Zaagmans...

For readers not from the Netherlands, let me just quickly introduce the concept of "Zaagmans". You could translate him as "Mr. Saw", and he's a fictional construct mentioned by the characters of a dreary office satire called "Debiteuren Crediteuren" in the comedy program Jiskefet on Dutch televison. Zaagmans of course comes along each wednesday at noon, to "saw the week in half".

In the second week of Januari Zaagmans came up at work (must have been wednesday the 11th) and I had the idea that it would be easy to either set an alarm for noon every wednesday with the sound of a saw or write a small silly app to do that for me and optionally show me a countdown. I kept things to myself and at home that evening I wrote just such an app. I wanted to dogfood it myself for a week, and after I knew for sure it worked on wednesday I published it. It turned up in the Marketplace on december the 22nd, just over three weeks ago.



I would never have believed what I started. Download numbers are trailing a couple of days, as you probably know, but in the first 2.5 weeks the app has been downloaded 123 times! And it is only published to a couple of markets: just NL originally, but as quite a number of Windows Phone users over here still have not switched from their "fake" US/UK/DE/BE Live ID they started using when NL support was still far away, I enlarged this a bit.

What I find astonishing is the fact that I have 9 reviews already, almost all of them five star except for one four star one. And this morning I noticed that Zaagmans is in the 3/48 position of the "New & Impressive" section in AppFlow! Wow, that's still just for the Dutch marketplace, but this little app really seems to be touching a nerve. It my own little Rubber Duck! ;-)

So far, there has been one update where you are now able to choose the sound you want to hear (first version made random choice of the original three sounds) and a second is current going through Marketplace submission right. After that at least one more version will be submitted that has Flurry statistics built in; I really want to see what people do with this app.

If you have ideas for it, please let me know.

Command & Conquer, Distimo style

Just a quick post, reacting to a comment by Tijmen after tweeting about the cool Command & Conquer style competitor map by Distimo.

Data for the following map (click on it for a larger version) is from the last month. It uses colors to show which of the WP7 apps I designated as competitors for my Klout Tile app (which should be all of the Klout apps out there right now..) have the highest ranking within the Social category in that country:

Interesting, huh? Especially since the other newcomer (from France, and currently only biggest there) shows the most information from the Klout API at the moment. Really should push out v1.1 of my Klout Tile app soon: it shows more data, should be more stable and cuts back on the "review begging" that was a bit excessive in v1.0 (with a daily recurring reminder). At least my app is still the only one with a Live Tile for your score.

My goal: get the whole world blue. ;-)

Update: Since posting this, another Klout app started showing your score on a live tile. So the "blue earth" goal doesn't seem like it'll be happening soon, as I am currently busy on other WP7 apps (one of which actually has a fixed deadline).

3D Masters app has more downloads than expected

As we know the App Hub download statistics take a couple of days to get processed, so it took a while to get going for my 3D Masters app. However, even though it seems to start trailing off a bit at the moment, so far there have only been a couple of days the app was not downloaded somewhere:

My other application only has about 40 downloads total (and none in the time frame shown above, hence the flat start of the cumulative line). And that one has been published since early november 2010!

Also, I would expect the actual target demographic for the app to not be heavy Windows Phone 7 users yet. So you can understand how I'm over the moon with these download numbers. ;-)

Update, early Januari 2012: still only a handful to go until the 400 downloads mark; that's almost additional 200 added in two months. Is that the word of mouth going around during the holiday season? New Nokia phones and advertising? I will try to get a graph out of the whole time it was published some time soon. And I really need to get cracking on the update for next July, when the 3D Masters 2012 event will be in Venlo again.

I have a finite Erdős Number

I was browsing some old XKCD comics the other day when I stumbled upon one I couldn't really place, as I had not actually heard of Paul Erdős before.

Well, that's a problem that Wikipedia can easily solve. As I started reading up on Erdős Numbers, I noticed the Compute your Erdős Number page at the Erdős Number Project.

And lo and behold: Marc van Kreveld is listed in the list of all authors with EN ≤ 2. So, because the subject of my masters thesis got presented by him at the 3rd International Conference on GeoComputation in Bristol, I guess my Erdős Number is three. Hence the recent Twitter announcement.