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The art of user interface
Years ago I thought I had the ability to design a decent user interface. Back then, the concepts were quite easy as the screen sizes were limited (Palm OS) and we were dealing with essentially black and white. As long as I followed the UI guidelines, the interface looked good. These days, I don't think I could design a user interface to save myself. The flexibility of iOS, high resolution screens, full color displays and multi-touch add so much complexity to user interface design that it takes a professional, in my opinion, to design good user interfaces.
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Does experience count in mobile development?
The other day, I was instant messaging with someone and jokingly questioned why anyone would listen to what I had to say about mobile development. Then I realized that I've been doing mobile application development for almost 17 years! Just writing that sounds unreal. I wrote my first mobile application my senior year in college for the Newton. On a tangent, how did a college student get a Newton and the quite expensive developer tools? The Apple Personal Interactive Electronics (PIE) group licensed my NotifyMail application and exchange, I received a Newton MessagePad 110 and the developer tools when developer tools cost way more than the $99 Apple charges to join the iOS developer program.
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Life, a year later
It's been almost a year since I left my job running IT for a small company. As I've written before, leaving the job was probably not the smartest move as I didn't have another job lined up. However, it turns out that the move was one of the best moves in my career. Through a series of events, I ended up with my current job where I'm quite happy. Sometimes it surprises me how much work influences life, but considering how many of my waking hours I spend working, it really shouldn't be a surprise.
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The utility of a URL shortener
I've setup Twitter Tools to post links to my blog posts to Twitter and that's been working well. I did this as one of my friends doesn't subscribe to my RSS feed, but likes to read my posts. He is a frequent Twitter user, so this solution works well. Since I haven't been using a URL shortener, some of my posts don't make it to Twitter as the URL and title make the post over the Twitter limit of 140 characters. The other day, I decided to see about solving this.