I am always looking for tips on how to make DS a package people may want to use even if there is no astronomical event coming up or if the nights are cloudy for example. I was thinking if there was any possible link to anything that is catchy: music, potato chips, movies, books, and of course software. With just relatively dull tools such as MS Word, or Excel, this is not necessary as these are task driven and not emotionally driven. But the...

Oftimes those of the computer nerd persuasion like to talk about how they got hooked by these “thinking machines.” The “kids” may talk about their first Macbook Pro. Senior kids will poo-poo that and mention their Gateway 2000, Mac LC or even the Apple IIGS. Othermore grizzled veterans will shake their collective heads and whisper “amateurs” followed boasting about their Woz-signed Apple II, Commodore 64 (The Coleco Adam guys just slip quietly...

When we released Distant Suns on the Kindle over a year ago, one of my hopes was that it would be selected as Amazon’s Free App of the Day. And suddenly a couple of months ago I was contacted by Amazon and told that they wanted precisely that and to expect between 75K to 100K downloads! In theory it would generate thousands of new users who would hopefully show their friends Distant Suns and inspire future purchases later on. After...

“Green buttons?” you say? Eh? I was working on my own product, Distant Suns for Windows, and thought it would be cool to have some green, retro-type of buttons instead of the usual ugly Windows controls. So I spent about a day crafting some little green buttons only to realize that in the time spent making one window slightly cooler, I could have spent adding a real new feature or squash some real bugs. In other words: I wasted time doing cool...

I think about George at least once a week. George was a teacher. My advanced FORTRAN instructor from about <redacted> years ago to be precise. The reason why I think about this bearded, bespectacled aerospace engineer moonlighting as a community college instructor is that he taught me one of the most important lessons I ever learned in the process of becoming a full fledged software engineer. I had realized that my hopeful career in...

Last week I had the pleasure of attending version 1.0 of a new kind of iOS developer’s conference, Renaissance: The Art and Science of Apps. Billed as “the iOS app maker’s conference,” it spanned three days from Monday to Wednesday at the University of California, San Francisco. What made Renaissance so special is that it combined engineering (of course) with artistry and the business of being an app maker. We knew this was going to be...