Inspiration

I missed this, and I hate that I did, but UX team of One was a panel that was, by all accounts, amazing. One designer said it was the best panel he'd seen in 3 years at SXSW. Dang. Here are the slides:

UX Team of One @ SXSW 2009

View more presentations from Leah Buley.

Well, I'm an idiot

It wasn't enough to contemplate my own silliness in Austin after seeing "We Live In Public" (which is awesome). Instead, I was reminded TWICE today that sometimes I go too fast and trip over my own feet.

Apple approved me damn near a month ago. The message got lost in my .mac mailbox, apparently. Rookie mistake.

I also made an idiotic error on TUAW. I wrote something from 2007 as though it happened yesterday -- although it DID sound familiar. But I didn't triple-check my work. Doh.

So now that I'm back it's back to work.

iPhone OS 3.0 -- not that Apple will approve me in the program

So it's been a month since Apple took my money. $99 for a guy with 2 kids and now just one job is actually a bit of a pain. Especially when I lost that gig and have to pay for a bunch of my SXSW expenses... So I've got some really cool apps in the pipe, but I can't do jack until Apple approves me in the developer program "for real." Which they have yet to do.

This is a common refrain, sadly. I'm curious as to what the approval process means. Is there some special vetting? Do they check my credit? Do they track to see if I've read all the documentation or a certain percentage? Do they do a Google search on my name? If so, posting stuff about the App Store approval process being "broken" might not help my cause... But that'd also be a form of censorship on their part. Not that I'd put Apple past it.

Next book: Beginning iPhone Development

So I finished iPhone in Action and wrote my review for TUAW. I liked the book, but the structured, formal approach had me lost at one point, and without a teacher to ask questions, I had to quickly punt and slog through the rest. Things started to coalesce, but sadly one part had me stumped...

Then I started reading Beginning iPhone Development. Maybe it's the writing style, or maybe it's the radically different structure, but I'm liking it much more than iPhone in Action... and both are better (for me) than Erica's Cookbook.

Like I said in my review, it's hard to really "review" these books, as what works for me might not work for you. But so far I'm making great progress. Now if only I could craft SQL statements without crying...