5 Years ago today, I got this fun little message in my mailbox: Dear Mike Smithwick   The status for the following application has changed to Ready for Sale.   Application Name: Distant Suns Application Version Number: 1.0 Application SKU: 2001   I sold 8 copies that first day. It’s been a fun ride, most of the time. At the start it was pretty easy, in spite of the Appstore crossing the boundary into the unknown land of more than 10,000...

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...

Now it can be told. We here at Distant Suns World Headquarters for Intergalactic Mischief can now proudly announce the release of Distant Suns for both the Barnes & Noble NOOK Color and the NOOK Tablet, as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It has many of the  fine features of Distant Suns for iOS, such as: Displays the evening’s sky with over 130,000 stars Change the date and time to show the sky of the past or future, like having a...