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’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.

Because of my friend Chris Simmons, I’m going to try my hand at NaBloPoMo, the National Blog Posting Month. As if people didn’t write enough drivel on the Internet when they have something substantial to say, people are encouraged to blog even more with nothing at all to motivate them.

Okay…I’ll bite. I’ve been meaning to be more consistent in my blogging lately anyway. So starting today, I’m going to attempt to blog every day for the duration of this month. After all, I was somewhat upset over the fact that I didn’t have time to participate In NaNoWriMo yet again this year. So if I can limit myself to a blog post per day, perhaps next year I can finally get myself to the point that I can finish a draft of that SciFi novel vie been meaning to write for years.

After all, there’s more to life than iPhone and iPad programming…there’s also boobs, space ships and fictional technology!