Month: November 2008

iPhone is the Reason I Wish I Knew C++

I knew not knowing the good old traditional c/c++ language would come back and haunt me one day.

The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The going rate for iPhone developers, at least the developers I know and trust, is $125/hour and up. I have some friends who are booked out at $200/hour for the next few months, although $125/hour seems to be the going rate in my network. At that rate, a full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week and it may take four to six weeks for an application to be developed. Sometimes it will take less and sometimes it will take more. Add to development the other costs – project management, design, QA, and marketing, to name a few. It’s not uncommon to spend $30,000 and up on an iPhone development project. iPhone applications are not cheap.

In this particular case, money is not necessarily the thing I am after, it’s really the excitement and possibility of working on a product I love and use everyday…

Tough Questions

A typical conversation with Bryan, my three-year-old….

Me: Bryan, Look. It’s raining.
Bryan: Why is it raining?
Me: Because there’s too much water in the cloud. And when there’s too much water in the cloud, water drops fall and becomes rain.
Bryan: Why is there too much water in the cloud?
Me: Because water evaporates into the air and eventually end up in the cloud.
Bryan: What is “evaporate”?
Me: ….
Bryan: Why is water falling from the sky? Is there a big hole in the sky?
Me: …. Um, no.
Bryan: Is the sky hard (as opposed to soft)?
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I need to visit some science 101 sites for kids….

SVN Mania

Versions app

I’ve been meaning to set up Subversion for source control on my various projects. After having worked in an environment with tight source controls for almost half of a year, I’ve gotten used to the convenience and peace of mind of having a source control in place. So today I took the plunge and got svn to work with a SVN client, Versions, along with my favorite lightweight code editor Coda, on my MacBook Pro.

Life is good.

CitiMobile, CitiSuck

Firethorn released a pretty cool iPhone app today that allows mobile banking (check balances, transfer funds… etc). But Citibank is simply not ready for this roll out.

First the website on CitiMobile was buggy. Then I found out they don’t service the iPhone. I wonder how much longer I can take their crap before going with BoA or another tech savvy bank in terms of customer-facing applications…

Why am I still banking with them anyway?!

Update: Citibank has been rolling out incremental updates to the app. Unfortunately it still sucks and is not very intuitive when it comes to mobile UI. Some companies just don’t get it.

Chain Reaction

Insecurity breeds suspicion.

Suspicion leads to misunderstandings.

Misunderstandings bring out the worst in people.
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It’s as if we didn’t already have enough to worry about on daily basis to go the extra mile to be insecured about ourselves to be suspicious of others just so that we can misunderstand each other. C’est la vie.