I’m happy to let everyone know that I’m not dead, although you wouldn’t know it from all the dust on this blog. Do people even read blogs anymore? Well I guess I’ll find out soon enough.
The last few months have been filled with lots of exciting changes at work. Firstly, you’ll notice from the image above that I am no longer an evangelist. After 5 amazing years of travel and community-focused work I was really getting a strong itch to build things again. It also became increasingly frustrating not having more of an impact internally. It’s definitely tough leaving a team of so many amazingly talented people but we’ll still be collaborating on stuff. My new role is Lead Product Designer. Cool title but what does it mean?
It started last year when my comrade Tom Krcha moved to San Francisco and we began scheming about creating our own team where we could work on small, focused projects. We’re both highly motivated to build things that can have a real impact, even in small ways, on the daily work of creative people. We put together a proposal for this new team, codenamed Delta, and we eventually got the green light. We are now working heavily with the Behance team in New York alongside some amazingly creative people like Scott Belsky, Matias Corea, and Eric Snowden. The culture has much more of a start-up feel to it, which is definitely a welcome change.
We have already completed a Cocoa application for the Mac and are nearly done with our second. We will be able to share more about them, including demos, in a couple of weeks. Our primary technology focus will be on Cocoa for iOS and the Mac but we are also very interested in branching out into psychical devices, hardware, and other fringe areas.
Lots of people ask me whether or not I still do any Flash. The honest answer is no, since we have been so consumed with learning all we can about Cocoa. But I will be using Flash Pro to do some prototypes for different animations as it is so much easier than trying to do it in Xcode. I personally needed a to break from the web for a little while. JavaScript is getting more and more advanced, but I’m just not that interested in it at the moment.
Public speaking
After 5 years of doing it non-stop it is nice to take a break from it. But Tom and I are always up for doing stuff, so if you’re organizing a conference let us know. We can definitely drop some serious knowledge on moving to Cocoa development from Flash or JavaScript. I still think there should be a Flash reunion conference where everybody gets together and shares what they’re working on now. From the people I have continued to follow, it’s amazing how much cool and interesting stuff everyone is doing.
Personal projects
I definitely plan on blogging a lot more and getting back to video tutorials this year. Obviously most of it will be focused on Objective-C and application design but I’m open to exploring other areas as well. I am increasingly getting more in to real world hobbies like metal work and also steel frame construction techniques. The latter is because I eventually want to buy some land and build a small, eco-friendly vacation home completely off the grid.
The photo below shows my new office configuration. You can easily see the colliding worlds of physical and digital interests.
My first physical project is milling an 80% AR-15 lower receiver. What the hell is that you ask? Check out this YouTube video that explains all about the project. What could possibly go wrong? 