It seems during conversations with people recently that it’s hard to get a handle on what some of these numbers actually look like. A small bump in an input parameter from say, 0.1% to 0.2% is actually a significant number of people. So I’ve created a little back of a napkin calculator.
The first two text boxes let you plug in two numbers and get a percentage out. In this case the gross number of infections and the number of deaths. Hit the calculate button and out pops the mortality rate. The two numbers this starts with are the two metrics for the UK as of 9th May. (Sourced from Google)
The second lot of controls (the slider and the list of percentages), show what those various mortality rates would look like based on the number of infections as controlled by the slider. The percentage shown in red, is using the calculated mortality rate from the first calculation.
So our last engagement centered around building a chatbot platform. Through this experience we gained a massive insight into the state of the art and how this can really boost your effectiveness in many key areas of running a successful business.
It’s almost certain that chat bots are going to be a very big part of engagement in the coming years. Some evangelist are even going as far as saying they expect to see them included on organisation charts.
There is no denying that chat bots are going to become more and more prevalent for certain functions within key areas such as customer support and increasing the surface area by which your customers can interact with your business. The fact that can turn your business into a 24/7 operation is also highly attractive but will need some planning in order to fully embrace.
A lot of people conflate chat bots with AI and this really isn’t a true picture of where we are yet. The AI and natural language capabilities aren’t required components of a successful chat bot. In fact many bots have no AI capabilities at all. They are merely chat oriented decision trees that are orchestrated through a messaging channel.
Another misconception is that a chat bot should be indistinguishable from a human. In fact in many surveys it turns out that many users are more than happy to know they are chatting to a bot rather than attempting to trick the user into thinking the bot is a human.
Either way, if you’re looking for a bot for your business please get in touch as put our knowledge to good use for your business.
We’re very pleased to announce the completion of a new site for a new client.
The new site has been built for 10 Gallon Events Ltd to promote the Once Upon a Time in the West Festival. They needed a fresh site that was both easy to use, eye catching and functional. Responsive design was a must since the site will also be used during the festival for announcements, meaning lots of mobile users.
Take a look
We are very proud to announce that we have teamed up with India based mobile start-up, Instago. We are collaborating to bring a suite of mobile apps to market.
Instago Pte Ltd has appointed us to provide various services. We are providing strategic and technical guidance whilst also contributing to key decisions. We are also undertaking the software development efforts to drive delivery of the apps themselves. We are currently targeting the core mobile platforms – Apple and Android.
The project consists of building social activity based platform technologies.
This is just a quick update to get you excited about the upcoming release of SampleSort.
There are a number of requested features that we are working on for the upcoming release. The most notable features include:
Manual editing of file categories
Meta data editing
Waveform Preview
A lot of people have requested the ability to make changes to the categories that files are placed into automatically when scanning. SampleSort attempts to get this right first time but will not always get this correct. So opening this up to users to make these changes will be hugely beneficial and increase the accuracy of searches.
We have also been working on the ability to read and write meta data to various file formats. We will be including full read and write support for all the major tag formats such a IDv3, iXML, Cart, BEXT and a few lesser known tags as well. This will make SampleSort a much more useful tool for professionals dealing with audio coming from hardware field recorders and other software applications.
The waveform preview pretty much speaks for itself. Being able to view the Waveform will be a welcome addition to the application.
We are expecting to get this new version released before the end of November, hopefully much sooner!
Well, we’d all like to thank the SampleSort users for pushing us over 6000 downloads as of a few days ago! This is a little proud moment in our lives! Thanks everyone.
We’ve just made a new version of SampleSort available for download – v0.8.398.
In this update we have built on the changes in the last update to improve the scanning processes even further. We’ve also laid the groundwork for allowing user configurable categories coming in a future version. We’ve also addressed various small bugs along with other small enhancements.
We have also added a much asked for feature to allow multi-select in the various application data grids. You can now select multiple records and bulk add them to the export view.
Oooh, New UI!
The major change in this release comprises a completely overhauled UI. We’ve redesigned everything in the UI to make better use of space and to provide an improve user experience. We’ve also made use of a completely new colour scheme to place more emphasis on the data you want to see. We hope you like the new UI, we’d love to hear any feedback.
You can see the new main view in the screenshot below:
We’ve also done a lot of housekeeping around to reduce the download to just over 8.5mb. Another major change in this release is that we have decided to move away from using the built in Help system. We are going to publishing the help documentation on the jamsoft web site moving forward.
Anyway, really hope you enjoy the new version and please drop us line.
We have today made a new version of our sample organiser application SampleSort v0.8.350 available for download. We have been fixing bugs from recent issues people have been experiencing and have reached a point where we are ready to release!
We have made a number of cosmetic improvements in some areas as well as working on the core code. We have increased the default font size for increased readability in the UI.
In this update we have also addressed a number of memory and performance issues that have been reported. With the new version in our tests we have seen scanning times drastically reduced. When testing scanning an entire machine we have seen these times reduce from 30 minutes to under 7 minutes. Scanning individual directories have seen as many as 24,000 files scanned in under a minute.
How to get the Update
If you have configured SampleSort to check for updates automatically you can just start SampleSort and follow the instructions. Or you can download the update manually below.
Whilst we have been working on various mobile solutions we have made extensive use of open source libraries, in particular MvvmCross.
MvvmCross has been in development for a number of years and is used to underpin some very high profile commercial Xamarin based mobile applications. The primary focus of the library is to bring a unified WPF-like data binding approach to all available mobile and desktop platforms. Being able to use a design pattern such as Mvvm on platforms like iOS hugely increases developer productivity and application unit testing. We highly recommend this framework.
Over the past few months we have made a number of code contributions back into this excellent framework. Currently our main contribution has been in creating the MvvmCross iOS Support library to aid fellow developers developing for the Apple platform.
Let us know what you think!
We have recently completed work on a new web site for the very well known Japan Tobacco International owned brand Hamlet Cigars. We worked alongside the excellent London based digital media and branding agency One Darnley Road.
The new site was required to launch alongside other media channels to complete a re-branding exercise and contains brand information and all their historical television and radio advertising materials.
Since the controls around marketing and advertising tobacco products is highly regulated in the UK the site has some unique requirements around controlling how users register, authenticate and perform age verification against the integrated ID3Global web services.
You can view the new site by clicking the link below:
https://www.hamlet-cigar.com/
