Things a-changing. There haven’t been new posts in a couple of years.
Some of you might have known all along that my passion for photography aside, I’ve been a software developer since the time my grandfather explained what variables were to me at age 6 or so using strawberry containers back in Palermo (Italy).
For those who didn’t… well yes, I liked strawberries but I found Grandpa’s chit chat far more fascinating than the fruit. My first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80. The specs on that thing were amazing… a Z-80 processor, 4K of ram… we’re talking supercomputer here LOL. That first sinclair was followed by a Spectrum and later a QL … a computer with Motorola’s 68000 series processor that cost FAR less than that OTHER computer with he 68000 processor – the Apple Macintosh.
The QL got me into assembly programming. If you don’t know what assembly programming is, it’s nutty stuff where you write lines upon lines of code just to get the computer to do the simplest things… with the side benefit of getting every last bit of power out of the device. I wrote all sorts of stuff on that QL… a Tetris Clone that I actually sold to a few people through a computer club, a triangle evaluator program for my father to use in order to calculate the surface area of irregularly shaped locations his asphalt business needed to quote, and a variety of other things.
Later I followed the rest of the world onto the x86 platform, which is what I’ve been programming for years. In C, C++, Pascal, Delphi and Visual Basic .net (Don’t laugh… it’s actually a very powerful language!). That’s part of what I still do in my day job.
I do less programming in my day job these days and the itch continues to need to be scratched. A few years back when PalmPilots were “a thing” I wrote and released a few apps for Palm. One I’m particularly proud of was WW Buddy… a digital calculator that emulated the formula used by the Weight Watchers slide calculator that Weight Watchers was providing members at the time. I reverse-engineered the formula behind the slide and wrote the app. Released it for free and a few months later was contacted by Weight Watchers’ attorneys with a request I take it down as they felt it violated their copyright (even though it didn’t even mention Weight Watchers). That was fun. I tried to get Weight Watchers to buy the app but no go there.
Palm died a few years ago, and with that my non-work programming hobby.
Until now. I’ve had a few ideas for apps I’d like to have on my iPhone for some time. I’ve grown tired of waiting for someone else to write them… so here we are.
A few days ago I started taking a Udacity course on Swift, Apple’s new programming language for the iPhone. I’m a noob again… at least in terms of this new (to me) platform. They suggest that the students keep notes on what they learn… so I figured why not make those notes public so that they might help someone else?
We’ll see how and if I keep this up. The idea is to document what I learn while I’m learning… and eventually I’d like the idea of documenting from start to finish everything I do to write, debug, release a couple of apps I want to put on the app store.
Let’s see how this goes!