If you haven’t heard of Twitch, it’s a huge place where people play games and other people watch people play games. In fact, it has expanded far beyond that and you can watch people do all sorts of things. Maybe you want to learn how to cross stitch or about 3D printing?
Twitch (and other streaming platforms) are more than this. They are also places where people can connect, we can listen to regular voices in the background while we do things, and communities form. For some people, probably even more so in times like these, they’re a reliable form of social contact.
I thought I’d try to stream on Twitch a little regularly for some of these reasons. We can talk about stuff, or we can just play through some games. Whatevs.
Plans went out of the window this weekend with some variable Welsh weather. Kim had a bit of a bounce off her mountain bike and we had a think about making a clip stick for some of those sport climbing dodgy landings.
I’ve been working with a bug in the Android version of the Daily Anatomy app that meant the app didn’t update with a new question each day for some users that maybe didn’t use their Android devices much. I think I’ve fixed it – fingers crossed and I’ve sent the new version to Google’s Play Store.
I also introduced a big problem for users with older versions of Android by adding something new, but I think I’ve fixed that too. If the app crashed when you tried to start it and you’re using a version of Android older than 4.4.4 try the new version in the Play Store. Hopefully it will start up and run now.
The code is a mess. But it works.
I’ve been writing new questions over the summer, filling in some gaps and rounding out the collection a little. All the new questions I add will pop up in both versions of the app.
I hope it’s helping! Andy’s learning from it, so that’s a start. Daily Anatomy (Google Play Store)
I learnt a bit of Java and Android programming a month or two ago and built the Android version of the Daily Anatomy app. It’s now up on the Google Play store for your favourite Android device.
The app will give you an anatomical question every day, will record your total score, and keep track of how you perform on questions from different regions and systems of the body. I’ll add leaderboards and achievements in the future.
Go get a copy:
The animations for Embryology at a Glance that Steve Atherton has been creating have started going up on YouTube. We’ll keep working on them and keep adding to the channel. The animations are intended to support the text and illustrations in the textbook. Go and have a look:
I thought I should update you guys on what I’ve been doing with the Daily Anatomy app since its release in January, and what I’m planning to do.
My main job has been to write batches of new questions and add them to the ever growing pool of questions that the app draws from each day. We have seem some questions repeated, and we’ve seen some interesting sequential questions on the same topic, and some similar questions asked, but these are all chosen at random. The bigger the pool, the lower the chance of seeing the same question again. Writing good quality, accurate questions with a helpful feedback description is a lot of work (and a big part of my other job!) and this is why this is a paid app – I need motivation to keep writing these things.
With some of my beta testers we’ve listed plans for adding achievements to the app, to reward users for answering a number of questions correctly for each system and region, for example, among others. I’ve also written some code to note your longest correct question answering streak and I’ll add a second leaderboard so you can compete on this front too.
