I am trying to figure out what is the fastest way the figure out the current user Country. I know there are a lot of location examples online, my actual is question: since I don't care much about precision, is it OK if I use RegionInfo.CurrentRegion.DisplayName; to figure out the user country?
What are the downsides of using this approach (besides precision)?
No, you shouldn't use RegionInfo.CurrentRegion for that.
For example, I live in Montenegro, but RegionInfo.CurrentRegion on my phone will return USA, which is completely irrelevant being almost 4000 miles away from here.
You have to use Geolocator class for that. Here's some sample code.
Related
I try to catch some Base Pointer Adresses from a Windows Application which I want to Bot (Its not a game, Its an Online Broker). So, I know how to find Base Pointer Adresses, but I do this with Cheatengine (Find Adresses, set Breakpointes, search for the Output Adresses... and so on) - but this takes very much time for Base Pointers with 6+ Offsets. Maybe there is a much faster technique how to scrape them out of Memory?
And here is my presumption: In This Pic you can see, there are many similar Entrys (Forex Entrys), and they are all similar structured. They have a Adress for Ask-Value and Bid-Value - these are the Pointers I need! The Values are represented as Double. Maybe, I can find multiple Adresses at once, if I find the one from another. I thought on object oriented programing, where many Instances have Adresses nearby to the other. So, is there a way to find multiple at once, and fast?
I tried some stuff with OllyDbg, and didnt find some nearby (But my skills with OllyDbg are not insane, I still dont know all functions of it). Do you guys have a better solution, how I can find them faster? I dont really want to code some stuff in Assembler - but if nececary, I can do this. Would be great if you can help. There are 89 Entrys, and I will need per something like 20 - 30 minutes. Would be awful.
Cheers!
Filthy Frank
Using pointers and offsets is not the correct way to go about this. On the back end they're just using HTTP and an API. You should either use that directly or hook the function that does it and then work with the data right after it is received by the client.
How can I get the timezone of a specific city/country, I have the latitude and the longitude of the country. Can I do that with the TimeZoneInfo class?
No, you can't do it with TimeZoneInfo as far as I'm aware.
The Geonames web service will give you the time zone, but it will give you the zoneinfo name rather than the Windows ID. You could use the CLDR information to provide a mapping between the two of them - that's what we do for Noda Time. (You'd embed the mapping information into your app; it's reasonably straightforward.) It looks like you can also download the Geonames data, but I expect you'd have a fair amount of work to do to use it on the device.
Of course if you'd be interested in using Noda Time directly, I'd be happy to hear about your requirements. It's not quite hit production yet, but the more use cases we have, the quicker we'll be able to design the API appropriately :)
I am looking for some ideas on enhancing a trial-user's user experience when he uses a product for the first time. The product is aimed at a particular domain and has various features/workflows. Experienced users of the product naturally find interesting ways to combine features to get the results they want (somewhat like using an IDE from a programmer's perspective).Trial users get to use all features of the product in a limited fashion (For ex: If there is a search functionality, the trial-user might see only the top 20 results, or he may be allowed to search only a 100 times). My question is: What are the best ways to help a trial-user explore/understand the possibilities of the product in the trial period, especially in the first 20 - 60 mins before the user gives up on the product?
Edit 1: The product is a desktop app (served via JNLP, so no install required) and as pointed out in the comments, the expectations can be different in this case. That said, many webapps do take a virtual desktop form and so, all suggestions are welcome.
Check out how blinksale.com handles this. It's an invoicing app, but to prevent it from looking too empty for a new account, they show static images in places where you'd actually have content if you used the app. Makes it look less barren at first until you get your own data in.
if you can, avoid feature limiting a trial. it stops the user from experiencing what the product is ACTUALLY like. It also prevents a user from finding out if a feature actually works like they want/expect/need it to.
if you have a trial version, and you can, optimise it for first time use. focus on / highlight the features that allow the user to quickly and easily get benefits for useful output from the system.
allow users to export any data they enter into a trial system - and indicate that this is possible/easy. you don't want them to be put off from trying something because of a potential for wasted effort.
avoid users being required to do lots of configuration before using a trial. prepopulate settings based on typical/common/popular settings. you may also want to consider having default settings for different types of usage. e.g. "If you want to see what the system is like for scenario X, use configuration J. If you want to see what the system is like for use case Y, use configuration K." where J & K are collections of settings best suited to a particular type of usage.
I'll speak from personal experience while evaluating trial applications.
The most annoying trial applications are those which keep popping up nag screens or constantly reminding me that I'm using a trial. Trials which act exactly like the real product from the beginning till the end of the trial period are just awesome. Limited features are annoying, the only exception I can think of when you could use it is where you have rarely used feature which would allow people to exploit the trial (by using this "once-in-lifetime" needed feature and uninstalling). If you have for example video editing software trial which puts "trial" watermark on output, I'd uninstall it as soon as I'd notice it. In my opinion trial should seamlessly integrate into user work-flow so that once the trial ends they would think "Hey, I have been using this awesome program almost each day since I got the trial, I absolutely have to buy it." Sure some people will exploit it, but at the end you should target the group which will use your product in daily work-flow instead of one time users. Even if user "trials" it 2 times per year, he will keep coming back to your product and might even buy it after 2nd or 3rd "one-time use".
(Sorry for the wall of the text and rant)
As for how to improve the first session. I usually find my way around programs easily, but one time only pop-up/screen (or with check-box to never show it again) with videos showing off best features and intended work-flow are quite helpful. Also links to sample documents might be helpful. If your application can self-present itself (for example slide-show about the your slide-show program) you could include such document. People don't like to read long and boring help files, but if you have designer in your team, you could ask him to make a short colourful intro pdf. Also don't throw all the features at the user at the same time. Split information into simple categories and if user is interested into one specific category keep feeding him more specific information. That's why videos are so good, with 3-6 x ~3-5 minute videos you can tell a lot. Also depending how complex your program is you could include picture with information where specific things are located on the screen.
Just my personal opinion, I have never made a trial myself. Hope it helps.
An interactive walk through/lab exercise that really highlights the major and exciting offerings of your application.
Example: Yahoo mail does the same when the users opt to use new mail interface
There are so many ways you can go with this. I still can't claim to have found the best approach.
However, my plan from the beginning with my online (Silverlight) software was to give away something thousands of people will find useful and can use for free. The free version is pretty well representative of the professional product, with only a few features missing that enhance productivity (I'm working on those professional features now). And then I do have a nag popup that comes up every 5 minutes suggesting that you should buy it. That popup can be dismissed as many times as you want. I know that popup will annoy some people but I suppose that's the trade off. There is no perfect plan. But I don't think the occasional nag popup scares that many people away, especially when it can be dismissed with a single click.
I was inspired by Balsamiq Mockups, which has been hugely successful over the past couple years. My trial/nag popup way of doing things was copied almost exactly from Balsamiq. I honestly don't know if this is the ideal plan, but it has obviously worked for them. By the way, I think another reason for Balsamiq's success is that the demo doesn't have to be downloaded & installed. Since the demo is in Flash, there's a very high conversion rate of users actually trying it and becoming addicted to it.
I've got a list of 6,000 company names (along with their headquarters address) and I need to find the web address for each of them. I'm considering using the Google Web API (obviously this will take a few days as only 1,000 queries per day are allowed) to do this(search for "COMPANY_NAME CITY STATE") and then take the first result. However I'm not 100% sure this will work, and I feel like there's a better way. I can do this in any language I know really, C++, Java, PHP, Python. This only has to be run once.
How would I use WHOIS to do this? I know how I would do it if I already knew the URL, but not the other way around(name to URL). And what would I do if it were privately registered?
BTW, these are US businesses.
You can use WHOIS instead of Google API for it.
Use Amazons Mechanical Turk. It's perfect for these kinds of tasks which can be hard to automate and typically need a person to validate them. It will cost a little but it should be manageable, depending on how bad you want the results.
I've read about systems which use the Flickr database of photos to fill in gaps in photos (http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=629).
How feasible is a system like this? I was toying with the idea (not just a way of killing time but as a good addition to something I am coding) of using Flickr to get photos of a certain entity (in this case, race tracks) and reconstruct a model. My biggest concern is that there aren't enough photos of a particular track and even then, it would be difficult to tell if two photos are of the same part of the racetrack, in which case one of them may be irrelevant.
How feasible is something like this? Is it worth attempting by a sole developer?
Sounds like you're wanting to build a Photosynth style system - check out Blaise Aguera y Arcas' demo at TED back in 2007. There's a section about 4 minutes in where he builds a model of the Sagrada FamÃlia from photographs.
I say +1 for photosynth answer, its a great tool. Not sure how well you could incorporate it into your own app though.
Its definately feasable. Anything is possible. And yes, doable for a single developer, just depends how much free time you have. It would be great to see something like this integrated into Virtual Earth or Google Maps Street View. Someone who could nail some software like this could help 3D model the entire world based purely on photographs. That would be a great product and make any single developer rich and famous.
So get coding. :)
I have plenty of free time, as I am in between jobs.
One way to do it is to get an overhead view of the track layout, make a blueprint based on this model, and then get one photo of the track and mimic the track's road colour. That would be a start.
LINQ to Flickr on codeplex has a great API and would be helpful for your task.