Hire Me!

The state of things in 2019

written by Mickey on 2019-01-04

And another year has passed – pretty quickly, if you ask me. Last year was the chance to close a bunch of construction sites and start new ones. Next to releasing two iOS apps that I have been working on for a while, I finally got the time to publish another book.

I'm currently working on a round of updates to my existing apps in the iOS AppStore, namely Surveillance Pro, OBD2 Expert, and Wellenreiter. With regard to closed source platforms, I'm pretty excited about what's likely to happen this year. In autumn, Apple will release a way to compile iOS apps to run on macOS – something, I have been waiting for since the introduction of the original iPad in 2010. While some folks are fearing doomsday for the macOS platform, I welcome this choice mainly for three reasons:

  1. Compared to AppKit, UIKit is a much more modern and convenient approach on a UI toolkit. As someone spoiled by writing apps with UIKit, I could never motivate myself to learn AppKit, since in many areas it feels like "going back" a bunch of steps.
  2. Having an app that feels slightly(!) out-of-the-place sounds better to me than having no app at all. I, for one, am willing to make the necessary changes to have my app look and feel good to a macOS user. That said, I hope Apple will take the chance to enhance UIKit where it is lacking to address the needs of "desktop" class computing.
  3. I believe macOS as a platform makes sense for about every 2nd app of mine. I'm hoping for widening the target audience with only a minimum of necessary code adaptation.

Time permitting, I also hope to continue working on my Retro Computing project "Retroplayer" this year.

With regard to open source hard- and software platforms, I'm still waiting for a couple of incarnations of Godot, i.e. Vala 1.0, the Neo900, or another open platform I can port the freesmartphone.org special interest middleware to. Let's see what purism and Golden Delicious Computing are releasing this year.

Happy new year!