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Happy 2013!

December 31, 2012 •

Holy smokes! We’re on the last day of 2012 already! Blimey that was fast!! O_O

I hope everyone had a fulfilling 2012; one not of regret but one of good times, and sharing them with friends and family.

As always, I like to make a quick note of my personal achievements throughout the year, just as a bit of reflection on how I spent the year.

  • Signed a mortgage and bought an apartment (Holy crap!!)
  • Attended GDC in San Francisio, during March this year as an official rep of UberGames. XD (Still going to write a blog about this!)
  • Shook hands with a person from the Pokémon company and had a little chat about iPokédex (More on that later. Maybe.)
  • Attended talks at GDC by game dev veteran people like Notch and Tim Schafer. (Yeah, not much to say about this. It was beyond epic)
  • Got offered a job at an amazing company in Japan (More on that later. Maybe. 🙂 )
  • Was one of 1500 developers to attend the Apple WWDC and witness the unveiling of iOS 6 and the Retina MacBook Pro firsthand. (Shiny. Sooo shiny.)
  • Attended Perth’s first Startup Weekend and built a shippable product in under 48 hours. (Oh god. The pressure. XD)
  • After 11 months of development, I shipped version 1.0 of iComics on the iOS App Store. (Feels really good. Trust me. 🙂 )
  • Presented a talk on HiDPI web page practices at (what is most likely) the final AUC /dev/world/ conference. (Video coming to my YouTube soon! 🙂 )
  • Spent the entire year researching web technologies and started putting to good use on a new iteration of the UberGames site (Coming VERY soon)

I like to treat each year as one of personal growth, and try my best to best what I did in the previous year with each one. Some absolutely amazing stuff happened this year, and I think I definitely outdid 2011. 😀

As always, I’ve got a pile of goals I want to strive for in 2013.

  • Lose weight. Like seriously. I gained like 4kg in the silly season this year. >_< Thankfully, thanks to the nutritional research I did this year, and certain changes that may be happening next year, this may be possible.
  • Learn more about corporate development practices. As someone who is mainly self taught in programming, hearing all these mysterious things like ‘agile development’ and ‘unit testing’ this year has made me realise I should learn more about development logistics.
  • Learn more about low-level coding. I’d love to learn more about how various CPU architectures works on their native level.
  • Start a new games project. This has been in the works since like 2007. We gotta start this thing. Seriously. XD
  • Make iComics the #1 DRM-free comic reader on  the App Store. This WILL be hard. But I am determined. 🙂

As always. I hope everyone else had an amazing 2012 and have great plans for 2013. Happy holidays everyone!

Happy 2013! 😀

26. ಠ_ಠ

December 10, 2012 •

Me at 26. XDIt’s been a week or two ago now, but I thought I’d do my obligatory birthday post.

I like to do birthday posts every year. Advancing in age is one of the best excuses you get to party, and I always cherish the times I spend with my friends and family during this time. I was considering doing a reflection on all the crazy crap that happened this year, but I’ll save that for new year’s eve.

So. Roughly this time last year, I turned 25. Criminey. Turning a quarter of a century old was scary enough, now I’m more than a quarter of a century. They say that 27 is when all the crazy crap actually happens, so I’m going to leave that for now. XD

As always, it was an awesome weekend. For the outing with my buddies, we tried out a cool restaurant in the southern area of Perth called Tsunami (The irony of that name right now isn’t lost on me. ^_^; )

Tsunami was a rather interesting place. As you’d expect they had a wide range of Japanese dishes, but there were some interesting flairs about them. For example, the sashimi we ordered came with stone blocks heated to 400C for which you could cook the fish on (Which I’m guessing is for the less adventurous when it comes to eating raw fish XD). Either way, the food was amazing, and I’d definitely want to go back there again. 🙂

After dinner, we all went back to my house for cake and ice cream. Overall a very nice evening. ^_^

On the following day, I had lunch with my parents and my grandmother at a restaurant near our house. Dad’s gift to me was some kind of sponsored merch from work, which he called a ‘care package’. I’m pretty sure he was given that merch against his will. XD

Anyway, as far as birthdays go, I couldn’t ask for more. I’m so glad I have so many friends and family I can spend the day with.

Now I just gotta make 26 as awesome as 25 was. XD

iPokédex. Now one year.

July 15, 2012 •

Hey everyone.

I almost missed this, but thankfully I was somehow reminded of it last Friday.

As of the instant this blog post was published, iPokédex has officially been offline for precisely a year now. Wow. That was fast.

I thought I’d just quickly say, thanks again for all of the support everyone has given me. It was thanks to all of this kind feedback that made me think it was something worth pursuing.
(Also, even though it’s taken down, please stop asking for an Android version! XD)

I can’t really say anything for certain right now, but thanks to my trip to GDC earlier this year, iPokédex making a comeback isn’t fully off the table at this point. And as such, I haven’t given up. 🙂

However, there’s nothing I can do about it in the immediate present, so right now, I’m continuing my work with iComics. 🙂

In any case, fingers are still crossed! Don’t give up hope! 🙂

Making a Facebook Page

July 1, 2012 •

Well… a few days ago, after deliberating on it back and forth for a VERY long time, I finally decided to take the plunge and make a public Facebook page for myself. 😀

http://www.facebook.com/timoliver.au

I’d been basically avoiding doing this for several years since I really couldn’t think of a reason of why it wouldn’t be the apex of gratuitous self-wankery (especially back in the ye olde days when they were called ‘fan pages’). XD But given some recent stuff I inadvertently did on my private Facebook, and after asking a few buddies, it finally seemed like it might be a good idea.

Basically, when it comes to maintaining a personal brand on the internet, I don’t really consider private Facebook accounts to be a part of that. I treat mine mainly as a place where I can casually converse with my day-to-day mates, keep in touch with new/old colleagues, and (most importantly), keep track of events happening in my neck of the woods.

A week or so back, hoping to get some more feedback on my iComics icon, I started posting iterations of it on my Facebook account. Well… although a lot of my friends very kindly offered their opinions (And we totally nutted out an AWESOME icon! 😀 ), I couldn’t help but feel I was spamming my account with things that the majority of people I’m friends with on Facebook PROBABLY didn’t care too much about. The breaking point was when I looked at the front face of my account and it was NOTHING but iComics posts. ^_^;

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WWDC 2012 – The Keynote

June 27, 2012 •

In the queueIf you’re going to go to WWDC, there’s one tradition you must partake in above all else. And that’s the attending the opening keynote!

Since I’d never been to WWDC before, I went around and asked some of the veterans what time they thought would be best to start lining up for the keynote. Several recommended 5:00am, others recommended 3:30am and a certain sexy Apple engineer wearing a pink shirt even recommended 11:30pm the night before!

Since I knew waiting in a line from 11:30 would absolutely destroy me, and I didn’t want to risk missing out by going at 5 (given how fast the tickets went!), I decided to join the 3:30 contingent. So after a rather brief sleep, we all woke up at 3:30, met in the lobby and headed down to Moscone West to line up!

Blimey was the line already long! Already, the line had gone from the entrance, down the width of the block and around the corner. By 5:00, it had already continued down the entire length of the block and around the corner. By the time we were actually let into the building, it had already wrapped around the entire block, and the back of the line was right next to the entrance!

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WWDC 2012 – The Golden Tickets

June 21, 2012 •

Whew boy! What a week! I totally meant to write this before I went, but time as always, was a fleeting illusion. XD

Since it’s too much to cover in one post (And I’m writing this before work), I’m going to cover my trip to this year’s WWDC, including how I got in, the whole keynote experience, and then reflections of the conference itself. 🙂

Right after my trip to GDC, I received word that the AUC was opening up scholarship applications for staff and students of Australian universities to attend Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. Aside from the pool of competitive scholarships, as luck would have it, this year my university had been allocated a scholarship for them to select one staff member for the trip. ^_^

Not wasting anytime, I sent off two applications; one for the competitive scholarships and one for my university’s allocated one. I was initially disheartened when I received word that I hadn’t made the cut for any of the competitive scholarships, but then I was thrilled to receive a phone call from my university’s AUC coordinator saying that I’d been selected for the allocated staff scholarship! ^_^

Now, given the way that Apple decided to roll with the selling of the WWDC tickets this year, simply getting a scholarship did not guarantee we’d all get to go. In the past, Apple simply allocated the tickets to AUC which were then forwarded onto the scholarship winners, but since this year, tickets were digitally tied to the Apple ID they were purchased with, that meant we’d have to see about securing our own tickets when they opened. And given last year the tickets sold out in less than 12 hours, it’s fair to say none of us knew what was coming. XD

When the ticket sales opened, I had JUST sat down in a cinema to watch The Avengers. Thankfully, one of my co-workers had noticed the sales had opened and sent me an SMS to tell me. Not wasting a second, I bought my ticket on my iPhone, in the middle of the cinema, right in the middle of the movie. By the time the movie ended, the WWDC tickets were sold out. So in hindsight, I’m VERY glad I didn’t wait until after the movie to sign up, and I’m pretty sure I owe that ticket to my co-worker.

But… sadly, as a result of that extremely small window, a LOT of the scholarship winners ended up missing out. And in addition to that, one new condition of buying a ticket that wasn’t really made clear before ticket sales opened up was that not only did you need a valid Apple ID, but it had to be an active developer account (eg, currently on the $99 subscription), which tripped up even a few more applicants.

So while I was extremely happy to have managed to secure a ticket to WWDC, it felt rather bittersweet seeing a lot of my buddies miss out at the same time. It was absolutely crazy how fast the tickets sold out this time around and I’m extremely scared to think about what it will be like next year.

Either way, right there I knew WWDC was going to be way more hardcore than GDC. Even getting your foot in the door requires you to be quick, and on the ball. XD