BLACK FRIDAY! NTW price cut ;)

BLACK FRIDAY is here!

Prices cut to the minimum that Google will allow for each respective currency :D

Switch over to NTW Pro now and enjoy its whole arsenal! For example, Undo/Redo history up to 9999, custom fonts, continuous Text to Speech, power tools like word wrapping, EOL control and so on!

Some reviews by NTW Pro users:

Andrew: The ONLY fullscreen, distraction free editor on the market! Absolutely fantastic! Great distraction-free editor implementation, and the only one on the market that's got a working fullscreen edit! (I've tried -all- of them). If you want to do real writing on your phone with a bluetooth keyboard, -this- is the way to do it. I can finally write -anywhere-! Super customizable, and the theme out of the box is high contrast and very easy to work with. I don't have a tablet to test it on, but I expect it's just as good on one. Great, responsive dev!

Dennis: Best Droid editor! I've tried the popular ones. I use NTW to update my website. It's totally reliable. I bought the pro version.

Dominik: Naprawdę obsługuje duże pliki Polecam. To chyba jedyny program, który pozwala na edycję pliku powyżej pół megabajta.

Ernest: Only editor that handles large files. Haven't used many of its features, but I like the ones that I HAVE used.

Br: Very nice. Love the customization options, works well with Swiftkey Tablet (unlike some other well known text editors), does what it's supposed to do. Surprised it's not used more.

Alistair: Brilliant text editor. Works brilliantly. Not sure about the original theme settings but these are easily reconfigured. Can't think of any other features I would need. I edit HTML documents sometimes and it has a html mode which is great. Good work.

Chapter 1.3

Chapter 1.3

The stunned silence that followed was clichédly deafening, and yes, you could easily hear a pin drop.

"Well, what do you say? The boy ain't got all night you know, his body will go back to dying again when the Finkarian restoratives wear off."

"We can become Life-Users..." Hans said in a wistful tone.

"Really? Us? For real? Us" Delana was babbling.

"Yes, to save the boy." said the doctor, and seeing the shiny stars in their eyes, added with a smirky little drawl in his voice, "But don't worry, you'll both be very weak Users. Back in the day, we called Users like you luuuusers." , dragging out the last word with much aplomb.

After a very short pause, Delana retorted, "I'm gonna kill you one day Matthias!"

She was always good at a fast recovery, Hans thought, he himself was so mortified at having his hopes raised and then dashed that he could only manage a reproachful look at the wretched doctor. He and Delana had grown up together, childhood sweethearts, and the topic they discussed the most throughout their youth was to become magic Users. Delana favoured the raw power of the Divas, while he himself thought the technowizardry feats of the Finkarians were more amazing. But really, they weren't picky, becoming any type of magic User at all would be a dream come true for both of them.

"Oh, don't sulk! It's not what it's cracked up to be, most people just treat it as a tool of last resort. Being a Life User, especially a weak one like what you'll be, is often just too much trouble than it's worth. You get bad headaches, waking nightmares, and a wide range of sensations that we call the Shivers whenever any major activity on the network passes down to you." said Matthias with a rueful shake of his head, then continued with a smug look.
"Some Users actually went to register themselves just to make their lives more bearable, but luckily for you, I know an alternative solution." He finished off with a complicated flourish of his sleeves and a little tip of his head.

There was clearly a bit of the rascal in the doctor that they had never seen before, perhaps this was the old him, before whatever happened that made him become a doctor in Tradmart.

"Who will it be then?" Matthia said, he was suddenly all seriousness again.

"Me." Delana said quickly.

Hans knew what she was trying to do. True, it was Delana's turn now; they had worked out a system when it came to unpleasant things that had to be done, and it had become so ingrained in their daily lives they barely had to consciously keep track anymore. Being a weak Life User was apparently going to something of a lifelong suffering, so Delana was going to insist on following through with their system.

"NO! This is serious, we have to discuss this!" Hans cried out immediately, he just couldn't let her take on this kind of burden.

"What is there to discuss really? Hans, you and I have both wanted a baby for so long, and one of us has to do it. Why not me?" Delana said stoically. She was going to be stubborn. "Matthias, just how bad can things get for a weak Life-User?"

"It won't kill you if that's what you're asking. Don't fret too much, you'll get a lot of headaches and bad dreams the first few weeks, but eventually you'll get the hang of my method. And frankly, I think Delana would be more suitable to save the boy, most undeveloped minds respond better to a motherly touch."


To be continued...

Chapter 1.2

Chapter 1.2

The ensuing commotion was predictably chaotic but thankfully short. The doctor took over immediately and quickly organized them into a semblance of cooperative effort. Wrapping him up in hot towels, blowing a few breaths down his mouth, pumping on his little chest, and then dripping a drop of Finkarian restorative down his throat. They repeated this on and on into the long night.

Sometime in the night, Corporal Reynolds left, apologizing profusely but also telling them he couldn't see much point in continuing and his nerves were so rattled he needed to go home for a long rest.

That was true, the innkeeper found himself thinking, it was all very touching, but also extremely bizarre that the dear doctor would try so hard to bring back a child who was so obviously dead. Drowned or chilled to death, it didn't matter. He had lost count after the 8th cycle of blow, pump and restorative. If he could have been revived, he would have long ago. The doctor was no stranger to death, he should have accepted this one by now.

He exchanged a look with Delana and could tell she was thinking the same too. Then with a sigh and a little shake of her head, she tilted her chin towards the doctor and looked pointedly at her husband. Well then, fine, it was his turn this time.

"Mattias, " He said hesitantly, "Perhaps, it's time to -"

"No." The doctor said, and then he frowned, not with frustration or grief, but strangely as though he was intrigued by an interesting problem. "I can carry on. The two of you can go to bed if you wish, I'll carry on down here. I'm sure I can fix this by dawn."

"Mattias, he is dead. You have to let it go." The innkeeper persisted. He imagined that the doctor perhaps had a poignant regret with some other drowned baby he failed to save, these sort of things were possible and can affect people in unusual ways.

"No, really, I have it under control. I can feel it. He is not really dead... in fact he may not even really be alive either, but it is definitely there, so so strongly. My methods are just not right. Maybe I need to be more subtle and guide it more instead of pushing.... Dammit, I'm out of practice, too damaged, and I just can't handle that much Life!"

"Huh?" The innkeeper and his wife were lost. Had the dear doctor lost his marbles?

The doctor froze in mid-pump, looking afraid all of a sudden. He stared at the innkeeper and his wife for a while, apparently thinking. Then he visibly relaxed and said "Hans and Delana, we've known each other for a long time, and I know you two are trustworthy folks. Tell me, would you like to adopt this child?"

"Are you insane, Matthias, Don't toy with my feelings, it's dead!" Delana cried out.
"I think he's serious, Delana. Didn't you notice him mentioning Life? You're a Life-User, aren't you, Matthias? Your Life can save this child?" 

There was a short silence before the doctor spoke with a grimace.
"Yes. I'll appreciate if you could keep this to yourself."

"You know you can trust us. But... why the secrecy, Matthias? So what if you're a Life-User? It's no crime really, even the unregistered ones get no more than a few days confinement in the School if caught."

"I have my reasons." The doctor said grimly. "Now, do you want to adopt this child?"

Of course they did. They had been trying for the past 3 years, but Delana had only managed to experience four miscarriages, each more painfully saddening than the last.

"Good. The Finkarian restorative has restored his body somewhat, but its efforts are limited because his consciousness is somehow numb to all our efforts, like a very deep sleep, but deeper than anything I've ever encountered. I've been trying to prod his consciousness all this while to awaken it so it will connect with his body, but it's not responding. I need your help."

"But what can we do? We don't know any magics, can't you just pump Life into him until he wakes up?" 

"Arrrrgghhh, the ignorance of laymen! The Life I wield is not like a drug that can be poured down anyone's throat. Life, is a network of every living mind, a Volyns State existence that only other Life Users can truly comprehend. A Life-user has the ability to access this network, and through it, influence the minds of others. I have an idea on how to bring him back, but at least one of you will have to become a Life-User too. And I would advice that you keep yourself unregistered."

To be continued... :P

Brainstorming ideas for NTW

Been thinking what directions NTW should take next.
It seems most of the really useful (IMHO) power functions are there, like true searching with wildcards, text to speech, shelf system, and encodings and stuff.
And NTW must maintain its user interface standards too, minimize the amount of button pressing, maintain an intuitive enough way of doing things and so on.

Anyway, the following are some of my ideas.

Custom interface
Provide icon packs, although that would seem a bit of an overkill for an app with just a few thousand downloads.
Alternately, just allow user to specify their own icons, color scheme, size and position of icons, etc.
But the issue would then be how to implement it in a user friendly manner. Asking users to write their own custom xml layout files is probably out of the question. And contrary to what the layman might believe, creating a interface for the user to drag and place icons around on the screen is not straightforward, especially when I know the layman will also expect NTW to automatically refine the alignment of the icons with each other instead of having a few pixels of gap in between or just 1 few pixels higher or lower than each other due to the user's inaccuracy when placing them icons.


WYSIWYG editing of HTML or RTF files
Too tough, no existing libraries means I will have to program everything from scratch... eeek!

Superuser access to edit anything:
Jota Editor recently managed to implement this, congrats to him!
I actually did create an alpha version a while back which made use of the command line to gain super user access to edit any file, but it was sadly unstable, because the system response from the commandline can vary quite a bit, so I would sometimes get items missing and other irritating issues, not to mention it was like a witchhunt, going through all my code to find all the places that needed superuser access.

Convenient playlist mode
I've been thinking whether I should add a playlist mode to the NTW's Filebrowser, i.e. a convenient way of creating playlists by tapping files and long tapping folders to automatically add them into a specified playlist file. Because it seems many music players limit the creation or editing of playlists to its database where you can only select by albums or singers or entire folders. Whereas I sometimes want to play only a custom selection of songs from various singers located in many different folders. There is an app called Just Playlists that support creation of playlists through its filebrowser though, so maybe this feature is not really very useful on NTW.

Support for Dropbox and other cloud storage
Nice, but seems rather risky, and not actually neccessary, as NTW+Dropsync does the job perfectly well.

Better chunking system
A more seamless loading of the next and previous chunk during navigation. Such that all the loading of the next and previous chunks are done automatically in the background and its all buffered, so it feels as though the user is opening the whole file at one go with no memory limitations.
But.... Chunking is already pretty complicated as it is, I dread to think what complications and obstacles I might face, especially the compability with the various devices and Android OS versions.

This is by no means a serious attempt at writing a story. I've had it in my head for years and years, and have taken tons of notes on it. But I can never seriously sit down to write even a rough draft of it, because my own criticism going on inside my head kills it after a few paragraphs. On the other hand, I can usually write pages and pages of blog/forum/fb posts with no problem. So I'm gonna give the informal approach a go here and hope something comes out of this.

Prologue

Chapter 1.1

It was a dark and windy night. The wind came howling gently from the north, cold and biting, bringing with it the faint scent of lichen flowers from the green peaks of the Luding Mountains.

The river running beside the inn was quite deep but no more than three meters across. The innkeeper was an enterprising fellow and he would suspend small crates of beer into the chillingly cold river water. He was not supposed to do that of course, the river was the main source of water for the entire city of Tradmart and there were regulations against polluting it. But his customers paid more for chilled beer than warm mead, and this more than made up for the occasional bribes when officials came checking.

It was slow business that night. Most people including all his staff had gone home early for their spring reunion dinner. There was just him, his wife, and two regulars in the inn. One was a doctor from the north sector, the other was a police constable who had just dropped by for an unofficial break while doing his rounds. Both were finishing up already
He was cleaning the common room for the night while his wife was doing the kitchen. The doctor was leaving and ordered a beer to drink on his way back, so his wife leaned adroitly over the window to pulled up a crate from the river.

And then he heard her short sharp scream.

No, not rats, lizards, or cockroaches, Delana had nerves of iron and was not frightened by such common sights. Could she have injured herself somehow? He felt his heart skip a beat and then a rush of vigor flow through him as he dropped his mop and ran towards the kitchen.

From the corridor, he saw Delana standing facing the window, her back heaving hard with huge breaths.  Whatever happened, it had got her really terrified.

"There, there, what's the matter, Delana?" Reaching out, he touched her shoulder gently and said as soothingly as he could. She said nothing, just turned to hug him and pointed at the ground. He looked down. And his breath stopped.

It was a baby. Human apparently, judging from his features, but his skin was an unhealthy shade of gray-blue and still dripping wet from the cold river water. He lay there quite neatly, as though just sleeping, in a crate of beer. The innkeeper gasped and felt sickened as though kicked in the gut. He could see no sign of life in the child.

"What's the matter? You need any help?" Both the doctor and the police had entered the kitchen as well. They had not seen the baby yet.

Job hunting
It seems rather hopeless finding a job that matches my skills, I'm wondering if I should just spam job portals and let the employers decide whether I am suitable rather than cherrypicking my way through jobs.

I have a materials science degree, but I focused on computational materials science in uni, doing mostly theoretical stuff, writing Matlab and C code from scratch.
In my first job, I picked up digital signal processing and Labview. Then in my 2nd and current job, I do mostly semiconductor fabrication, thermochemical calculations, statistical analysis, and reaction kinetic analysis. I also write Matlab code for all of them, referring directly to the equations in the original papers if need be. And in my free time these past 2 yrs, I picked up Java from scratch to write NTW version 1.01 (within 1 month :D). And I converted my Matlab code for Pendulum Chaos to the Android platform as well.

However, when job hunting, the job descriptions rarely specify Matlab or Labview or ability to derive and implement mathematical modelling. They all want people who :
1) Have computer engineering degrees and can use/setup specific computer hardware.
2) Are very hardcore experimentalists in the field of materials or chemistry.
3) Have an IT degree and know 1 million and 1 programming languages.

Nobody looks for a flexible theoretical computational materials science guy with a penchant for planning and picking up computational/theory related stuff fast :(
Feeling very sad, lost and unappreciated now...
Maybe striking out on my own is really the most suitable option for me now...
But it's hard to be confident when it seems that everyone who tries my baked goods have a different opinion on it. I really need something that 90% of people will agree is the best ever they have tasted and will kill for more. Like the Hokkaido Shiroi Koibito chocolate, Famous Amos, Royce's Nama chocolates, Petit Provence's sesame pizza (I'm addicted to it :d).

Baking
Just wanted to update that I've found a killer recipe for Japanese cheesecake and developed a very nice (IMHO killer too :D) recipe for Langues de chat cookies. So now I just need to duplicate them consistently when/if my bakery does open....

And now I'm revising my first love - chocolate chip cookies. After such a long break from baking them, I've sorta lost the feel for it, which explains why I screwed up my 2 attempts at it last weekend. Thankfully, I got it right by my 3rd attempt, except it was still not as nice as I remembered. So this week will consist of more experimentation. Most proceeds (disasters :( and successes :d) will go towards my guinea pig dive buddies at the end of April ;)

BTW my new Rowenta oven 7868 was slightly disappointing, its wattage seems a little low, so it cannot maintain the set temperature whenever I place anything inside, especially if there is a lot of moisture, like cakes. This has been causing me havoc whenever I bake cheesecke. I always have to set at least 20C higher in order to reach the desired T. Further more, the heating is not really even. The fans heat the innermost side of the oven more, while the grill heat the left side more than the right. Furthermore, bottom heating is much less powerful than the top. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

And it's troubling how I get ambiguous reactions about my baked goods. I can easily get compliments of "quite good" and "very nice". But nobody has placed any orders yet, so I wonder if they really really super super liked it, or are they just saying it because it's free and their expectations of an amateur baker were low.

Maybe on the global competitive scale, my baked goods are merely "not bad" or "average" to them?
Or maybe there are just too few diehard cookie/cheesecake addicts among my guinea pigs.
Or most people need a special occasion or special time of day to even consider buying non-bread baked goods.
In any case, it really dampens my plans for starting a non-bread focused bakery.

Android
Currently NTW and Pendulum Chaos satisfy all my own usage requirements, plus its sales counts are so depressingly low. What this means is that I am chronically demotivated towards adding in new features and stuff.
So...., your feedback is my only source of motivation, pls feedback if you wish any changes.

Ok, semi-rant over!

Names for bakery!

Planning planning planning, I do love planning things :D, even make-belief ones. Let's hope this online store takes off well enough first.

Thinking of names now. Made one long list, eliminated many more, can;t decide on a good one, but my preference is towards the Straightforward, Whimsically unrelated, Geeky, and Statement?

Straightforward
- Yandaokia/Robbin's Desserts/Bakeshop/Bakery/Oven/Furnace
- Notorious Yandaokia/Robbin's Baking Company

Whimsically unrelated
- The Oven/Bakeshop Kitty (Kitty is old phrase for a community money pot, and also compatible with Cat's Tongue cookies.)

Geeky
- Furnace Recipes/Science/Lab
- Made In Furnace
- Dessert MicroFabrication Lab
- Metropolis Baking Lab
- Ovenology FS101/OV101 (Already exists though, a company selling oven-cleaning technology)

Statement
- Flour+Oven(I really like this one even though I dun think its really catchy)
- Flour+Furnace
- Made From Flour

Grandidose
- Android Baking Company
- National Bakeshop of Singapore

iPhoney

- iBake4U

- iBake uEat

Descriptive

- Daily Dessert/Dough/Cookie

- Cookies and Cheesecakes (CC Bakery? Hmmm, in this case maybe PAP will sponsor me :D)

Witty/Cheesy/Corny/Pun
- Refined Recipes (But sounds too atas and not catchy at all)
- The Reluctant/Reformed Incinerator
- Cookiehouse
- Refined Recipes
- Half Incinerated
- The Reluctant Dessert
- Four PM Bakery
- Creamed Butter
- Oven Addictions
- Ovenheart/Furnaceheart

- More Dough Please

- Stealthy Treats (Tagline: Fug it I dun care, it tastes good!)
- Sugar Cravings (Sh i t, another one taken already)
- Flour Power! (edit: Arrggghhh, sh i t google says this is a very popular name)
- Rolling in the Dough Baking Company (:D But too long :( And bakeries with that name exist already too :'()