Salut!
I didn't blog for quite a while, since – as I've mentioned before – these days, Facebook seems to me the more appropriate forum for shorter status messages.
That aside, let me recap how things are these days. Since the birth of Lara Marie, quite a lot in my life has changed. I haven't been contributing to any open source projects nor did I have time to continue my writing of articles and books. This leaves me being quite unsatisfied.
Business-wise, my iOS/Android-company had to struggle a bit in late 2012, since a lot of clients cancelled or postponed their app projects due to the unstable economy in europe. Thankfully we're now being more busy again, however I find myself being pretty annoyed with how our projects are being performed these days. Dealing with customers who try to squeeze more and more features into an app and loading you with change requests while at the same time insisting on the fixed price offer is extremly annoying. Plus the pure nature of many mini-projects we get (typically one or two person weeks) where the communication overhead results in us working twice the amount of time we actually get paid for.
Perhaps we need to be more strict and organize the workflow better. On the other hand, it rather looks like the mobile app market is dominated by so-called "full service design agencies" which then outsource the actual implementation to us, keeping us out of the actual decisions, but paying us only a minimal share of what they get.
In a world of HTML5 and cross-platform-tools ruining the prices, it also seems increasingly difficult to convey the benefits of a highly device-optimized native app.
With 30 years of experience in information technology (heck, I even received a Ph.D ;) – do I really still need to discuss about button placements and whether billing a bunch of additional hours is justified, when all I did was implementing "that trivial feature"?
After five years of iOS development, it might be the time for me to move to something new – or come back to old things. That's why I'm pondering about a combination of a sabbatical and a parental leave in 2014.