Here’s a good example of my Geek Cred.

I walked down to the cafeteria to get some lunch today and noticing the little banner out front I immediately think of the board game Caylus.

Had to have a medical procedure done today. Here’s how I look today

Saw this guy driving with the top down in a classic Porsche 356 Speedster. You can see there’s still snow on the bushes next to the building in the background.

I noticed that the version of WordPress I was using was pretty out of date. Before I could correct that I had to switch to using PHP 5.

All done.

Automatic cross-posting a link to my Twitter account is not working. Evidently it has not for several weeks. Oh well. Some more tech stuff to figure out…

Changed to use a secure twitter application. If this update posts a message toTwitter automatically, it worked.

Nope. Did not work. For now, I’m deleting the Twitter plugins on my WordPress Blog until I work this out.

We celebrated our 14th-year Wedding Anniversary having dinner at our favorite steak house on Valentine’s Day. And of course we had to pull out Carcassonne (the travel edition, because it has slightly smaller tiles) and played a game right there while eating our meal.

I lost, of course. But it doesn’t matter. We had a lot of fun and it was quite a memorable meal too.

At least 2 of the restaurant staff stopped over to ask questions about this interesting game we were playing.

It was also nice to get out. Melissa hasn’t been well for quite a while now and this was our first time out together for months. A good time and celebration indeed.

Melissa has an app installed on her iPhone that, after taking your portrait, uses aging algorithms to predict how you will look when you are much older.

Here’s my result.

I kinda like it. Though I think I’ll have a lot less hair.

I published a post to my board games Blog this evening.

A World Without String

I decided last Fall to take a crack at writing an App for the iPhone and iPad to be included in the App Store. Using my Laser Game published as a tutorial for Squeak as a starting point, I rewrote the App using Objective-C. The idea was to keep as much of the initial design and Smalltalk object models as possible.

Now I had seen Objective-C many years ago, 1993 I think it was, when I was investigating NeXT Step on Intel computers. And I knew it was a “cousin” to Smalltalk, having been launched by Brad Cox as an attempt to make Smalltalk-like programming on top of C. That may just be a poorly formed opinion of my own about Objective-C’s roots. I had not programmed in C since maybe the late ’80s.

So with a few books and tutorials on learning Objective-C in hand I dove in. At first, not unexpectedly, I was very frustrated with the tools and libraries because of a lack of familiarity. On the other hand, I can see why there’s developer loyalty about Objective-C. It is actually enjoyable coding once you get use to things.

Okay, long story short, I’ve published my App in June 2011 after many interruptions and typical other distractions — including being very busy at my regular Smalltalk professional work. After that initial hurdle of getting the first App finished and published, it’s been quite enjoyable to add new features and also polish up the code. As I’ve gotten smarter about coding in Objective-C I’ve been changing the implementation, refactoring and replacing code here and there.

Without any real attempt at marketing the App, I’ve had some success in sales. That was a real surprise. My purpose was to gain the experience of writing an App for the iPhone and iPad and to have something to point to as a “notch on my resume” for technical skills. It didn’t matter to me at all if the game sold. But I am delighted to see people have been downloading it and playing the game. In fact, what’s really cool is that people all over the world have downloaded and installed my Laser Game App. Apple makes publication of Apps worldwide very easy to do.

I just submitted Version 1.2 to Apple for approval. Considering the Fourth of July holiday I suspect it will be approved around mid-to-late-week coming up. The V1.2 update is a significant improvement over the previous designs. I feel like I’m just starting to get on a roll here.

The App has it’s own web page for news and support. I recently published some screenshots showing how the new release appears.

All in all, I really prefer working in Smalltalk and am much faster at developing there than in Objective-C. And that’s to be expected since I’ve been doing Object Oriented work with Smalltalk since the late ’80s. But I can say that developing for the iPhone and iPad with Objective-C is quite enjoyable and I hope to keep getting better. Also, it really is cool having my own App running on my iPhone and iPad.

More to come, I’m sure.

Someone wiser than me once said “People decide how you must feel about something by what you do, not what you say.”

This evening I was reflecting over a workshop I once participated in on work-place behaviors. It was one of those workshops where you wondered why someone actually has to tell you some of this stuff. As is often the case, personal behaviors and styles are the key in any relationship — personal ones and work-place ones. So we included personal topics.

We were asked the question “How does your husband or wife know you love them?”

The usual responses where people talked about remembering flowers on a birthday or chocolates on some other occasion were mentioned. I never much cared for these typical answers.

I raised my hand and said, “I make sure there’s fresh fruit in the refrigerator.”

Just read this evening that Google purchased Instantiations. Here is the Instantiations web site with an official report.

http://www.instantiations.com/

Wow. Of course I know the Instantiations folks really well, having worked with many of them for years and I congratulate them. I’m guessing that Google was mostly interested in their Java tools, but I have to wonder if they appreciate the Visual Age Smalltalk product that Instantiations also produces. That’s some formidable team and product line they purchased and I wish Eric and the rest great success going forward.

UPDATE: I have part of this wrong. Google purchased the Java tools. Instantiations will remain as a Smalltalk only company.