19 Feb 2013
I had the pleasure to be invited by David
Catuhe to participate in a round table about
Windows8 development during Microsoft TechDays
2013!
I was joined by Christopher Maneu from Deezer and
Guillaume Leborgne from
MCNext, both deeply involved in Windows development. David (cropped from the
photo) led the discussion with Jean Ferré, who
leads the developers, platform and ecosystem division at Microsoft France.
The discussion was very interesting and openly addressed the late start of
Microsoft on mobile. They seem to have spared no effort to ease the work of
developers, for example by opening the platform to development in
HTML5/Javascript. I confess I initially thought it was a strange choice for
native apps but it seems to have attracted quite a few web developers.
This round table was a great opportunity to meet smart people and gain insight
into the Microsoft platform! Thanks also to the journalists in attendance who
covered Algolia in the IT press.
19 Feb 2013
We’ll be in Barcelona next week for the Mobile World Congress! Last year, more
than 67,000 attendees participated in the event.
We will use this opportunity to launch our new website along with a brand new
offer… Algolia for FREE! Stay tuned!
If you happen to be attending MWC too, ping me if you’d like to discuss over a
coffee :) (@dessaigne on twitter, or nicolas at algolia dot com).
29 Jan 2013
Start In Paris is a monthly event where 5
startups have the opportunity to pitch their service to the Paris startup
community. After a first selection and then a public vote, we were selected as
one of 5 finalists of the #22 edition that took place yesterday, January the
28th!
Algolia has greatly evolved over the last few months, so it was an excellent
occasion for us to test a new pitch! And the response has truly exceeded our
expectations. After a 5 minute pitch we received a rush of questions,
displaying interest and insight from the 400-strong audience!
While we were the only tech startup to pitch to an audience including only a
few developers, we ranked second in votes, just behind Kitchen
Trotter, our fellow Seedcamp finalist from
last December. Congrat to them, they were truly excellent!
[Edit 03-Feb-2013] Check out Alexis Niki great feedback about the event on Rude Baguette [/Edit]
28 Jan 2013
Demonstrating how Algolia Search functions in the wild, in this post we will
discuss a recent integration with sharypic, another
Paris-based startup focussed on photo sharing at events.
Sharypic is a web and mobile
app dedicated to collaborative photo sharing, focused on
enabling users to easily gather photos from attendees during and after an
event. The platform allows users to collect and share photos from all devices,
including mobiles (via Twitter and Instagram), cameras, and computers, and
from already existing albums on Facebook, Picassa, and Flickr. One of their
killer features is the ability to stream photos to a live PhotoWall at the
venue and to an embeddable slideshow widget. This increases engagement both
with event attendees and with an online audience. On sharypic one of the
primary ways that users discover events is via a search bar, in addition to
pages highlighting recent and popular events.
The existing mobile search function relied on
users accurately typing an event’s name into the search field, which limited
the results (especially on smartphones where typos are common). By integrating
Algolia Search into the mobile app, sharypic users can now type just a few
letters of a search term, or enter it incorrectly (‘pqris’ instead of
‘Paris’), and the results will display the corrected term within event names,
locations, descriptions, or hashtags.
Martin Fourcade, one of sharypic’s co-founders, said “For our users, it’s
exactly what we needed. They can show the best photos of their events to
friends without bugging their smartphone and whining about the internet
connection. I’m lazy when it comes to typing on my smartphone, impatient when
it comes to waiting for server responses… now everything is done with a few
keystrokes!”
Sharypic’s other co-founder François-Joseph Grimault hopes that this new
intelligent search will enable users to find specific content more easily,
possibly leading to increased exploration on the platform. Time will tell how
the new search feature affects user behaviour, but reducing user frustration
through quick and efficient search is a step in the right direction.
Download the latest version of the sharypic app, including
integrated Algolia Search, and have fun with photo sharing at your next
event!
24 Jan 2013
When I started to develop for Android it appeared to me that an APK file was
just an archive, a simple approach that you can find in many systems today.
Files are extracted from the archive at installation and you can access them
via the file-system.
This seemed even more reasonable since Android uses Linux which is very good
in respect to POSIX standards.
But I was completely wrong! An APK is not a mere archive: the application
starts from and uses the APK at runtime! This is a horrible decision that will
probably hurt Android for a long time…
[Edit 28-Jan-2013] The goal of this post was to express my point of view about the bad properties of using directly the APK file at runtime versus relying on the file system. I used memory-mapped file to illustrate this but the post is incorrect on that topic. There is in fact a way to memory-map a file directly from the APK: you can use an extension for which files are stored uncompressed inside the APK (mp3, jpg, …) and use the AssetManager.openFD() or Resources.openRawResourceFD() to have offset/length inside the APK file.
All my thanks to Jay Freeman for his excellent feedback. His comments helped
me to understand my mistake and to improve our Android integration!
[/Edit]
Let’s look at our own example. At Algolia, we have designed an efficient
binary data-structure that is able to answer instant-search queries in just a
few milliseconds, even with a very big data set (for example with all the
world cities’ names from Geonames: 3M+ entries). This data-structure is
designed to be used directly on disk without being copied in memory. To obtain
optimal performance, we use a memory-mapped
file which is standard on
all platforms, especially on Linux.
We have been able to use memory-mapped files on all platforms, except on
Android! In fact you can only retrieve an InputStream from a file packaged in
an APK. So the only solution to use a memory-mapped file is to copy the
resource from the APK on disk and then to use the file-system. This seems like
re-implementing an installer in each application.
Is the APK so bad? Why did they design it this way?
I imagine that Android developers chose this approach to solve some pitfalls
of file-systems. I can think for example about solving performance problems
when you have a lot of small files in one folder, or reducing the size of
applications on the device (resources are compressed in the APK and
decompressed only when the application uses them, which actually contributes
to the sluggish image of Android).
I may of course be wrong, there may be other more important reasons for this
approach. But if not, Android should have thought more about the consequences
of their choice: in the long term, the APK constraints are more serious than
those small pitfalls that could have been solved in other ways.
But wait… Android applications can contain dynamic libraries (.so files) via
NDK. Isn’t it the principle of dynamic libraries to be memory-mapped? In fact
I am pretty sure they discovered this problem when working on NDK since
dynamic libraries are automatically extracted from APK file at installation
and stored in an application directory in ‘/data/data’. I am wondering why
they decided to implement this hack instead of fixing the problem…
Conclusion
Developing an API, a SDK or worse, a whole platform, is extremely difficult.
Let’s face it, it’s unavoidable to ship some badly designed components or
inconsistent APIs. We definitely need to listen to developers’ feedback even
when it hurts. Actually, the real difficulty comes when it’s time to put
things right without alienating existing users!
By the way, if you know more about APK design choices, I’m interested to hear
from you!
