yes I know, very old school, but there are timeless nuggets of information within each! Recent books I’ve read or are reading include the Domain-Driven Design mentioned above and another Kent Beck book, Implementation Patterns. I’m always looking for new books — what is in your library?

Test first - Sorry to break the news, but test-driven development is not a buzz word…it’s something you need to do. If nothing else, it will force you to Keep it Simple. If you write the tests first, you can define the criteria for success up front, therefore providing you with a finish line — when the tests pass, you’re done. Without a finish line, it is so easy to keep running….and running and running, until you have implemented what you think should be implemented…not what the customer needs

Introduce your code to your team - If you work in an environment where there is shared code ownership, this is incredibly important. When you are working on something that you know no one else on the team is familiar with, review the code with them when you make changes. This can accomplish several things at once. First, When you are on vacation without a cell phone, your team will know how to fix your wacky code – We’ve all been here… The last thing you want is to have a message from a co-worker on your hotel room phone in Mexico saying that all hell has broken loose! Secondly, the best brain to have on a software problem is the one that isn’t biased towards a solution. If you wrote the code, you are already biased — you think it is the best way to solve the problem, whether you like it or not. A fresh brain can point out the obvious ways to do it better — and that is a good thing for your team (even if it hurts your own ego a little bit).

These are just a few of the many habits practiced by Rockstar Software Engineers…what others can you think of? I’ll write some more of my thoughts on this in a future blog post