Of the Longevity of Mobile Apps

This is on open response to the article "Why no one uses your mobile app any more?" by Hunter Walk, an "in"-fluencer on linkedin.com.

Progress Report #2

This post is slightly later than anticipated - for those of you who are interested, my cross-platform Java project that started at the beginning of February went very well.

Progress Report #1

From the 3rd Feruary 2014, I became  a free-lance software developer, by means of redundancy (you can read more about that here).  I set myself a task and since then have been nose to the grind-stone towards it's completion.
So I'm a week and a half in.. what have I achieved so far?

A New Chapter

By the time this post bounces it's merry way into the lives of the bots that regularly ping this blog (that try to entice me away to sites-a-foreign to purchase anything from Viagra to Ugg boots from a guy named Vlad), I will have become (officially) a Free Agent in the world or professional software development.  This was not of my choosing; 4 years on one project taking it from conceptualisation to full-blown application suite, with all the pain in between, means I am sad to part company with what I can only refer to as "my" product.
Still with the warm memories of working with possibly the best Dev Team I have had the fortune to Lead and be a part of, I now need to look forward as our paths diverge; I hope to work with you again some day, should the stars align in our favour.

Until then, while I search for something new I have set my self a challenge; a pet project if you will, to supersede any others I may have mentioned before now (not that I actually managed to start them)...

64-bit Installer Issues

Recently, I encountered a problem where my 64-bit Windows Service installers were failing to correctly install (failing to install at all, to be fair..).  After a little digging around I found a post that detailed that, despite correct configuration Visual Studio builds the MSI incorrectly, causing execution to fail.

The Future of User Input (aka Gesture Is Dead)

I travel a lot for my job. Occasionally I find myself travelling with Sayyed Shah; friend, fellow developer and long time co-worker since day 1 at Neutrino, in his kindness as he gives me a lift most of the way home.
On one such journey, our conversation drifted to that of User Input and as such serves as catalyst for this post, Sayyed deserving as much credit for eliciting the thoughts from my head for this article as me.

User Physics and the Quest for Perfect Software

This post was inspired by the words of Bob Schukai (Twitter @iammobilebob) when I attended the AppsWorld event in Earls Court, 2012 and he spoke of measuring your Users actions to determine the hot and cold spots of your software (among other things - I had hoped to share in greater detail my thoughts on his session but alas the audio recordings never seemed to materialise from the event organizers).
It's been a little while since then (though it may be longer still before I publish this.. who knows how long it will take to write) but I still keep finding myself considering what was said both when using and writing software.

Thoughts on BI: Data vs. Information

During my twitter support for NeutrinoBI at the Gartner conference in London the other week (remote support that is), I found myself in the position of commenting on a post that I didn't entirely agree with.

Thoughts on Philosophy-based Design

I read an article this morning offering an alternative way for object design it can be found here:

http://www.devx.com/dotnet/Article/47368/0/page/1

The following are my thoughts on it.

Cloud Computing: IT Vapor-trail or [guttering] Pipe-dream?

I was watching the GadgetShow the other week, with Jason Bradburys "Up-coming Tech Top 5", two of which boiled down to what I see as the extremes of cloud computing aimed at the consumer market; IPTV (being the lightest of the two) and remote hosted gaming hardware.