Posted on February 10, 2012 at 5:07 PM

In this week's Fish Fry, I investigate FPGAs doing floating point, signal conditioning from Texas Instruments and how the "app economy" is giving more attention to the engineering community. What is the app you find most "useful"? Where do you see the "app economy" headed in the future?

Posted on February 11, 2012 at 5:48 AM

Thank you very much Amelia , and Altera of course!
With this wonderful kit no more icebergs wandering in my earl grey teacup!

Posted on February 13, 2012 at 1:19 PM

I use a few apps on a regular basis. Most are for entertainment purposes (stupid car radio is broken again, TuneIn Radio app to the rescue).

But my most used app at work is "Calcuccino" (an iPhone app, not sure if available for other devices). It's a Programmer's Calculator, so it can do various logic operations up to float-to-int converts (including displaying what a float looks like as a 32-bit number. Good for finding out if the stuff on the protocol capture is correct or not). It also has a scientific mode to do "normal" math.

Calcuccino is not perfect - I really wish it had a "backspace" key!
(I'm not in any way affliated with the development or profits of this app).


But where will this app market go? I think it is working very well. Apps are cheap, most under $5, so the potential market is very large. Per sale profit is tiny, but if an app is a go-to item (or just a fad for a few weeks) you stand to move hundreds of thousands of them.

Even large organizations are getting into the app game. Is it just a fad that will die off within a few years? Somehow I doubt it. I think the days of $400 PC programs have more to worry about than this new model.

(and this model isn't that new. The Shareware market place was all the rage not that long ago...until the hackers made that too dangerous. Apps seem like the replacement for that market channel).

Kevin M.

Posted on February 17, 2012 at 1:53 AM

Even a teenager on a shoestring budget could be an app customer : the strength is in numbers! As long as app developers continue to release shiny,cheap,catchy apps simple to use , even for elder people , things will go ever better . They'll catch all the vast amount of customers scared of the complexity of nowadays multiwatts desktop beasts , that don't need of so much computing power at all!
What about this app:

http://market.android.com/details?id=com.azumio.instantheartrate.fu...

now you can always know when it's time to quit with all that coffee at your lengthy debugging sessions on your new mastodontic FPGA based project .
It turns useful even to control your heart prior asking a pay increase to your boss !