eburley.com

So, what the heck has been happening in my life:

• I’m still happily married, still have two kids
• I still work at Toolbox.com, still digging it
• I twitter a few times a day, and post here a few times a year.  that’s bad.  I should work on that.
• I have been getting back to working out two or four times a week, but haven’t been on a bike outdoors in way too long.
• I read In Defense of Food, a really interesting look into the ‘Wester Diet’ that I’m trying to follow.  Probably a blog post in its own right.
• I bought an iMac.
• I just signed up for the iPhone Dev program.

Yeah, those last three are pretty significant for me technically.  See I’ve been a windows programmer my whole career.  I’ve written CA-Clipper dbase apps, Win32 apps, MFC, Atl, console, .Net C# winforms, Asp.Net, etc.  I’ve dabbled in php and perl, but by and large, I’m a windows Dev.  So why the switch?

Here’s the thing:  When I come home, or when I get a call from my wife, I don’t want to worry about who clicked on what email in outlook, or surfed by a hacked site with drive by download code.  No thank you.  I’ve played with Apple hardware before, my dad has had them, and I’ve had the odd g5 or mac book pro on my desk at work from time to time, but never as a primary box, and certainly never to code on.

This Mac flies.  The simple tasks that should be simple, but aren’t in Windows, are simple on this.  All my usb stuff works, the backup utility (time machine) is actually fun to use, safari and Firefox work great, and Parallels emulation actually runs windows vista and my quicken install faster than my previous three year old Dell, and lets me code windows apps when I want to.  The Dell has been re-purposed as an edubuntu / ubuntu running a proxy/filtering/firewall solution, sitting in my daughters room.  It runs ubuntu a heck of a lot better than it ever ran windowsXPMCE.

So tonight I was working on an iPhone app that uses the built in accelerometer, but the iPhone simulator, while really useful in other respects, doesn’t support simulating the accelerator.  So I applied for the developer program.  Yes it’s 99 dollars, and yes, I probably won’t see a profit on the next great iPhone app (although given what sells, maybe my stupid ideas aren’t that terrible).  But I figure getting a bit of skin in the game will make me committed to actually developing something saleable, and at the worst, I’ll have a cost of doing business to use at tax time.