A while back, I posted about Autonomous Robotics and how I’d love to do an autonomous racing series. Last week, I attended the inaugural London Machine Learning Group meetup (which was fantastic, by the way), where David Singleton gave a presentation on his self-driving RC Car. My interest was piqued. How much fun does that sound?!

Today, I did some more thinking about it, and I’ve put together the beginnings of an equipment list for the project.

• Aston Martin V8 Vantage RC Car. I’ve already got one of these, and I don’t think I’ve played with it in ages. Might as well hack it apart, then! (Also, Aston Martins are awesome.)
• RaspberryPi. This isn’t out yet, but boy am I excited. It looks like it should have the processing power required to perform all the calculations locally, and should be small enough to fit in the RC car itself.
• Minoru 3D Webcam. In my fourth year, a friend was using this as a range finder (and it looks like there’s some open source code to do this), so this camera could perform two great functions: firstly, the “basic” self-driving task using images; and second, potentially acting as a range-finder for some more advanced mapping.

The ultimate aim for this would not only be for the car to drive itself, but for the car to learn the course in the same way racing drivers do. For example, the car may drive itself around the course, producing an internal map. The car could then use some kind of genetic algorithm to attempt to define and follow a route around the course for the aim of getting the fastest lap time.

Ambitious, hey?

There are a few immediate issues I can foresee:

• Power. The RaspberryPi will require around 4xAA batteries to power it, and the camera may require the same again. I could end up with an RC Car full of batteries that won’t move anywhere because it’s too heavy…
• Control. David Singleton used an Arduino board wired into the car’s controller to pass instructions to the car, but if I want to keep everything onboard then I’ll need to do something else. Ideally, this should work alongside the standard wireless controller so I can still retain some ability to control the car.
• I’m being a bit ambitious. One step at a time, Griff…

11 days ago, I launched my first app, DoodleDesk, onto the Mac App Store. I had realistic expectations – I’d set my sights at a few hundred pounds profit over the year, enough to pay for a nice meal out or something. Nothing fancy. Of course, all app developers dream of App Store Success, and I was one of them, but I didn’t think I had a chance of coming anywhere near close to that.

The first few days of sales were encouraging. I did very little marketing and was selling 10-20 a day – one day I got a review on a French website and sold almost 40! I was pretty chuffed with that.

Then, on the 19th, Apple decided to put DoodleDesk on the front page of the Mac App Store in the “New & Noteworthy” section. I was absolutely amazed. My app was now surrounded by a collection of really superb applications, and was right up there for everyone to see. Incredible. At around the same time, the press release I’d put together was released, and a number of sites re-printed it. Suddenly, 10-20 a day looked a bit meagre.

I shan’t go into precise figures, but it’s certainly a lot more than I had expected. In one day over the weekend I surpassed what I’d hoped to make over the year. Because I’m quite anal about these things, I kept an eye on the app’s position in the charts. The peak values were:

• Top Paid: #19
• Top Grossing: #48
• Top Paid (Productivity): #6
• Top Grossing (Productivity): #14

At one point, DoodleDesk was higher in the Top Grossing chart than Angry Birds. Angry Birds!! As you’d expect, things are starting to tail off now the initial excitement is over, but it’s still surpassing expectations daily.

Whilst all this has been incredibly exciting, the most exciting part has been the emails and tweets I’ve had from people who are enjoying the app. I knew there were people out there who wanted something along these lines, but to hear from people who are actively using and enjoying the app has really made the whole experience. Some of the users have found fantastic use-cases for DoodleDesk – such as one man who intends to use it for tutoring his grandson over screen share. Superb. I couldn’t ask for any more.

Of course, the flip side to this is the people who aren’t enjoying your application, and I’ve had a good few of those as well. What has been frustrating for a first-timer on the App Store is how people will prefer to vent their annoyance at the app publicly by reviewing it, rather than emailing me with suggestions or constructive criticism. Similarly, only a few people have given positive reviews (though this has improved over the last day or so), although I’ve had plenty of positive messages from people personally.

Ultimately it’s not an issue – some of the negative reviews border on the ridiculous, and the app is simple enough to speak for itself. Public criticism is something I was worried about before I launched the product, but in my experience it’s far outweighed by the personal messages you receive from genuinely happy users.

What next? The difficult second album. So many ideas of my own, and many more wonderful feature requests from users. The trick will be making the app as useful as I can for everyone, whilst retaining the simplicity and ease of use. Watch this space…

Just a quick one to say that DoodleDesk has been featured in the New & Noteworthy category – very exciting! We’re looking forward to some exciting times ahead as the app gains a bit more widespread knowledge.

Version 1.1 of DoodleDesk is now available on the Mac App Store. This update fixes numerous minor bugs from the first release, including:

• Issues with edit menu items
• Copy issues on the save dialog
• Hiding of the “Show desktop” hover
• Restricting the open file dialog to only DoodleDesk files
• Issues with the eraser path changing once drawn
• Issues with save prompt when creating new documents
• Issues with creating new files when the current file has been edited

After much procrastination on my part, I am pleased to announce that DoodleDesk is now live on the App Store. DoodleDesk is a Mac App that replaces your desktop background with a whiteboard, allowing you to draw freely over your desktop, as well as adding text notes. It’s perfect for sketching out ideas, plans, diagrams, or simply wiling away some time idly doodling. But don’t take my word for it, check out these glowing reviews:

This app could single-handedly save the rain-forests.

- Bob Geldoff

One minute I was making bacon, the next minute my world had changed.

- Pork & Apple Magazine

If there’s any silver lining in today’s depressive society, it’s the ability for small companies to post fake reviews of their latest products.

- Ed Balls, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer

DoodleDesk is available on Mac OS X for £3.99 ($5.99) through the Mac App Store. Click here to launch the App Store.

Just received this obviously broken spam comment. Interesting to see the markup!

{The|The very} {crux|heart|core|root} of your writing {while|whilst} {sounding|appearing} {agreeable|reasonable} {initially|at first|in the beginning|originally}, did {not|not really} {sit|work|settle} {well|properly|perfectly|very well} with {me|me ...

A short while ago, two people got married in England. A man called Melvin wasn’t very happy about it. We enjoyed it so much at the idio office, that I made a little song out of it. Enjoy

Angry Melvin by jacques-van-der-griff

I’ve still not heard anything from Twitter regarding the closure of my Chinese Twispers account. Very annoying. I was a big fan of that account, and felt it deserved to live on. Hence, I give you Chinese Twispers Live. Instead of having a set of pre-determined replacements for words, you can enter your own and enjoy the wonder of defacing other people’s tweets. Then you can share those with your friends so you can all enjoy – what more could you want? Hope you enjoy it!

Today, I found out that the Chinese Twispers Twitter account (@chinesetwispers) has been suspended. I’ve not heard from Twitter on this matter, but have reached out to them. Annoyingly, all the tweets appear to have been lost, including all the favourites. I’m very disappointed about this, since many months of hilarity were included in that account, and now it’s all gone without so much as a suspension notice from Twitter.

I’ll start work on a replacement this evening, but it will never be the same. Good-bye, old friend!

If anyone has some of their favourite Twispers they happen to remember and would love to share, go ahead and comment on this article and I’ll start a dedication page.

I just came across this, and thought I’d share it with you whilst I’m working on a couple of things and don’t have time to post properly.

The Fast Fourier Transform, implemented in an SQL query. This guy must be absolutely insane. Kudos to him!

http://www.adellera.it/investigations/nocoug_challenge/index.html