Android application - cost estimation - android

I am developing Android application for the company. They want me to create digital newspaper that would:
Display list of headlines for each category/subcategory
Will have 4-6 categories and 4-8 subcategories for each category
Display article with text and images,
Play podcast,
Save downloaded articles/headlines in db
They already have the web-service almost adopted for this app.
This app will be quite similar to: TechnologyReview or CNET News (but the article will be larger)
I have estimated this project for 160 hours of development. That doesn't include design but includes design implementation.
I would love to hear your opinion on this estimate. Do you think 160h is too short or too long? How much I should charge for this project or 1 hour of development(more or less of course)? I am living in London, UK
I need this estimation by the end of today so I will be really grateful for fast replies.

If you have a similar project, or some similar code files you can bunch together into a folder, you can simply run ProjectCodeMeter over it and get a ballpark cost estimation that will point you in the right direction.
Good luck!

The way to do estimates is to break down the project into each component and estimate each of those. Trying to ballpark one number is inevitably worse than ballparking a breakdown. This also helps you get better on each estimate in the future because you know which estimates made sense and which were wrong.

Related

Carbon footprint calculation method

I'm currently doing my final year project. The end product of this project is to develop an Android application that can be used by an individual to track the amount of carbon gas emitted through daily activities and consumption. I'm having trouble in searching and understanding the method use for calculation. Anyone can explain?
You will most likely need to get the user to input their daily food waste, etc and use a formula to calculate it. A quick search on google brought me to https://www3.epa.gov/carbon-footprint-calculator/ which has an excelsheet with the various formulas you can download on that page.
As for how the formula or its constants are derived, I have no clue myself.

K Nearest Neighbor

As part of my final project for a 1 year software development course i am required to implement a knn project which predicts the outcome of football matches in an android app.
I built a mysql database on an online hosting site (byethost) using predictors:
difference in average goals per game
diff in average points per game
diff in average goals conceded per game
outcome
My tutor recommended k should equal 100 and that a significant data set be constructed (over 1000 results)
From here on i am lost as to how i should approach the problem at hand. Can anyone give any further guidance as to how to tackle the problem.
All advice is welcomed.
This is too long for a comment.
K-NN could be used as part of the solution. However, it is an undirected data mining algorithm, meaning specifically that it doesn't generate expected outcomes. That means that K-NN is not appropriate as the only technique used for a final project that depends on prediction.
I am concerned about any year-long course that makes such a recommendation. The difference between directed and undirected algorithms is pretty fundamental.

What is the best algorithm for speech to text with a known dictionary

I have seen lot of questions with this topic and read alot of articles but still cant find the best sloution for what I am looking for.
I want to build an app (Android/IOS/...whatever) which has this feature:
when the user write down a text (using killboard), the app will can recognize speech to text on what he wrote with 99.9% performance, I dont mind if he would have to record his voise first to make performance better... I want it to be "live" like Google Servies unlike Seri that writes the texts only after you finish talking.
I have found this site:
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net
and I wish to start working with it but before start I wanted to make sure it is the best way.
can anyone give some advises?
thanks
*edit: I dont care to build a new field for a new launguage if needed (its not in english).
I mean like, if you do some research you'll see that 99% accuracy in speech-to-text is only a very recent thing, and an example is Nuance's Dragon.
High accuracy speech-to-text can cost around $600 for a license. It's not an easy thing to create. You have to pay for high accuracy TTS libraries.
For what you're doing though, a really good service I have used is Wit.ai. It's very accurate, and its getting faster every week.
Another possibility for you might be the AT&T speech engine (Watson) found here: http://developer.att.com/
They offer 1 million API calls per month for a fee(low) and allow you to customize the "library" you use to recognize speech. It might be what you are looking for given your latest statements. You can try it for free though it is throttled until you pay.

Store big JSON in Titanium for iOS and android

How the app works
Currently an app is in the works which utility is to explore activities in 5 regions. Each activity is represented as an JS object with a fair amount of properties. Activities can be viewed through different filters in their respective tab, for example categories or a map. Inside each main filter, there are options to filter on date, region, accessibility etc.
The challenge
There is a lot of JSON that needs to be stored on the device, and support is required for both iOS and android.
In the best case scenario the data needs to be in sync with the database, and all data needs to be available on the device. The app will need to be snappy for a good experience, this means that fetching data needs to be as fast as possible. Furthermore, filtering data needs to be as snappy as possible.
Viable solutions considered so far (which don't quite cut it yet)
MongloDB with the MongloDB Titanium Store adapter, silver bullet?
This approach at first seemed be the silver bullet. Although the project seems promising, it is maintained by one heroic hacker, and the project is in need of some documentation. I have inspected the source, and hacked my way through the API, but to no avail, console.log and jasmine tests won't cut it this time. More important still, it is not quite finished yet, and features compared to MongoDB are missing. A great project, I hope it will catch on more and be capable enough to assist desperate titanium developers in the future.
JSONDB, only for iOS
This app really needs to work on both platforms, iOS and android, so no reason for trying this. Moreover, JSONDB works within a single context only, which would be a serious concern as well.
Ti Filesystem and JSON.stringify + JSON.parse, not memory efficient
A viable solution for saving a small list of saved items, which is also a feature in the app. But in other posts issues over memory limits with the use of JSON methods have been noticed for android. Though this might not be the least of my problem, memory efficiency overal will be a huge problem. Never have I seen benchmarks for performance with file reading and writing for Titanium, so I am not sure how big of an impact reading and writing would be. Filtering big objects is a huge concern as well, underscore won't manage this kind of big data. Iterating big objects is a huge problem no matter what approach I will choose.
Big ass global object
Practically the same approach as a Filesystem, only keep it in a global. This has the same issues and is just a plain unethical practice.
SQLite, yuck
Highly document oriented JSON data to SQlite, it sounds worse than samsung galaxy fanboys. Any feedback on this?
Multiple files + SQLite to maintain + lazy load, unicorns and rainbows?
Desperate for a solution, I might be onto something in the course of writing this post. There are probably something 10-16 main categories which each 1 to 4 subcategories. Keep all the activities for a subcategory in it's own file, which is a quite slim JSON. Browsing through categories, each subcategory is rendered in it's own TableViewSection, each subcategory be appended independently to the table based on how much the user is scrolled down, effectively lazy loading the content. There is only one quite quick file read. Within this view adding more subfilters effects only the already loaded items, and iterating this items is reasonably affordable.
Updating the data is also quite effective, only files that are subject to change are updated. A SQLite database can maintain the dates of all activities which have a expiry date, it can dynamically build it's own JSON file for the upcoming seven days or month. This will make the calendar view quite smooth for most usage. Picking future dates will be a nightmare though.
Still the map is an issue...
If you have read all of this, thank you. If you have experience with something similar, or might be onto something, feel free to reply! I have to quit writing, quit coding and start sleeping.
Sorry for the crappy monglodb docs. I developed it for some internal projects and really wanted to share it with the community, but the lack of docs does make it hard to use. But great news I have docs now lol also slimmed down and cleaned up the source code. Hope it works better for you now. http://monglodb.com
I'm the original author of JSONDB and thought I'd drop in and provide an answer for anyone finding this question via Googlefu.
JSONDB is now deprecated software - it's been replaced by another project called SculeJS. SculeJS aims to provide a full featured NoSQL database written in pure JavaScript for use in Titanium, NodeJS, and web apps.
JSONDB was originally only available for use in iOS applications due to limitations in the way Ti native modules were built - the current versions of JSONDB and SculeJS are compatible with both iOS and Android apps.
In a lot of ways MongloDB and SculeJS are similar, where they diverge is in the way SculeJS has been engineered. SculeJS is intended more to provide powerful, generic data structures with a rich query layer rather than being a straight port of MongoDB. No insult to Monglo - it looks like great software, I just wanted to point out the difference in intent between the two projects.
As a side note - all pure JavaScript modules are limited to to a single execution context within Titanium applications.
For what you're building I think MongloDB, JSONDB, SculeJS and TaffyDB would all do the job, the details of the implementation would just be slightly different.
I was encountering the same problem. I had about 5mb's of data which I wanted to store with the app, and not let it download.
I finally ended up with an SQLite database, with high performance. It is not as bad as you think. It might not be a nice solution ,but for the lack of choice it is a very good one IMHO.
Just create a couple of tables, and functions to parse them to database, and the other way around, and I promise you, you will be happy.
DO NOT store the JSON in the database, but store the values appropriately.

what is the best source to buy pictures for mobile applications

I am writing a slide-show like application for android phone which I am going to sell. it will target very narrow audience and I do not think I will sell more than 1000 copies of it. I was going to buy pictures for it from microstock agencies like istockphoto but it turned out that they require purchase of "extended license" if you want to put their images into apps. And guess what? extended license runs from $70-100 per image!
so my question for you, where did you get images for your apps you want to sell?
You can search at creativecommons.org for images you can use "for commercial purposes".
I'd recommend odesk.com. I used to look for stock art, both free and paid. Then I figured out that you can outsource and hire an artist for very little money. Depending on your needs, you can go cheap and find someone under $5 / hr that can do basic work. I currently employ a team at $18 / hr and it's worth every penny I spend given the quality of the work, and their ability to create themes from scratch and operate with only minimal oversight.
Alternatively, you can put out a bid for a fixed-price contract to create the icons for your app.
I've had better luck with posting positions, interviewing and hiring. I'd recommend putting up a basic description of the type of person you are looking for, and then have an interview question to screen candidates with. I typically do a "compensated interview" whereby any legitimate submission gets a minimum amount of money whether I hire the person or not. I've had great luck with this recruiting artists that have paid off many times over.

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