It’s been awhile since my last update and I’ve been rather busy. Gone through quite a few changes in personal and professional life. I suppose I should start of with professional since it is easier to talk about.
The Team:
I now lead a team of 3 developers and one QA person. They are all amazing. I couldn’t really ask for more dedicated or hard working people. To say that they get along with my style of management and work ethic is an understatement. They each add a little something to all my projects to take a good plan and make it awesome. If it weren’t for these guys and gals I would not be succeeding nearly as well as I have been. Super Bowl this year was a decent amount of work and so far has paid off rather well. Here’s hoping the coming months are just as good.
The Platform:
With that said we have rewritten our whole mobile site into a new framework we built from the ground up. We no longer use any ASP .Net controls and have gone “formless”. All Get and Post requests have their own handlers so as to remove confusion, add speed and simplify code. With this new framework we can also offer up a custom view based on whichever phone you are visiting our site with. Needless to say, our traffic has increased and so have sales as people can actually view the site on their phone without it looking like trash.
We also released a few revisions to our iPhone app. We are on 2.1 and have over 100k downloads.
Blackberry and Android versions are bother nearing completion and I am expecting an iPad version soon.
Sales have never been better and all of our projects are rocking right along. I can’t wait to be out in all three platforms and continue to grow the product’s we offer within each of them.
In personal news, I’m very happily engaged. Life has kind of been crazy since I stopped writing as it has been a roller coaster of growth, love and all of that. Thankfully though things are calming down and life and life is getting back to a more balanced pace where I can get back to more climbing, running and general stuff.
As far as wedding plans go, much is still up in the air, but we are figuring it out. I was surprised on Valentines Day to find that we have our first addition to our family arriving on March 15th. She is a Australian Cattle Dog puppy who will be about 9-10 weeks old when we get her. We decided to name her Sedona and we can barely await her arrival. We are also working on getting back into guitar, dance and camping. I’m expecting this summer to be a great one filled with a possible Europe trip and maybe even Taste of Chicago.
More to come.
One thing I found different in Objective C was how getting a substring was done. If you have seen my previous posts you may have noticed this method. I use it to grab a particular element value from XML without parsing the whole doc. It also serves as a good example of how to get a substring from a NSString.
One problem I found was that when I was receiving encoded XML from a webservice I would need to decode it so I could use it. What I ended up doing was just running it through the NSXMLParser and building it into a new XML doc that I will dispose of when finished. It’s pretty simple and saves me a nuch of time. This will also decode any form of tagged language so XHTML will go as well.
As I browsed the internet I found a few examples of how to call soap webservices on the iphone. The main example I found actually generated 3 calls – 2 asynchronous and 1 synchronous calls. I then decided a much more concise static method was needed to do the job and while the example I had found works, it isn’t something you would ever want to use in your own application. With that said, here is my solution.
Also to note, If you create a NSURLConnection and don’t use the static sendSynchronousRequest method, you are creating an asynchronous call and should be aware of that.
Life gives us these fleeting moments when we suddenly feel like we are in the right place at the right time or conversely the wrong place at the wrong time. The reality is we are always in the exact place we need to be. I feel I have lived a blessed life, not that my life hasn’t had it’s share of misfortune but the good has outweighed the bad. A portion of that is taking your misfortune and creating your own good times from it. A bad situation is only a bad situation until you make it a better one. I’m not saying that this applies to all bad situations, some just suck, but most are only bad because we let them be.
I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.
~Elwyn Brooks White
I don’t know what happened. I can’t sit down and pinpoint a single atomic moment. It was a process, imagine a set of watercolors being mixed by seismic activity. It would create a wonderfully bizarre melting of colors that you can’t begin to appreciate until you consider how it occurred. I’m finding that lately words lack the ability to describe the mixing of the watercolors in my life. There are so many aspects that are affected by this process it’s hard to isolate the affects on one another. Much less, how the watercolors were made from some plant dye and imported to my palette. How the paper was constructed and bleached. Then how all these elements were in the right place at the right time for the shifts in the earth’s crust to allow them to mix on a canvas making something randomly beautiful and perfect.
“I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream”
-Vincent van Gogh
I enjoy running, not just because I’m out in the world and exercising but because it’s one of my favorite forms of meditation. I get to Breathe that breath of life and listen to music that speeds my thoughts. The problem becomes catching all the thoughts as I run for they come quickly and deeply.
Recently you could say there have been a number of new experiences in my life. Each of them unique and adding a new depth to this wondrous existence I have been granted. It’s odd but I feel without many of my own experiences and readings of recent years, they not would be as significant. I know this is cryptic but some experiences speak to a person on such deep levels that it’s really impossible to convey all that is being experienced as it would require too much knowledge of that person. I’m still uncovering who I am, what chance do you have? Though there are certain aspects of life that I find universal and I’ve boiled down to more general statements that hopefully will mean something to you.
It’s not everyday when you get that wonderful rush of Fear. When the adrenaline pulses through the veins and your heart instantly hits overdrive giving your body all it can to hopefully meet whatever situation has evoked such a response. Though physical fear is a blessing, the fear I am more concerned about is a fear of decisions. A state where the mind is locked in a battle that does not elicit the same physical response to Fear. Fear of Decisions locks people into horrible jobs, worse relationships and lives filled with suffering.
What is it about life that allows the most random confluences of events to result in some of the most significant changes in people’s lives. Some people call it the “Butterfly Effect” or “Chaos Theory” which states that “a butterfly flapping it’s wings will cause a tornado on the other side of the world”. It’s the idea that the smallest simplest events can lead to huge events.
I just finished reading a comic series called “The Nightly News” by Jonathan Hickman. It was a thought provoking read that inspired through about societal norms and the generation of societal ideas and concepts mainly perpetuated by the news and government. The thing I found most interesting in it were the psychological ramifications of what was being said by the author and the main characters battle with himself and his belief system.