The I.T. Life

I was a little concerned about this at first, seeing Xcode in the app store for $4.99, however once I noticed that it is still free for registered developers I didn’t mind so much. This is actually a really great deal considering how much Visual Studio (the Microsoft equivalent) costs, and hopefully having it in the app store will encourage some more people to play around and learn to develop.

Whats this? A free gift from Apple? Well, even though its not a nice iPad, it is really nice to see some more free resources for developers; considering how expensive most technical books are even if these are watered down it is a nice touch.

Apple has released six developer guides for both iOS and Mac, and are available in the iBookstore. Topics include iOS Human Interface Guidelines, Object Oriented Programming With Objective-C, or Cocoa Fundamentals Guide. The other three titles are The Objective-C Programming Language, iOS Technology Overview, and finally iOS Application Programming Guide.

I once wanted to have an iOS app out this year; I bough my dev license and go ta few ideas going. However live because busy as usual and it never happened; these books will be a great help to hopefully get me to finish something.

Finally started working on my new portfolio, its WordPress based, and has a good bit of content in it migrated from the old site. It has a LONG way to go, but I think it will work out in the long run. The sad thing is I just spent my whole Saturday getting a head start on this new site, when I spend 5 days a week coding WordPress anyways.

Its hard to do a development blog, I’ve learn’t this. For a few reasons, mainly because anything really cool is protected behind NDA contracts, and also your so busy working on stuff, you don’t get a chance to talk about it. I keep a semi-up to date portfolio at http://jeffreyhann.com/portfolio.php but what isn’t up there yet is what I’m sharing with you now.
I’m working on a flash game at work. It will be release as a casual game, and its basically a puzzle game. It is very cool, there is nothing like it, and you will love it. But that’s all I can say.
I’m now the webmaster for Hal-Con (http://hal-con.com/), a local (re: Halifax) comic book and sci-fi convention that will be having its first year in the fall of 2010. I’ve set them up with a PHPBB forum and am working with them on getting a mailing list setup as well, other than that its small update, but still nice to do some volunteer work.
I’m also taking over the website for E2C, a huge orienteering challenge with both 8 and 24 hour courses. This is run by HRSAR, with lots of community support. To explain how tough this can be, the military runs it yearly. However anyone can do it, you choose the pace. Anyways, its a pretty basic site right now, but I’m gonna fix that, I’m thinking Drupal, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and updating there current payment system to PayPal (currently accepts checks by mail).
Thats about it for now

So, Instead of making you all wait for me to build a site based on this, here is a example spreadsheet of what the site will do, and also a working template for you to play with.

Template
Example

Whos with me here? Ever since my time at NSCC, they have pushed the “portfilio” concept. I have seen its use, and lack there of. Yes, a portfolio is a great idea, espically in IT, and web, where we can put all our stuff in one location to show to a potential employer or a contract. Company portfolios are extreemly powerfull, to be able to give a presentation to a client and quickly show what you have down. On the other side, as a IT worker, to beable to show what you have in a very slick way can be just as powerfull. Now, I have never been asked for a portfolio in a interview, however I have been asked for work examples. My idea is for a very quick way to do this. I want basically a purpose driven CMS. I want to develop a product that has a uber slick install like wordpress, has a great backend, has a very customizable front end. I want it to be Ajax driven, PHP/MySQL, I want to use a solid open soruce framework, and I want it to be popular. But will it be? If you had this, would you care? Would the kicker for you be that you have a very powerfull back end, and a front that is so customizable you can create a flash template instantly? or a flex site for that matter? I’d like to hear from some guys in the community right now, users, and developers. What do you want, what do you need? What can make this something that you want to use? So, whos with me?

I think I’m going to take the bit jump and convert my portfolio over to the zend framework. Its a excellent framework that should simplify alot of the tasks that I am doing already, and give me the flexability to expand it. The idea behind a framework is that most of the work will be done for you, you have a massive library of code behind you that you can tap into. It cuts down your overhead by giving you pre-written code. Also, moving to zend will mean I can convert the site to full OOP and MVC. The problem of course is though this will have many long term advantages, this will mean taking a project that is about 50% done, and sending it back to square one. This won’t be a really quick transformation, but I think it will be at the very least, a good experiement.

This one is going to have multiple phases. Phase one is to take a pre-existing odb2 application written in vb and port it to a C app for windows, than port it over to mac and linux. The second phase will be a command line application, based on the pre-existing framework to monitor speed via the obd2 port of your car, and based on predefined limits, sound a audible alarm when you exceed those limits. To kill the alarm you would simply hit the enter key, this would then prepare for the next alarm. There will also be a top speed, that will have no kill switch, and will continue to sound until you slow down. The last major phase of this will be building a device using a micro controller, a buzzer, and a physical button. It will plug into your odb2 port via a cable, and sit on the dash. This project has some initiative, just because it has some support from a friend of myne who already has a good idea how this will work. So, stand by!

Check out the SF project here.

I have a bunch of projects on the go, many in a beta stage, many more in a planing stage or design stage. These projects either get ignored, or just die and nothing ever happens. Nobody ever sees them, and they are not at a stage I would ever show a employer. Because of this, I decided to take my best 3 concepts (all web apps somehow) and put them on source forge. This will give me the motivation, and possible community support to get them done, and ready for anyone to use. This way, I can show I have been supporting open source software, and I have been persuing my own interesting in programming, and constantly growing. Hooray! Anyways, here are the links.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/easycatalog
https://sourceforge.net/projects/easybookmarks