tigerbears

Hey everyone,

tigerbears.com is rising from the dead! Is it the Solanum virus? Did an asteroid pass too close to Earth? Are we in the Matrix with George Romero and Max Brooks at the helm?

No. But after working on Tallies for iPhone (and iPod Touch, natch) for the last several months, and with its imminent release, I wanted to update things here. I also have a few things to share about that development experience that I hope will be helpful to other developers.

I’ve taken the opportunity to update the About page. Just to save you a click, here’s the contents:

After a brief burst of activity in 2007, this blog fell into disuse. “There are many like it, but this one is mine.” 

Once upon a time, I was a primarily a front-end web developer. Javascript and Java, all day long. I spent about nine years as senior UI engineer at Netflix and quit in late 2006 to do the indie consultant thing. Unfortunately, after just a few weeks, I ran into a few medical snafus that slowed me down for over a year. (Don’t let your neck get screwed up, kids, because collecting MRIs sucks.) 

Now, nobody *really* likes the old lemons-into-lemonade spiel, but this is one case where it came true. It was a great opportunity to put things into perspective and look for a new path.

Apple provided that path by releasing the iPhone SDK in 2008. 

Not having a C or Objective-C background meant that I had some catching-up to do, but I have to say I haven’t been this excited about slinging code since my first forays into Java back in the day. (That was using the Cocoa-Java bridge, even … maybe on OSX 10.0 DR3? Later?) Learning Cocoa was something that has called to me for a long time (when it was NeXTStep, even) and I’m stoked to have finally taken the plunge.

Now that Tallies, my first public iPhone app, has been submitted to Apple, I hope to have a little more time to share some of these experiences. *cough*

Besides code, I’m into film, zombie fiction, and motorcycles. My bikes may be trapped in the garage for now, but your spirit never really leaves the racetrack.

Cheers,

Bill