My Agile Experiment - a Flashlight on the iPhone - Up to 74th in utilities now | Hacker News Reader

My Agile Experiment - a Flashlight on the iPhone - Up to 74th in utilities now

andrewljohnson.com

11 pointsandrewljohnson18 comments

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It sounds more like a rave toy than a flashlight. I hope the user-driven spec model illuminates something interesting.

Haha, that's an interesting thought. I wonder if I will find some niche raver market on the iPhone from all of this.

Good idea. Maybe have a way to synchronize all iphones in a crowd for changing color and frequency.

I wonder at what point a user will ask me to do something technically challenging like this.

They just did.

(Hint: potential users count.)

Synchronizing all the iphones in a room wouldn't be technically challenging assuming their clocks are all set at least approximately correctly, and you just make them flash colors/patterns that are generated deterministically using the system clock.

Actually this could look really cool!

There is no reason all phones would have the same time. I know some US phones sync the time with the carrier, which is a great function but not seen in the rest of the world.

You could use bluetooth, but then you have to switch it on.

You could use the camera to pick up the phones behind you somehow, but that would not always work.

Wonder if he can read input from the microphone and use that to pulse the light in time to music, or display a VU meter onscreen, or...

I remember jailbreaking my first iphone and installing a app, that did just that. The colors would fade in and out based on how loud you spoke. @andrewljohnson, If I were you I would make a short video of your app in action and post it up on youtube. I am sure that will get more people interested..

> I just want to see if ... I can improve sales by doing whatever users say to do.

Thar be dragons down that path... Users don't know what they want:

http://www.extremeplanner.com/blog/2005/04/users-dont-know-w...

I edited the title of this post to reflect that the app is now up to 74th place in utilities. With just a little twittering, a blog post, and a post to HN, A Flashlight! is off to the races.

Hopefully, I will hear from users soon. If not, I guess I'll have to make it a rave toy as suggested by the people on this forum.

EDIT: Maybe it's not up that high. The rankings in the App Store all seem to have shifted all of a sudden, and the top 20 apps all look wrong.

Yes, because Agile clearly means "don't design anything" and "have no direction".

My apologies - I know I kind of man-handled the term here, but I think it conveyed the gist of the article.

In most development shops I've worked with who claim to go by an "agile" methodology, this is precisely what it meant.

I don't know about anyone else, but I would definitely pay for a Flashlight RPG. (kind of like a reverse Boktai...)

Best flashlight in the store .... I guess, never tried the others.

so the link take me to Gaia GPS not A Flashlight

Oops, fixed.

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