Welcome RedditHunter everybody!

Hi everyone!

Is with great pleasure that I present you another one of my creations - RedditHunter.com - Reddit Search Made Easy!

I just posted violently in a bunch of internet resources so be sure to check them:

Reddit/Entrepreneur (http://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/2k9slx/found_an_itch_to_scratch_reddit_hunter_was_born/)

"Last week I just found myself, while developing a brand new app, desperate with reddit search. The results were too cluttered and information like the comments and ups/downs were hard to track. After thinking to myself that reddit search was not satisfying me for the third time, I decided to take measures in my own hands. Searched the reddit api and started coding some javascript.

I then spent my whole Sunday coding, testing and getting through some cycles of trial and error. By the end of the day I had some satisfactory product and was pretty proud of it. After using it for some days I decided that this should go online, I added some information, some contacts and explanation and there you have it, my first scratched itch:

(www.redditHunter.com)

Hope you enjoy it!"

Reddit Sideproject (http://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/2k9t0t/reddit_hunter_reddit_search_made_easier/)

"Ever thought that Reddit search is a little bit disappointing?

After having that thought for the third time in a single day, I dedicated myself to create a clean, fresh interface for reddit searches. After some trial and error, some hours and a lot of sweat I present you www.reddithunter.com - Reddit Search made easy and clean 25 results at a time!

Give it a go, what do you think of it?"

HackerNews and ProductHunt were also attacked ;) so please, be sure to visit those sites and help me out by upvoting those posts, it would definetely help!

So, what do you think of my new project?

Big things coming... tomorrow!

Just to say friends, in the last few days, I´ve been working a lot!

It all started last Sunday when, for the third time in that morning, I was dissapointed with Reddit search. So I took measures in my own hands and developed my took on a new and fresh reddit search.

It's coming, just a few hours ;)

New app coming soon!

Hi everyone, I'm writing this post just to say that Aspiring Ninja is not dead and that the newest app is almost ready!

It will be called 'Lame O'Matic' and is basically a very simple app that generates random lame jokes.

Want a sneak preview??

"What did one ocean say to the other ocean? Nothing, they just waved."

This is the kind of thing you'll find there. It's almost ready, so be sure to check the blog in the next couple of days.

Sincerely
Aspiring Ninja, Cláudio R.

Post Challenge Musings and ideas

Hi everyone!

As promised I decided not to abandon this blog and I will be posting here all of my ideas and most recent projects.

Lately I've been thinking a lot, and to be honest I hope I hope I had this ideas earlier (during or before the challenge was the ideal time!). Since more or less the end of the challenge that this two ideas have been bouncing in my head.

The first one is a very simple product that would generate a base that could be used for thousands of ideas. The idea is simple, you have an XML file that contains information. Let's call the file our database, This could be anything, from recipes, to text, everything. Then, the next step is obvious, to build an XML parser that is powerfull enough to be extended to any kind of XML structure. This way, accessing the information in a file we have enough building room to build a lot of different applications.

(At this time, the first and simplest idea of them all is already being polished, so hope to see a new Aspiring Ninja App pretty soon!).

My second idea comes from a By-Product. I'm a big proponent of by products and think that they can grow everywhere. During the challenge I was carefully writing down every single problem I had and its resolution. I ended up with a pretty big list of common situations one can find while programming for Android.
The next step will be sharing this information with everybody. I'm still unsure what will be the method used but I will share this information and try to make the most out of it.

This is all for now, until next time I leave you with a phrase that has been in my head lately:

Do it! And do it now!

The 4 Days 4 Products Challenge - Wrap-up

Time to wrap-up, the 4 Days 4 Products Challenge is over.

I had fun, I really enjoyed this. It was challenging and mentally taxing but it was a pleasure. I can't even describe what I felt when I saw OWeather available in the store.
In the end I have a mix of accomplishment and non- accomplishment. I proposed myself to present 4 products by the end of this challenge, but I only was able to present 2 finished products and one idea. Kind of
2.5 products. And while I know this is a pretty good number it still left a sour taste in my mouth.

All in all I have achieved in 4 days:
- OWeather and OWeather plus available in the play store.
- OWeather.pt responsive website.
- 'Soccer Nerds' available in the playstore.
- Blog posts of all my experience throughout the 4 days.
- A selection of problems and technical wrokarounds I found while developing.
- A prototype of what I think is a great idea in which I will invest in the future.
- A full page in my notebook with suggestions to improve and update the apps that are already launched.

This is a pretty good start I would say.

I learned a lot in this 4 days, from how no to market something, to the value of a community, to marketing and design techniques and most importantly, my limits and abilities!

I would recommend everyone to try something like this, take some days out of your busy life and put yourself to test, you will be amazed with what you're able to achieve.

I decided that I will continue posting to this blog, everything business and developing related that I feel I should blog about, so keep checking, the journey has just started!

Sincerely,
Cláudio R.

Soccer Nerds - Avaliable in the PlayStore

Fans of soccer rejoice, the challenge second product is finally available in the playstore (I submitted it yesterday but had to wait until today for it to be avaliable).

Soccer Nerds is a soccer quiz where you have to guess the club given his logo from a number of possible choices. Results are given in percentage and it is a very fun way to spend some time.

Get it now in playstore!

The awesome logo was a creation of my dear friend and cousin Nélson Rodrigues and you can find more of his work right here! Be sure to check it out!

The Third Product (or sort of)

I want to take some time to talk toy you about my third product (there will be no fourth one, but for a good reason).

While trying to complete this project I had this wacky idea.

Consider you have a small business, like a pharmacy, or a pizzeria, and you want to start doing home deliveries. Now, you two options you either have someone taking those orders or you have to take them yourself.
Either way, it's one resource you're using to do that. It's a great idea, you think, but this resource costs money; and we all know that nowdays money is not the most abundant resource.

That's where my ida comes in, what if you have a service that takes care of that for you. Say, a mobile app, that takes a customer order (answering machine way), confirms it and sends an sms to you with the
said order? This would automate the process, saving a lot of money to a business. Also, Imagine how cool would it be saying to a customer "You want to order from home? Download our app!"

There are some problems that arise with this approach. First of all, there's no single serving. Each business has it's own necessities. So, there's not single solution that solves all problems, which means we would be selling a
service rather than a product. But it is actually a service that turns into a product. To understand the client necessities, and to turn those necessities into an app.

You understand where I'm at?

Because there was no solution to every problem, I thought about excluding this idea from the challenge, but that wouldn't be fair, actually, I really wanted to start working on this one.
I started thinking and sketching and I understood that this app would have 3 fundamental stages: Starting an interaction, recording the interaction results, send the results of the interaction. So, from the top of my head I
would be needing Speech-To-Text, Text-To-Speech and SMS sending.

With this in mind I started developing a prototype. And it went pretty good. Check out the screenshot below:

(Actually there's a connection problem in that screen ;)

I will consider this as half of a product, so at this moment I consider myself 2.5 products in ;)

What about the other 0.5?
Well, something like this needs a different approach, if I want to provide a service and not a product which you can launch and provide support on weekend, I need to have a plan, I need a way to get traction, a different way to
market it; a totally different approach. I am willing to take this jump, onbviously this will not happen in two or three days, but I will work on this idea and bring you some results soon.

P.S - I will provide the installer for the prototype I developed, so you can see for yourself what my idea is and where I am going with this.

P.S - I also have a fancy name for it, but I will not reveal it yet, I might want to buy that domain and I don't want anybody to get there faster than me ;)