This is my personal blog. I hope to be as candid as possible here.
Writing a personal blog alongside my business is a good exercise. It'll help me analyse my progress, and hopefully provide you readers with insights into freelancing, development, and business. If you have any feedback, let me know in the comments, or shoot me an email.
Have you ever seen that in shopping centres when a new store is moving in where an old store used to be? I liked it, thought it was clever, and now I’ve used it!
So I’ve decided to shift to a different domain name, and have (again) re-skinned the blog. This time, I think I’ll stick with it. Maybe a few tweaks here and there. I also hope to blog a little more, and do a few guest posts around the place, which I’ll link to from here as well.
While I’m here, I might just tell you about an iPhone app I recently tried and love. It’s called Instapaper and it’s fantastic!
You’ve possibly already heard of it, but if you haven’t, I suggest you give it a try. I read quite a few different blog posts around the place, some from feeds in Google Reader, and some that people link to on Twitter. More often than not though, I’m not in a position to read a full article right at that moment, and this is where Instapaper comes in. What to do when I’m lining up to use the ATM, or sitting in a small room contemplating life? I could read those articles!
Instapaper provides a bookmark you can use to say “Read later”, and it’ll save the page (in a readable format) to your Instapaper account, which you can then open on the iPhone. The big bonus for me, is that it actually downloads the articles to your phone, so even if you have no connectivity you can still read them (assuming you sync while you still have a connection). Considering the coverage some of the networks local to my area have, this is a particularly awesome feature.
Keen to hear your thoughts, both on Instapaper, and the blog in general, so feel free to leave a comment.
It’s been about six months since I got my iPhone, so I figure it’s time to revise the must-have app list. I’m not going to list all the apps I have installed, just the ones I’d recommend to a new iPhone owner (Luke, I’m looking at you. Congrats!)
The list is as follows (prices are as of 13th March, 2009):
Currency (free)
DomainScout (free)
eBay Mobile (free) (official app this time!)
FTP On The Go ($12.99 AUD, stricken from the list… poor value for money)
Google Earth (free)
Google Mobile App (free)
iSSH ($5.99 AUD)
Koi Pond ($1.19 AUD) (ok, this one’s not really a must-have… but it’s relaxing)
Live Poker (free)
Midomi (free)
Ocarina ($1.19 AUD) (by Smule, they do really nicely made apps)
OzWeather ($2.49 AUD) (better for us Aussies than the Yahoo one, comes from BoM)
reMovem ($4.99 AUD) (I mainly bought this one for my wife…)
SnapTell (free) (like Midomi, but for books and DVD covers, etc.)
Tweetie ($3.99 AUD) (yes, Twitter is all the rage right now, so get this and follow @japh.)
You may (or maybe not, I guess) have heard of “The Best Job In The World” website? Well they’re down to finalists now! 50 finalists, the top 11 of which will be sent to Australia to continue the selection process.
As a follower of GeekBrief, I’d like to support Cali Lewis coming on over to Australia and briefing from our beautiful coast for a while! So if you could please send her a vote (at least one, but one each day would be nice!), that would be much appreciated.
I wrote my first tutorial for NETTUTS recently and it was published last night.
Title: Create a Slick Flickr Gallery with SimplePie Description: I’ve wanted to write a tutorial for quite some time now, and APIs have always been a particular interest of mine. So with my wife’s recent foray into photography, I decided a Flickr tutorial would be first cab off the rank! Using RSS, Flickr and jQuery all together was pretty fun too.
