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Archive for September, 2011

Personal Projects – Summer 2011

September 17th, 2011 joelhainley No comments
I’ve been doing a lot of work on personal projects recently. My first iPhone app is almost ready to go to Apple, I’m pretty excited about that. I have a list of  ideas for the next couple of apps for the phone that I want to work through in the next couple of months. The apps aren’t terribly complex but they do build on each other (new libraries, frameworks, etc) so I’ll probably shoot for an app a month for the rest of the year.
Next year I will dig into some bigger apps that I want to work on, by then I should be able in a pretty good space with iOS development. I’ll probably pick up an iPad sometime towards the end of the year and spend some time with it, then perhaps target some apps for it next year. All around should be good stuff.
I also have Android development on my hitlist for this year. I’ll probably work to port each of the iPhone apps that I’m writing to android. Hopefully the learning curve for Android will be similar to the iOS learning curve, I’ve really enjoyed my time with iOS development. I’ve done a ton of java development in my career, so I anticipate Android being pretty straightforward.
The Android developers I’ve talked to are really excited about the platform. I would also like to spend some time and understand about working with Android at the C/C++ layer this would allow for sharing core logic between the iOS and Android apps but I’m not going to shackle myself to that notion without having first spent some time with each of them.
In other news, I’ve almost finished freshening the UI of HamTesting.com, I’m pretty happy with the results. As part of this effort I built out a virtual machine that is a copy of the production server for hamtesting, including the database, so that I can do work on HT when I’m commuting. This has been a huge win for me and I’m looking forward to getting through the list of things that I’ve been wanting to do with HT for a couple of years now.
I’m not sure what the velocity on new features will be, some of them could take a fair amount of time to work through, but I would like to target having a regular release schedule for HT so that it doesn’t get neglected again. Some of the features are really important to the growth of HT so I want to be sure that they are getting done.
I’ve switched over to using git for all of my projects, I setup a server that has all of my source on it, gets backed up every day, etc. I’m really enjoying git so far, although I don’t do a lot of development with others so it’s hard to really appreciate/utilize some of the strongest selling points about git. However, the notion that I can initialize a git repository on a project and work on it locally for a couple of weeks, tracking change, etc. and then easily push it to a server when the project grows legs is just awesome.
I have been entertaining the idea of putting some of my older excursions into coding up on github for consumption by the masses. Though I doubt the masses will have much of an interest, I think it would be kinda cool to have some of the stuff available to a wider audience. Some of the things I’ve been considering posting:
- I wrote the beginnings of an SVG library for .Net, mostly for the creation and drawing of svg documents using .net objects, it was pretty interesting but I got distracted by work related things and the mood has passed me for the time being. – I also wrote a rails-esque PHP framework (i’m sure everyone has one of these), – I also have an older framework that I wrote in php that might be of interest to others.
- There is also the ASPForms codebase although I’m not sure I have that laying around anymore. (this was an orm before orms were so trendy, but it understood more than a current orm does)
- picprep which was a pretty fun little utility for processing images from the commandline in a batch sort of way.
- Album Foundry floating around somewhere which was the first time I wrote cross-platform binary file sorts of things. That was a fair amount of fun as well.
Anyways I’ll give it a bit more thought and if I decide to start posting things then as I have time I’ll create repositories on git-hub and start getting some of these things out there.

I’ve been doing a lot of work on personal projects recently. My first iPhone app is almost ready to go to Apple, I’m pretty excited about that. I have a list of  ideas for the next couple of apps for the phone that I want to work through in the next couple of months. The apps aren’t terribly complex but they do build on each other (new libraries, frameworks, etc) so I’ll probably shoot for an app a month for the rest of the year.

Next year I will dig into some bigger apps that I want to work on, by then I should be able in a pretty good space with iOS development. I’ll probably pick up an iPad sometime towards the end of the year and spend some time with it, then perhaps target some apps for it next year. All around should be good stuff.

I also have Android development on my hitlist for this year. I’ll probably work to port each of the iPhone apps that I’m writing to android. Hopefully the learning curve for Android will be similar to the iOS learning curve, I’ve really enjoyed my time with iOS development. I’ve done a ton of java development in my career, so I anticipate Android being pretty straightforward.

The Android developers I’ve talked to are really excited about the platform. I would also like to spend some time and understand about working with Android at the C/C++ layer this would allow for sharing core logic between the iOS and Android apps but I’m not going to shackle myself to that notion without having first spent some time with each of them.

In other news, I’ve almost finished freshening the UI of HamTesting.com, I’m pretty happy with the results. As part of this effort I built out a virtual machine that is a copy of the production server for hamtesting, including the database, so that I can do work on HT when I’m commuting. This has been a huge win for me and I’m looking forward to getting through the list of things that I’ve been wanting to do with HT for a couple of years now.

I’m not sure what the velocity on new features will be, some of them could take a fair amount of time to work through, but I would like to target having a regular release schedule for HT so that it doesn’t get neglected again. Some of the features are really important to the growth of HT so I want to be sure that they are getting done.

I’ve switched over to using git for all of my projects, I setup a server that has all of my source on it, gets backed up every day, etc. I’m really enjoying git so far, although I don’t do a lot of development with others so it’s hard to really appreciate/utilize some of the strongest selling points about git. However, the notion that I can initialize a git repository on a project and work on it locally for a couple of weeks, tracking change, etc. and then easily push it to a server when the project grows legs is just awesome.

I have been entertaining the idea of putting some of my older excursions into coding up on github for consumption by the masses. Though I doubt the masses will have much of an interest, I think it would be kinda cool to have some of the stuff available to a wider audience. Some of the things I’ve been considering posting:

  • I wrote the beginnings of an SVG library for .Net, mostly for the creation and drawing of svg documents using .net objects, it was pretty interesting but I got distracted by work related things and the mood has passed me for the time being.
  • I also wrote a rails-esque PHP framework (i’m sure everyone has one of these),
  • I also have an older framework that I wrote in php that might be of interest to others.
  • There is also the ASPForms codebase although I’m not sure I have that laying around anymore. (this was an orm before orms were so trendy, but it understood more than a current orm does)
  • picprep which was a pretty fun little utility for processing images from the commandline in a batch sort of way.
  • Album Foundry floating around somewhere which was the first time I wrote cross-platform binary file sorts of things. That was a fair amount of fun as well.

Anyways I’ll give it a bit more thought and if I decide to start posting things then as I have time I’ll create repositories on git-hub and start getting some of these things out there.

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