Saturday, April 30, 2016

Sole pierced by tooth pick

Westgate at B1 level is having a Japanese food fare if anyone is interested. I guess the products are transported from Japan because the price is crazy expensive.
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Are the food good?
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I had no idea because the queue was long and lots of people were seen lining to get the free samples.
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These samples were cut into smaller pieces and held with a tooth pick. The toothpick quality is good. Not those cheap and less pointy ones.
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I wished that it was not the case. If it had been the cheaper ones, I wouldn't be writing a random blog.
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When people were sampling the free food, some decided to be a litter bug. These people are suspected to be hoggers too. I abhor them because when they threw away the pointy toothpicks on the floor, I got injured.
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There I was, walking around the fare and getting a pack of mochi. All of a sudden I felt a sharp pain on my sole.
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When I held my foot up, I saw a pointy toothpick sticking on my sole. I was wearing slippers.
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It would have been a funny pic to take and share, if it hadn't been painful enough that I had to pull it out ASAP.
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I have been pierced by nail, screw, glass and other stuff on the road. But having a toothpick sticking out of my sole in a shopping mall really added up to the wierd stuff that could have happened to me.
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Just to share

Saturday, March 12, 2016

Google Play star rating is not up-to-date


Google Play star rating doesn't help much to gauge the popularity of apps. It also doesn't help to inform users about how responsive the developers are to users' feedback. What the star rating does is to average off the rating of earlier versions down to the latest ones.Hence, if the earlier versions were good and millions voted for 5 stars, that rating stays throughout. Even when the app failed later that resulted in millions who removed the apps, the star rating would still contain the previous votes. If that is the case, it will not tell new users how good the app currently is. To me, when the star rating is not real-time it does not help. That is because it won't help users to gauge the real-time performance/popularity of the app in question.

Another benchmark about app performance (or popularity) is the number of downloads. Most hot apps would have millions "downloaded". However, this benchmark is also not useful for the same reason as the star rating, i.e. it is not real-time. Assume that initial release of the apps attracted millions to download it. The millions love it, but then due to complacency on the developers' part, the app lost its luster and millions removed the apps from their phones. Such movement is not reflected on the scale. To me, that is not informative. For all I know, the 10 millions downloaded could well be "1000 still using it" scenario.

All-in-all, these two ratings are not being helpful to both users and developers. If these ratings or benchmarks can be made into real-time, it would help users to decide if they want to waste their phone memory downloading the apps. Also, real-time rating will pressurize developers into addressing users' feedback in order to keep their rating high because they can't afford to have the rating drop overnight!

Wouldn't that be a good idea, Google?