A couple of days ago, my plane tickets were purchased and my hotel reservation was made. I’m headed to WordCamp Chicago! Brave New Media, the company I work for, is sending me along with our other (awesome) developer, Jerry Kramer. I’ll definitely be tweeting throughout the event, and you can expect a post or two [...]
The past six months of my life have been filled with work, work, more work, and a little play. I stopped blogging in July to try and preserve the amount of time in that “play” bit, because I was picking up a couple of new projects. Well, since then, the projects have either been completed [...]
People often talk about “work/life balance,” which really boils down to prioritizing your time. For a lot of creative professionals, it’s more of a “work/life/pet projects” balance. There’s only so much time available to spend on that third category, and even within that, priorities are rethought and shuffled around. Some don’t make it past the [...]
Transmit is my favorite FTP client for the Mac. It has been ever since I bought Transmit 3 back in 2006. Well folks, the day has finally come for Transmit 4! I won’t be commenting on its features at all—for that, you can go to their website—but I will be pointing out their awesome new app icon. Even that got an upgrade!
To everyone who has been waiting for version 1.1 to drop, I’m really sorry, but I won’t have it ready tomorrow night. Expect to see it this weekend. The reason it’s been delayed is that I learned more about version 3 of the Google Maps API (currently, SimpleMap uses version 2) and there are some [...]
So I’ve been back from the Big Nerd Ranch for a couple of days now, and I’ve had time to reacquaint myself with real life. I’m able to look back on all of last week with hindsight now, and connect some dots. I definitely learned a ton in that class. If I had needed to [...]
Phew, it has been a crazy week! I have written so much code in the past seven days that I’m surprised my hands can still type. On Thursday, we had the best brain break we could have asked for: zip lines. I posted a teaser before, so here’s the real thing. (A huge thanks to [...]
Zip2-Alison Yes, that is me on a zip line, going 35 mph, 150 ft above the ground. There was coding today, of course. I just didn’t take any video of it! I’ll be writing more about that (and the zip lines) later tonight.
I can’t believe how fast this class is going. I feel like I have months of iPhone programming knowledge behind me already. Topics covered today: the accelerometer (tilting, shaking), phone rotation, working with table views, and editing/adding/deleting data from an app. I worked ahead a little bit and learned how to control the phone’s camera, [...]
Check out those icons. I made those apps! They even do things. As you can see, today was a big day. We learned a lot. It feels like Thanksgiving for my brain: I’m completely stuffed, but I’m craving seconds, and I will eat more no matter what. The Quiz application is really simple. There are [...]
Today was our second day learning Objective-C. We got much deeper into it today, and the programs in our exercises were getting more and more complex. By dinnertime, we had learned how to tap into services being broadcast from other peoples’ computers and capture the information (iChat, printer sharing, iTunes library sharing, etc). It was [...]
Today was the first day of class. I woke up and took a bath in my jacuzzi, which is perhaps the best way EVER to wake up in the morning. It was a gorgeous day outside, and I had a pretty awesome view from my room. Breakfast was at 8:30, and there was a nice [...]
I’m here! The Banning Mills retreat is beautiful, though I didn’t get to see very much of it today. When we got here from the airport, I basically dumped my bags in my room and went right to dinner—where I spent the better part of 4 hours talking with the instructor and a group of [...]
Of course, by “the big day,” I do not mean I’m getting married or having a baby. I’m going to the Big Nerd Ranch! Tomorrow I’m off to Banning Mills in Whitesburg, Georgia to attend Beginning iPhone Bootcamp. I will be locked away in the middle of the woods for a week, chin-deep in Objective-C [...]
I’ve been on the waiting list for the Beginning iPhone Bootcamp at the Big Nerd Ranch for almost a month now. Today I got the exciting news that I’m IN! From July 18-24 I will be on the geekiest trip I’ve ever taken. Hooray!!! I will definitely be blogging about the trip daily once I’m there. [...]
Welcome! This (hopefully) will be my general development blog as I learn Ruby and Objective-C, and also as I expand my knowledge of PHP/MySQL, Actionscript 3, XHTML/CSS and Javascript. Get started by reading my latest posts, learning a little more about me, or checking out my WordPress plugins.