iOS/Web Developer's Life in Beta

My life is pretty darned busy right now. Transitioning to a new job, travel for work, helping @dccp with her travel arrangements for her academic conferences, my own iOS projects, and my blog. Since the time I have available to work on my own coding experiments is limited to evenings and weekends. I’ve been recently attempting to focus on just one or two projects at a time, since for a while there I was coming up with at least 3 new prototypes per week.  Focusing on myDrumPad has really made it easy for me to give it the extra polish and attention it needs to take it to the next level. However, since I started participating in NaBloPoMo, the National Blog Posting Month, this has been consuming a great deal of my free time.

I enjoy writing about what it is I’m experimenting with, things I’ve learned in my iOS development, as well as other random tidbits that most people likely won’t care about. But writing about those activities have begun to overshadow the activities themselves. I don’t understand how prolific bloggers can balance their online writing, their businesses, as well as maintaining a happy family balance – perhaps they don’t?

I’m going to try to see NaBloPoMo through to the end, but what this is showing me is that either I put way too much effort into my blogging, or perhaps I don’t have as much free time as I formerly thought? Maybe it’s the fact that I got more done on the SkyTrain than I previously thought, and commuting in the car these past two weeks have taken more time of my day, but the progress on myDrumPad isn’t what I’d like to see.

How do other bloggers out there balance their blogging activities with their actual lives? Especially technical bloggers that write about iOS app development, web development, databases or scalability?

I’m a fairly decent web designer.  I’m not great by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m not really visually creative.  I tend to express my creativity in the apps I build, as well as in my writing.  So given the fact that I’m really proficient in CSS and HTML, I can make simple web applications look good if I don’t have the help of a designer.  That being said nothing replaces a great UI designer, who are worth their weight in gold!

But when it comes to my blog, I want it to look attractive without having to spend a ton of time on it.  I’ve given up on trying to write content management systems.  To me they’re a solved problem – maybe not solved particularly well, but it is to the point where I don’t feel I’d like to contribute anymore to the field – so tweaking my own website content by hand holds no interest to me.

But seriously, why do the available blog templates out there have to look so damned horrible?  Even the commercial blog templates for WordPress all seem to be lacking in some serious areas.  Is it really too much to ask that I can have an easy-to-read blog template that will adjust to the width of the browser that doesn’t have serious CSS problems on one browser or another?

Over the next few days I may be tweaking my blog’s template a bit, because I’m tired of the standard one-size-fits-none layout that most templates have.  I might even pay for a commercial template, if it means my blog doesn’t look like the sidebar of a print newspaper anymore.

I’ve been considering starting a new project recently, and have been torn: Should I create my project using Three20, or should I use UIKit directly?  I know Three20 is supposed to help by making applications easier to develop, but what does it really buy me as a developer?  In my experience, most of my time with Three20 has been spent working around its various quirks.  And from what I can tell from my recent research, it doesn’t seem so straight-forward to support Universal applications across iPhone and iPad devices.

The application I’m considering building needs to use a splitview controller, popover controllers, and all the standard UI metaphors from the iPad.  Those don’t seem to be Three20′s strong-suit.  Does anyone have any ideas on how to elegantly support Universal applications using Three20?

For the time being, I’m hoping to develop using Apple’s standard stack, perhaps even using Interface Builder to define my custom table cells and views.  My hope is that Xcode 4, once its released, will improve on Interface Builder’s integration with Xcode, making development with it less painful.

I really don’t like making tweaks to my blog itself, since I’d much rather be writing my blog posts themselves, or the software I talk about in my blog.  So any time I spend working on just the blog software’s configuration feels like wasted time.  But frankly, while I liked the simplicity of Blogger for all my previous entries, it was just getting on my nerves.

I didn’t like the editor interface, I didn’t like how difficult it was to tweak the HTML and theme settings, and frankly it was just too difficult to update.  And since I run my own server and manage my own websites on it, I figured to hell with it.  I’ve started migrating to WordPress (it saddens me that I’m not using Perl for my blog, but alas, I have no time to tweak anything).

So this is the first post to go onto the new blog.  No one will see it until I switch my domain over, but for the time being this is it.  I’ll set up some redirect rules later once I want to make things official.  I’m also not done changing themes or plugin settings, so I’m not happy with what I have now, but it’ll improve bit by bit over time.

I haven’t had anything resembling a blog in years, and while I have had quite a lot to say in the past, I felt as if no one would really care one way or the other. This impression has changed recently, since I’m once again working in an office environment, and my interactions with co-workers shows that I do have some bits of wisdom rattling around in my brain that’s worthwhile sharing.

To that end, instead of publishing on an Intranet wiki, in-office emails or, God forbid, a whiteboard, I figured I’d once more try blogging as an outlet. After all, I don’t think I could do a worse job than most of the other blogs out there covering a wide variety of topics (or, worse yet, no topic at all).

The only reason I’m posting this now is I’m waiting for my test server to finish its re-install. We’re going through our second test pass now, and sadly my changes I checked in yesterday at 4:30pm broke last night’s build. So today has been a hectic lost day, as we’ve been playing catch-up to fix the various bugs that have crept their way into the trunk.

When I have more time, I’ll add more here.