Where have I been?

I've been busy.

I've successfully switched to Mac, my iPhone App is done, and I'm now developing in Python and Django for web. I also managed to build a complex web service on the Google App Engine (for my iphone app).

I am setting up http://www.benford.name as my personal website and will start hosting my blog over there.

Well, that's all I have to report.

I've been hard at work groking the iPhone SDK. I became hungup on implementing my photo browser. It's using a UIScrollView with a few "advanced" things happening on top.

It's been fun and a challenge to learn "yet another framework". My blogging should stay pretty sparse until my brain has soaked up enough info.

Unplugging from the borg

I feel like my life as a .NET programmer could be coming to an end. Over the next year I probably won't be starting my own new projects in .NET.

I can't tell if I just get bored of a "stack" every three years or I am truly wanting to switch again for a "better" way. Back in 2005, I felt isolated using LAMP and yearned for the apparent community of .NET. Four years later, I'm tired of the culture of .NET and the type of apps that get built. The breaking point has been the newly found group of soggy programmers (which are mostly non-microsoft people).

All of the sudden I find myself seriously playing with the idea of building a iPhone app and using google app engine (python) for the server side. I'm still in research mode, but of all my options, this is what want to do most.

In all fairness, I wanted to make an iPhone since the day the SDK was released. I even bought a mac mini about 7 months ago.

I'm plodding along each day wondering what I'll do next. I have spent the last three weeks on my mac mini and I'm loving the change of scenery (from working on windows).

Website Finished and What's Next?

Website Finished

Great news! The website I have been working on for the past 6 months is finished enough to go live. So where is it? It's sitting on the server waiting for official content from my business partner.

So, it's done but not live yet.

What's Next?

I started reading (and coding) through this book: Beginning iPhone Development with great success. I'm half way through in 2 days.

I do have an iPhone app in mind, but I'm not sure I can build it as easily as I think. I promised myself a two weeks to go through that book and I'll see how I feel at that point.

If I do decide to go for it, I'll also be building a server component using Google App Engine.

My alternative is to try for some freelance work to get some income going. I'll keep you posted on both the real launch and my next phase in project dev.

Crunch Time

It's crunch time on my project. I finally have list of things to finish and also did a pretty good job of estimating each task. Entering this into fogbugz gives me a launch date of Marth 14th.

I'm working hard to get this done.

I expect just to have the site up and running to see if any interest is out there. It's not perfect and their is plenty of parts that I would like to make better, but 've spent a lot longer than I wanted to on this project so far.

Particularly, the UI is going to need some improvement, but I'm hoping it will do for now.

See you on the other side!

Lost Developer Time

I started adopting NHibernate on my current .NET project. In other words I've outgrown Linq-to-Sql.

I have been crawling through many blogs looking for a little advice on testing nhibernate mappings and implementing the Repository pattern etc, and it dawned upon me:

All the helpful blog posts and articles about NHibernate were written between 2005 and 2007.

Am I really that late to the game? The answer is of course, YES!

I took a brief look at NHibernate back in early 2006 but and I intentionally avoided it at all costs. Please understand: I used to work at a job where the only priority was is getting done fast (at the expense of quality). Being under constant pressure to finish projects fast, I naturally fell to using tools that supported this type of programming. The two things Microsoft has are Linq-to-Sql and Webforms.

These tools appear to make it life bearable,but over time you pay for it in the long run. You end up making crap code but launching it anyway, then having to deal with it while it runs in production.

Things are different now. I'm my own boss and I make all the rules. So, I declare the number one priority is quality.

I feel like this part of my development career is behind me and I'll try to avoid ever working under conditions where quality is ignored in such extreme ways.

I'm very curious to see how long I stay developing in Visual Studio Land. Although, my recent use of Resharper and NHibernate might change this attitude.

NOTE: I revised this post on 2/26/2009 at 1:33pm

I actually like Safari's font rendering over the "Windows Standard"

I downloaded Safari 4 Beta today. It looks like a native windows app to the point where they even changed the font rendering to use the windows style by default. I guess a lot of people complained.

I actually like the OSX style font rendering. Here is a comparison:

With OSX font style:

With Windows Standard font style:

I guess Apple is trying to make the windows users happy, but I still don't understand why everyone objected to the "nicer" fonts.

At least it is a configurable option: