TL;DR

BARRACUDA is your robotic curation helper - and it fits in your pocket! It's a cross platform mobile app that helps you curate stuff from steemit.com. It's not quite a bot, and it's not quite a normal steemit browsing app. It can help you curate more, it's fun, and the best part is that you don't have to share your private keys with anyone!

It is required that the user hits play before continuing to read this post... BARRACUDA!

Screenshots!

First, login using the tab to the upper left (use your posting key only). Then, add some 'Top Friends'. These are the people who BARRACUDA will swim around looking for awesome content. BARRACUDA will also check out stuff that your top friends have resteemed!

You can change several rockin' settings here.

It shows you a bunch of info - you can hide this once you've absorbed it.

Be a power user! You can do like developers do and stare at logs to see what BARRACUDA is doing in the background :^) This is can be helpful and fun. Click hide and re-show if the log seems stuck - for some reason this seems to happen on mobiles but not while testing in the browser.

What is BARRACUDA?

Is it a bot? It is a fish? No. Yes. Maybe?

What is BARRACUDA!!? Your very own robot fish that will find and upvote shiny things for you - with your own account using your own posting key on your own mobile phone!

Your robotic BARRACUDA!! should follow these rules.

• Only upvote one post per cycle (when the unleash button is clicked or every N minutes after you click the START BARRACUDA LOOP button).
• Only upvote posts by people who are in your top friends list (or posts that they've re-steemed). Look at the specified number of posts per run.
• Only upvote posts which are more than the minimum minutes and less than the maximum seconds old.
• Only upvote while you have the app running.
• Only upvote posts with more than the minimum and less than the maximum upvotes.
• Flags are currently ignored.

First, make sure you have added some top friends. This is how BARRACUDA!! knows what to bite, I mean vote. Click the menu icon and choose some posts. Also, make sure you're logged in. We recommend you only use your POSTING key in Advanced mode for your own security.

The punchline

BARRACUDA finds something and upvotes it. You can then see what it upvoted, check it out, and decide if you want to leave the upvote or not. For me, this has been really fun. It's like turning the TV on to a random channel and THEN deciding if you like it or not. Finally, it basically works like a bot, except it requires you to click a button every now and then. Anyway, it's wicked fun.

Note ... that full bot mode does work if you run from the source code using ionic. More on that later...

Why did you make it?

As you may be aware, I'm interested in decentralized curation tools (see Project @THUNDERWHALE!). BARRACUDA grew out of my desire to see if a decentralized curation app was doable. I think BARRACUDA proves that it is. With some (significant) changes and enhancements (possibly including making it a desktop app) this code base might be tweaked to achieve the goals of Project @THUNDERWHALE!

How did you make it?

It's based off of @good-karma's awesome eSteem app. I just brought the mind of a back end bot dev to the world of front end apps. Boom. BARRACUDA!

Alpha Warning

Be careful. Barracuda's can and might bite anything. No warranty is expressed or implied. It's based off of @good-karma's amazing eSteem app, thanks @good-karma!!

Image credits

The barracuda image is based on a freely available image of a barracuda!

About the Author

Bryan Gmyrek is a software developer and lives in Arizona with his beautiful wife, three sons and two golden dogs. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the U of Arizona based on the particle physics research he did at the world famous DZero Experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. He's been online since 1993, into cryptocurrencies since 2013, won prizes at three Bitcoin hackathons, and has co-organized the Blockchain Meetup in Phoenix Arizona for over a year. Many of his videos are popular on YouTube. Check out my top 50 introduceyourself post.

Like my stuff? Please vote for me as a witness (witness thread)
Just head to
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Scroll to the bottom, cut and paste nonlinearone into that box and hit the vote button.
Thank You!

Thank you for the support so far everyone - I'm #67 on the witness list and have faithfully witnessed many blocks already :)

Want Your Own Barracuda?

This is still a very alpha version, but it is running on my Google Pixel XL. Note that I can also run it in a "full" bot mode using the ionic framework testing tools on my laptop. I'm planning on releasing an alhpa version of the app - note that for the first version it may be Android only and you may need to "install from unknown sources." Sorry but that's what living on the edge is like sometimes.

The best nation in the world is Donation!

If you want early access to the alpha (hopefully in the next few days), you gotta become a fan of @barracudaapp and donate ten or more steem backed dollars to the @barracudaapp account.

BARRACUDA!!

Want to support BARRACUDA? Please upvote and resteem this post. Thanks!

Follow me @nonlinearone