Compare these two pictures and tell me why on earth I’d buy from iBooks and not Amazon?

Here’s a tip, don’t try and sell an ebook for the same price I can pickup a physical copy of the book. $9.99 for an ebook is about the right price, $29.99 is not. As much of an Apple fan I am, and as much iTunes credit I have sitting there, I’m not going to spend 3x the amount just for the ‘Apple experience’. Besides I much prefer the Kindle (on iPhone & iPad) app over the iBook app, Apple pay attention to that too.

Unlike many university graduates who get an entry level job and then bounce around from one company to the next (because lets face it, company loyalty is for the most part a thing of the past), I was very lucky to have stumbled into my first real job whilst still studying. Having just finished my first year at university doing a double-degree, with no money, my parents rightly pressured me into finding a temporary job for the summer. So off I went, walking up and down a main shopping strip, giving my resume to pretty much every shop on both sides of the street. I got a phone call when I came home,  from a retail outlet who needed late night data entry work; as they were putting a new point of sale system into place. It was the perfect temporary work I needed, so I accepted and went to do a weekend of 6pm – 2am data entry. It was there where I met a man who would shape the next decade of my life and the first stage of my career. I joined AMC for summer work experience as a casual junior developer, and then changed the double-degree to a single degree while continuing to work part time at AMC until I graduated, then joined up fulltime. AMC and university was a great match, as I was learning how to do things the ‘proper way’ at uni, while learning how things were done ‘in the real world’ on the job.

Twelve years and ten months later (I’m still surprised at that length of time), I’m handing over the Software Development Manager’s role to my replacement, amidst the company being acquired and my long mentor, friend and former owner no-longer involved with the company. I had been looking to move on for the past year or so, as I was so very tired of dealing with barcodes, point of sales, stocktakes and all related things, and had even worked out a smooth exit strategy over 12 months, which included the slim slim hope that HawksBed Studios would make Dan and I millions and could spend our life writing whatever iOS apps we wanted. Of course that didn’t happen, but it did give me crucial iOS development experience and really solidified my desire to do it full time. As fate would have it I responded to an ad for a casual iOS developer only a month before AMC was turned up-side-down, putting me in contact with some great people. After the shit hit the fan, I quickly decided that I would not stay on at AMC with the new owner and started looking for full time iOS work.  I was then offered a full-time contract position with the awesome guys at Revolutionary Concepts and Collect3 that has the potential to take us all to amazing places. Working from home has huge advantages but presents new challenges and to get to the goal that’s in sight will require working harder than I have ever worked before. But no matter the outcome of what’s next, a huge chapter of my life is about to close and another is about to be written (here we go, bring on the cliches!).

Looking back over these thirteen years, there are so many significant tales, events and turning points that would probably be very therapeutic to write down, but a public blog just isn’t the place for these stories – perhaps if I ever need therapy my therapist would get a boring earful of it all. The short of it is, as they say (to keep being cliched about it), “There were good times and there were bad times”, but mostly it was just very good times. The calibre of people I’ve worked with, colleagues, clients and vendors has been amazing and the experiences and opportunities I’ve had have been varied with constant education on the way. I would ultimately like to say “So long AMC, and thanks for all the fish”, but in reality they never gave me any fish. Thus I’ll just say “So long AMC, and thanks”.

Firstly my full time job of the last 12 years is still keeping me busy, managing my small software team producing Windows and Windows Mobile software for the retail market. 12 years of working with barcode scanners. Still, I have been pushing the sales team towards these babies, because it would be immensely more fun writing software for a well designed platform, as opposed to Windows Mobile.

I know this because most of my after-hours time lately has been spent deep within XCode cooking up Cartoon Studio for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. We are currently in version 1.0 feature freeze and are a brewing up something that is hopefully full of spit, polish and shiney. Speaking of spit and polish, I have a post about just that over at HawksBed Studios. HawksBed studios is the company founded by myself and my good friend Bort (of Twitter and FARK fame). We make a good team since I can implement things, but have no ideas, while he can’t implement anything but is full of ideas. The first (of many) ideas is Cartoon Studio and we think that so far we’re on track for something exciting. Check us out and if you’re interested in joining our wider (but still private) beta release let us know.

Meanwhile, back in March, an old friend was resurrected: PCW Entertainment. When I first discovered them in 2001 they had a big impact on me. Sure, Professional Wrestling is not a legitimate competitive sport, it is theatre. But it is physical theatre and very much so. As I trained to be a referee, learning how to take bumps and flip around I found a great respect for all of these athletes and new found ability within myself that I could do anything I wanted to, if I wanted it badly enough (even become a local tag team champion being thrown off the top of the ringpost through a table and loving it; me, a geek who avoided all exercise at all costs). So when PCW announced their return I gladly got in touch and asked “what can I do?”. They’re a good bunch of people and if you’re like me and avoid the politics, never a drama. I was back doing commentary with the excellent Christopher Bayliss in March and had a great time. The next show is coming up on the 15th May – if you’re in Melbourne Australia, enjoy WWE or TNA and have never seen local independent pro wrestling – you’re missing out.

Finally, coming back to geeky stuff, I thought a small analysis of the sales figures for Photo Rotate over the last year would be interesting. Obviously such a small utility app was not going to let me retire, in-fact I would have been happy to have recovered the cost of the iPhone developer program. But as you can see it’s been some OK pocket money. What’s more interesting is that even with tiny daily sales, where the ‘sales spikes’ occur are pretty clear:

Click to make larger

Nothing surprising, but interesting. And on that note I need to stop writing and get back to doing what I’ve been doing most lately, putting spit and polish on Cartoon Studio.

So this post is being written on it with the wordpress app – really just because I can.

It really is the device I’ve been wanting for the last few years and it has completely lived up to the hype for me.

More Apple KoolAid down my hatch.

One of the quickest ways to find problems, is for the development enviroment to be moved from XP to Vista. So relunctantly, I am seting up a Vista Business virtual machine for this purpose.

I was quite suprised, however to discover that my Bed’s Printer Switcher application works perfectly in it. I was impressed to discover that OSX did this all for me – I don’t know if Vista does (it bloody well SHOULD), but if it doesn’t at least that will work without fiddling.

After turning to the Apple-Dark-Side they made it too easy. To not do a backup really required effort. Stick a USB drive in, turn on Time Machine… and you have a regular automatic backup procedure.

Of course I didn’t want to backup to USB drive. I have my and K’s stuff to backup, and an Ubuntu file server with a nice 400GB drive to hold the files (lets not discuss off-site backups, move along…). Now while Time Machine supports backing up to a network drive, they limit it to Apple’s own products, or a drive hosted by Mac OSX 10.5. Capitalistic goals aside, there is a very good reason for this. Apple added some extensions to AFP to safely handle network dropouts during the backup process. These extensions are required to safely protect your backups from becoming corrupted.

Now if you are pretty confident that your network isn’t going to drop out during a backup, you can configure Time Machine to allow an unsupported network drive, and backup to your SMB shared network drive. Easy. So thats what I did.

This has worked flawlessly with K’s iMac. My MacBookPro however, was more complicated. Because its a laptop, I often run on wireless when I’m downstairs in-front of the tv. When I go upstairs, I’ll plug in the Ethernet for optimal speed and turn off wireless. Of course I never paid attention to see if Time Machine was currently working when I did this. It was often running and every so often I would corrupt my backup sparseBundle and had to start all over again.

So I finally gave up on Time Machine for my laptop. I still wanted the automated backup however – but I don’t care about incremental backups, I’ve never (famous last words maybe…) wanted to go back to a previous version of a file. I just care that the current version is backed up in-case my drive dies.

This is where I love that the best computer UI is built on-top of the best OS core… unix. A simple installation of rsync on my Ubuntu file server, a simple shell script on my laptop (rsync is installed by default with Leopard) and I’m mirroring the folders I want. Then a simple configuration of my system to wake up at 3am and run my script and I’m automated. Too easy.

In other news I have moved abednarz.net from using joomla to using wordpress, as joomla was feature overkill. I have also decided to semi-retire my live journal, since I don’t use it that much anymore, my paid status is about to run out and most posts I do these days are of a technical musings nature. I’ve set up a wordpress cross poster and will still be checking my lj friend’s page.