There was a time, long ago, where this blog was about programming .NET things. I covered writing debuggers, profilers and other interesting things but now all that is so out of date it’s just not worth keeping around any more. I stopped because it just wasn’t exciting me any more, so I went off to write about games until I started to get bored of that as well. It’s amazing how quickly having a paying writing gig can turn you off a subject you love.
I’ve tried to rekindle that passion many times, but always I’ve hit the same old problems of motivation. The reason is, as I think I’ve now found out, that there just wasn’t a big enough chunk of “unknown” out there for me to delve into. I work with .NET every day and have a pretty good handle on enough of it so that I don’t have an urge to go and explore the nooks and crannies to find out what cool things are behind the next corner.
The iPad fascinates me for this exact reason. We are nowhere near to figuring out what having powerful devices like phones and tablets with us all the time means yet, and it’s exciting me in ways that are feeling very familiar. So it’s time to grab Xcode and learn Objective-C. It’s time to grab the iPad and iPhone and see what I can make them do.
One of the most exciting things for me is Airplay. The ability to get a second display onto a TV over Wifi has some really fascinating implications for games that might make Sony and Microsoft a little uncomfortable over the next few years.
A few bazillion GB of downloads later and I have the Stanford iOS 5 videos ready to go along with a bunch from WWDC last year. So far there’s been a lot of “Ohh, that’s really clever” moments about features and just as many “wouldn’t this be easier in a less mad language?” ones as well.
