I don't think you need to learn really hard core math to do CS. In my experience, the one most important "genre" of math was discrete mathematics. My textbook was Elements of Discrete Mathematics, and I think it was a really great intro: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Discrete-Mathematics-Computer...
Wow this app doesn't just overlay a moustache image but the moustache actually follows you around in realtime. Never seen this technology before. Awesome!
I think it's more about the message than the alarm itself. The problem I saw with alarms is not that I never hear them, but most of the times I do hear them but just turn it off because that's the only thing you can do with an alarm, right?
But if I can hear a message containing meaningful content, I will listen to it, because that's the intended action. And if that content tells me my todo list for today and helps me realize how busy I am and gives me the sense of urgency, it would be easier to wake up. Because as I mentioned, there are countless times where I regret not waking up and think "Damn if I was able to think rationally while I was sleeping, I would have totally waken up."
Great to hear that! Can you elaborate on how it being a timer rather than a clock makes it easy to think about? That might be very useful feedback for me. Thanks!
Thanks! Well I think the whole point of WakeMyself is it functions both as an alarm AND as a dream capturing tool, which means, you do know when you wake up--it's the time you set the alarm at. It's quite tricky, but I think there's a subtle but crucial difference between synchronous capturing (phone call) and asynchronous capturing (sms) and that's what makes it work. But maybe it's just me, so please try it out tonight :)
Thank you. Yeah the reason that I've made this available for free currently is because I thought if I started out charging I would be fixed with that business model, and I don't even yet know what this can be used for other than my own cases. So I just decided to release it as beta and learn from people. Please do try out and let me know if you have any feedback :)
And about translation, did you mean transcription? or translation as in language translation?
Exactly! I actually had these two separate ideas, and they came together while I was trying to build the first idea. What was awesome was I was actually able to capture my dream on my first usage. You should try too! Would love feedback :)
Have you ever tried something that tells you what to do? I've tried things that wakes me up with music or all kinds of things, but the key here I think is the message you can write to yourself. If you could tell yourself all the things you need to do for the day, that would be a really good way to start the day. Because I find that even when I do wake up most of the times I just do nothing productive. I think it's great to hear a todo list when waking up.
Yeah I kind of struggled with time zone thing for about an hour and decided not to bother with it, just to build the minimal version. But I think for the sake of usability, I should add it in the future.
How does your app do text-to-speech, if you don't mind me asking?
The reason for building this as a service is because I thought there's more to this than just a single player alarm system if enough people want to use this. I just wanted to test it out and see enough people will like this. Hope this makes sense? :)
Yeah, I think in my case the "calling" part is the most important part. It's not even about the calling itself but more about the message. If I get a call from myself and it says "Hey man you have a test today in 3 hours, you can't be sleeping! Snap out of it!" that's pretty effective for me :)
Plus my favorite part is you can respond to yourself and it will be recorded--the dream capturing part. Please try it, would love to hear your feedback on these. Thanks!