Bölümde (Bilkent Bilgisayar Müh.) bitirme projesi olarak da yaptığımız ollaa ile bölümün bu dönemki en iyi bitirme projesi ödülüne layık görüldük.  Hepimizin şimdiden bu projeden çok şey öğrendik. Başta takım arkadaşlarım cesur coder’lar Uğur Kumru ve Ecem Ünal’a, hocamız Prof. Fazlı Can’a ve yardımlarıyla emeği geçen diğer herkese teşekkürü buradan borç bilirim. Bu da böyle bir hatıramız olsun. :)

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One of the most important lessons I learned during my startup adventures so far is, creating a business/product relying on third parties is one of the most dangerous choices. Here is what sucks.

Developing iPhone apps

All apps submitted to the App Store go through an evaluation process. Sometimes it takes 2 days and sometimes 15 days. You can’t estimate what could possibly happen because the process is not transparent. Even updates go through the full evaluation process. You have a critical bug in your iPhone app and you changed only one line and submitted an update, now you have to wait about a week to get it fixed. Read More →

Recently we have released iPhone app of our mobile social network **ollaa. **However there have been arguments about why don’t we support iOS 4.x and forced minimum iOS 5.0. In fact it is mostly about trade-offs we made before starting development. iOS 5.0 SDK has several features that made our development phase much easier such as automatic reference counting (makes the code readable and maintainable) and storyboards (made having feedbacks on UI flows and designs possible and removed the need to have separate mockups for flows and UIs) Read More →

Digitimes: Intel and Microsoft have been keeping close cooperation […] developing new tablet PCs based on Windows 8, with a goal of decreasing the global market share for iPad from 70% currently to below 50% by the middle of 2013 […] So here’s the Microsoft’s master plan. I am not sure if people are going to pay $300-$1000 for a Windows-based and probably not so well-designed and thicker device while there is iPad out there. Read More →

I see many people around me who can’t do anything productive in most days. That’s a common problem that we all sometimes feel drowned by having lots of things to but actually doing nothing. Recently I have read this free book named GTD for Hackers and compiled a list of practices of mine and author’s on getting things done. Organize your inbox. I use Gmail and for the emails I won’t read or reply immediately, I star them. Read More →

I am clearly obsessed with minimalistic blog themes and I finally decided to clone Dustin Curtis’ blog. Thankfully, Rıza created the main layout and styles and I adapted it for myself. His code and my usage are both available. In addition, I disabled commenting for a while, let’s see how it goes. I don’t want to change this for a long time. Read More →

While we’re waiting for our mobile social network app ollaa to get approved for iOS App Store in next two days, here’s the mobile OS percentage of 1000+ users signed up for beta invitation. Pretty much shows market shares in Turkey. (Follow @ollaaApp for news.) Read More →

_(Prelude: At ollaa.com we are 3 undergrad CS students, developing a mobile social network.) _

We have faced several difficulties in our startup adventure until now. Here’s a few of them:

**Things are slow: ** When everybody is supposed to pay attention to college courses, development is not so agile and you cannot expect all team members to push feature implementations everyday. GPA-hobbies balance is pretty dangerous. Therefore, you keep postponing release dates. Read More →