After a false start last April, when my computer broke after I had spent a week going through the iPhone videos, I figured Fate was telling me I should focus on my "real" work, which is being an entrepreneur (or, if you ask my mother, being an unemployed bum). Well, I made a New Year's Resolution to wind down my startup if it didn't make significant traction by the end of the year. It didn't. And so, shortly after returning to Seattle after the new year, I picked up the iPhone SDK Development book by Bill Dudney, Marcel Molina, and Chris Adamson.
I can't recommend it enough. I don't have any Objective-C experience and it's a bit of a weird world to me. Just assigning and retrieving a variable took several hours for me to figure out. But Bill has a forum and the fact that he personally replied to my questions in a pleasant and attentive manner gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
I was short on time, though - after I had begun winding down my startup a major carrier decided they wanted to put our application on their deck, after all. On top of that, I was having problems making rent - subsisting on noodles with broth and 1/3 can of sardines per dinner wasn't cutting it - and so I had started doing some research with the computer science department at the University of Washington. The project required quite a bit of learning and I threw myself into it. But then the good folks at the payroll department started questioning why I was putting in so much overtime and I realized that the intense, pro-active attitude I had put into my startup was probably not sensible for a part-time staff position at a university.
I figured it was Fate talking to me again. We hadn't chatted much since our last conversation where my side was mostly a stream of expletives. I decided to re-prioritize and to focus more on iPhone development so here I am, putting up my first app, which I'll write about in my next post...
