you want to start something?

Somewhat inspired by Ian Robinson’s declaration of his 5 year plan. I can’t really separate things like Home/Work (which is probably a bad thing) but here’s some things I hope for:

• learn to program. Seriously. Find a mentor who has infinite time and patience. Learn some cocoa and get something out there so someone other than me will run some code that I’ve written.
• lose weight and keep it off. I used to be a lean, mean fighting machine but I’ve definitely gotten a little fuzzy around the edges. But now getting to age where I feel like I’ll have to be careful.
• take up photography. Properly. By watching the blogs and tweets of others, I know what I’m meant to be looking for but the step of getting into Aperture/Lightroom and working with HDR and the other acronyms seems like a big step.
• convert the garage, the basement and the attic. Maybe not me personally. But get them all done. And plan the extension. Yes. And keep one of them for my geek crap.
• retire. Not seriously. But wouldn’t it be nice…

So, go on. Make it a meme.

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Image credited to Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s seminal work, Watchmen.

Wikipedia says:

Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award, and is also the only graphic novel to appear on Time’s 2005 list of “the 100 best English-language novels”, an annual feature of the magazine since it was founded in 1923.

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PocketGamer writes:

It’s an open secret that Vivendi Games Mobile isn’t long for this world, at least in its current form. Newly-merged parent company Activision Blizzard recently described it as a “non-strategic business unit” after all.
…
With Activision Blizzard now the world’s largest games publisher, it’s hardly a resounding vote of confidence in mobile that it sees no need to have an in-house mobile division. Vivendi Games Mobile has recently seen big success with its Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D game for iPhone.

Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D was really successful but you have to ask what is success for a mobile game?

Desktop games these days are built with a huge budget and command huge profits. A mobile game would, in theory, be built with a smaller budget and due to the lower prices command much lower profits.

Is the mobile division unprofitable or just not profitable enough?

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…and fancy demoing to four universities in Northern Ireland?

The dates are from the 3rd to the 12th of September.

We’ve got a couple of cool things, in the areas of 3D visualisation, biological monitoring and games but we could do with a few more. The idea is to demo technology and science to kids who are currently doing their A-Levels. Whether you work in hardware or software, you must have something cool to show off.

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Ian Landsman tweeted:

I have a feeling many business iphone apps my come full circle back to just iphone optimized web apps.

My reply:

The USEFUL data is either in the cloud or being collected and SENT to the cloud.

This is why apps like Google Docs are not going away. They’ll morph and change and become even more capable and sophisticated but in essence, the cloud is where the storage, the processing and the real bandwidth is.

Look at some of the cornerstone Web 2.0 apps. Youtube for instance is a player which relies on a powerful automated postproduction workflow. Docs is a lightweight web client for some powerful processing behind the scenes. More and more we need to keep our data safe and as can be seen recently, data on devices is non-secure. Keep your data locked up. Keep records so you can revoke access. And increase bandwidth and coverage to mobile devices so that there’s less need for aggressive caching.

And don’t design crap UIs

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