Applying Business Intelligence to Bug Tracking

Last week I released AnkiDroid 0.5.1, and judging by the Android Market's comments, people seem to love it :-)

Since a few releases already, an opt-in feedback mechanism sends us a report everytime a problem happens. The anonymous reports are automatically scanned by a Google App Engine application to determine whether it is a new bug or just an additional occurrence of an already known bug. The data can be exploited in two ways:

1) An online application allows one to browse the reports and bugs, see which bugs happen the most often for a given version, and associate them with issues in the bug tracker.

2) A set of Business Intelligence tools allows one to drill-down reports in a multidimensional OLAP cube, and generate reports to show any interesting findings. As a quick example, here is the distribution of crashes among Android versions. Those tools use the open source Pentaho Business Intelligence suite.

Video of my AnkiDroid presentation at Roppongi Hills

Here is a video of my recent speech in Roppongi Hills about AnkiDroid. About 200 people attended, including a Japanese company who is considering reusing the code as a part of their educational offering. I licensed the slides under a Creative-Commons-Share-Alike license, so feel free to reuse or modify them and speak about AnkiDroid at other events!

Presentation about AnkiDroid in Roppongi Hills

I will give a presentation at Hills Breakfast on Friday 10/22, 7h45, in Mori Tower, just at the left of the Goldman Sachs entrance.
I will be speaking about AnkiDroid and Open Source in general.

Last month's presenters were the Director of the Mori Art Museum and two Google managers.
My friend Yuko Mizutani of Mori Building Co. is organizing the event and invited me to give a talk. I first thought I would talk about ECM, but she figured out it would sound too much like an advertisement for my company, so I will be advertising Open Source instead!

Released AnkiDroid 0.4.1

I just released AnkiDroid 0.4.1, result of the collaboration of about 8 developers and tens of other contributors!

AnkiDroid will always be open source, but it is starting to get attention from companies as well: a Chinese company contributed the Simplified Chinese user interface. This version brings in a lot of new features:

First, the user interface has been translated by volunteers in 13 languages:
- Portuguese
- Swedish
- Romanian
- French
- Spanish
- Italian
- Simplified Chinese
- Traditional Chinese
- Catalan
- Russian
- Polish
- Greek
- German

Second, you can now download decks that have been made by other people. Hundreds of good-quality decks are available in a multitude of topics: sciences, law, languages, medicine, etc.

And lots of other improvements!
In Google's Android Market, search for "Anki".

Released AnkiDroid 0.2

I just released AnkiDroid 0.2 !
You can install it on your Android phone using the Google Market. AnkiDroid is a memorization software with already 900 registered users. Of course, it is open source.
Many new features for this version 0.2:
- Basic spaced repetition.
- Preferences dialog to enable various things.
- Sample deck.
- Starts much faster.

Working in Milan

This week I am working in Milan in the offices of Sourcesense. We are about twenty people from Brazil, Australia, Europe, India, the U.S. and South Africa, our goal is to brainstorm and define how Alfresco certifications will look like: Which different certifications will be proposed, what will be their content, price, modalities, difficulty, and many other things. We reached a consensus on most things, and tomorrow we will produce sample questions for each of the certifications.

In other news, I released OxygenGuide 0.3, which fixes bug #6, and AndroidBigImage 0.1.

Created OxygenGuide, an open-source offline travel guide

A lot of people were asking for it, so this weekend I developed OxygenGuide and released it under an open-source license.

Imagine you are traveling around the world and suddenly find yourself in Riyadh looking for a restaurant or a place to sleep. Carrying travel books is a pain, and browsing the Internet on your mobile phone abroad will probably cost a lot.

That's where OxygenGuide comes in: It is a compact offline travel guide that takes only 150MB of your smartphone's storage space. The data is based on Wikitravel, but customized for small devices. With this world travel book on you mobile device, you will travel lighter and further. The current version works for notebooks such as the Eee PC. I will try my best to release an Android version during the next weekend.

Update: Now usable on Android too.

Google gave me an Android smartphone!

I just came back from Google Developer Day 2009, where I attended enlightening presentations about OpenSocial applications optimization, advanced Android programming, and how to push the limits of the Google Maps API, among others. I definitely recommend watching the videos when they come online. I ran into a lot of acquaintances and got introduced to very interesting people. As if it were not enough, Google offered me this shiny smartphone running Android!