I've been a developer for years, having worked on products as diverse as multiplayer games, online casinos and TV box software. Finally, I wanted to work for myself and try new things - so I decided to get into mobile development.
The most challenging aspect of developing Speccy was optimising the spectrum analysis algorithms to perform well on a range of devices. There is such a wide range of mobile devices, with different strengths, different sensors available and different performance profiles, that it can be challenging to create an app that will work well on most devices. If your app suffers on just 1 device, you could have bought yourself an angry review from a disgruntled user. Testing and optimising is paramount.
Hi there! I’m a designer/developer, with over eighteen years industry experience in games/web design, development and animation. That means I speak both ‘designer’ and ‘techie’. I’m an advocate of ‘agile’ methodologies and encourage writing clean, maintainable code. Strong in both techie skills, such as unit testing, version control and pairing; and creative skills, such as interaction design and animation. I sharpened these skills while building a high performance UI for the resource constrained YouView Set Top Box. I’m a keen rock-climber, musician and love to travel, picking up bits of foreign languages and eating new, unidentifiable things. I enjoy learning constantly, study martial arts, play badminton sometimes and occasionally perform stand-up comedy.
- myFitnessPal. Very well made and worthwhile just for the barcode scanner which tells you how much fat you're about to eat! - Ecosia. Although primarily a search engine, they have a simple app too, which can serve as a replacement to the Google search icon on your phone and plants trees with the revenue from your searches. Gotta love that! - RemixLive. A fun to use sampler with a few effects; nice for laying down some beats, or just playing.
Speccy is a relatively new app. I've only been working on it for a week or so. Hopefully more cool features are still to come.
I had the idea of developing an app that might help you get into a safe or combination lock for which you've forgotten the code. This is because the tumblers of a mechanical safe make a very slightly different 'click' noise when a correct number is dialed - if you could 'see' all the subtle frequencies of a sound, maybe you can distinguish them. But Speccy has a range of other uses, some of which only users will have imagined.
As with all my apps, the main thing I bring to them (that some developers do not) is responding to user's feedback. You see a lot of angry feedback for some of the most popular apps out there and the developer has forgotten their users. When someone has a suggestion for my app, I do my best to implement it. An example of this is that my app is the only spectrum analyzer to allow exporting of data - something a user asked for.
I'd like users to tell me what the future features of my app should be, I'm democratic like that :)
I'd love for users to send me their feedback. I only have a few devices to test on, so it's all about the users out there helping to make things work better.
About App: Turn your phone into a Spectrum Analyzer. Speccy is an audible spectrum analysis tool, which displays the spread of amplitudes of audible frequencies detected through your device's microphone. It works using FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) and 'Hamming Window' signal processing. It is the only app on the market which allows you to export data to the clipboard (for plotting in Excel, etc.).
Categories: Tools
Date: February 6, 2018
Developer: Liam O'Donnell
About developer: Hi there! I’m a designer/developer, with over eighteen years industry experi ... Read more
Website: http://www.spikything.com/blog