Eddy Blog

The Year 2011 is officially over, now that 2012 has arrived. The sky still looks the same and nothing drastic has actually happened. However, with a new year, it would certainly be a good time to start with a new and clean slate. I must say that 2011 was a very interesting year for me. It is a year filled with changes and recontacting.

On a professional front, I’ve been a Windows based programmer since 1998 and did dabble in Mac programming some time in 2001 with my first iMac (that Blue CRT All-in-One box) with Mac OS 9 and subsequently the transition to Mac OS X. I’ve developed one Mac app which did sell but did not quite pay the bills. The first Mac OS X version was awkward on the hardware at that time and I’ve soon abandoned the venture and went back to Windows which was where the bulk of computer users were. However, with the economic downturn over the last few years, I saw my sales for Windows apps falling and as such, I needed to tap on new opportunities.

In late 2010, I’ve read success stories about the Apple devices especially the iOS App Store and that Apple was coming out with the App Store for Mac, I thought I should get back in again. Almost about a year ago, I’ve got myself a Macbook Pro and started developing apps for the Mac. It was a difficult transition and although the App Store was good to customers, it was not friendly to developers because of the tons of rules on how your app should behave and of course the 30% cut which Apple requires was a little hefty to swallow in the beginning. I was desperate as I needed to make a living so I took the plunge. I wrote my first Mac app which was a reincarnation of the one I did way back in 2001 and it got accepted to the App Store in February 2011. From then on, I was on the roll and alongside the Windows apps, I developed 7 Mac Apps (some with Windows versions too) in 2011 alone using RealStudio. That was the same development tool I used way back in 2001 but certainly a lot have changed in the last 10 years.

It was a hard decision to take because I’ve lost touch of the Mac platform and certainly there was a lot I needed to learn but with determination and probably out of desperation, the decision became easier. Coming from Delphi Pascal language, RealStudio’s RealBasic was not hard to learn. I did consider using Xcode with Objective C but it was just too hard for me and if I went for that path, I would have wasted quite a lot of time just learning and not developing and selling.

On the online front, I had set up a blog several years back but I hardly posted to it, just did not have the time to do so and set up a twitter account in 2010 which I did not do anything about. However, I begin noticing businesses and people I know having twitter and Facebook accounts and I thought I should give it a go. I am slow but I supposed I need to adapt to changes in order to keep up with the times. After my trip in KK in November/December, I decided it was a good idea to restart blogging. I started with my recent travels and I am excited about it.

Twitter helped me contact with people I would not have normally met and I am certainly grateful to getting to know new friends from across the globe. As I get older, my memory is starting to fade and blogging definitely is a great way to keep my memories alive for me to review them in the years to come. It is also a reminder for me of what I’ve done and what I’ve achieve. Even if no one reads it, at least I have a reader – Me

I enjoy taking photos but I am in no way a professional or semi-professional photographer. I enjoy taking pictures of wildlife and when I look for a camera, I always go for one with the widest zoom. My old Panasonic Lumix LZ10 was in the verge of breaking down, I got a FujiFilm Finepix S3300 with a 26x optical zoom (24mm – 624mm) and have been taking pictures of almost every new place I visit.

2011 also saw me being more serious about my health and during my first check-up, I was told I had hypertension and was placed under medication. Other test for diabetes, thyroid and cholestrol shows up negative though. As of December, my blood pressure dropped and is now in the normal range with medication. I’m now taking walks in the morning as my form of exercise as I did not really want to do anything too drastic after reading about all those sudden deaths in Singapore.

2012 would certainly be an exciting year for me. For my apps, I am certainly looking to developing more cross-platform apps and do plan to make a move into mobile computing. I can see that tablets and smartphones would definitely be the thing of the future while the PC market stagnant. I am not going to abandon the Windows platform and would certainly continue to develop for it. Windows 8 would certainly be an exciting challenge when it is release in 2012.

In life, you need to take risk and make hard decisions but you certainly need to do so in order to grow and adapt to changes or risk being left behind.