Whew! I’m back home from Japan and settled back in. What an amazing trip that was! Before it becomes too much of a distant memory, I figured I’d write a wind-down blog post on it.

So late last year, I was invited by Natasha Murashev (Better known as @NatashaTheRobot) on recommendation of my colleague JP Simard, to come and present at a conference she was organizing in Japan for March of 2016. The conference, known as try! Swift was going to be a 3 day conference consisting of a stream of 25 minute talks, specializing in Swift, Apple’s new programming language but also including iOS development in general.

A trip to Japan (one of my favorite places), to hang out with iOS developers and talk about app development (one of my favourite things)? I couldn’t say ‘hell yes’ fast enough!  

Continue reading →

… that’s it? 2015 is over?

I’m not sure how good a sign that is, but I can’t believe how fast 2015 flew by. That was truly ludicrous.

I said last year that 2014 was a ‘maintenance year’ for me. A lot happened, but it felt like all the effort that went in simply maintained the status quo. Nothing really advanced. I could probably chalk that up to the fact that I had to spend a chunk of my time re-designing iComics for iOS 7, as well as shifting house several times.

No, if I had to describe 2015 in one word, I would say ‘transformative’. So much changed, SO MUCH CHANGED and it was an exhilarating and amazing time.

Some of my highlights of 2015 included:

Continue reading →

Hi everyone! I can’t believe 2015 is already nearly over! Jeez!

I thought I’d do a reeeeally quick update on where we’re at with iComics, and what the current goal is.

Continue reading →

At the start of October, Pokémon published a brief notice stating that Pokémon for iOS would be retired at the end of November. True to their word, at midnight of the 1st of December (around 4pm in my time zone yesterday), the server running Pokédex for iOS’s in-app content purchases was taken offline and the app itself disappeared from the App Store within the hour. There were no official news posts marking its passing, no tweets, no acknowledgements… it just went away.

Continue reading →

(This photo here is my birthday dinner with my parents, sister and grandmother. )

Whelp! There we go. I’m 29 now. The final year where I can say ‘I’m in my twenties’. Criminy. How frightening. Doesn’t time fly.

In any case, as I like to do every year, here’s a quick flashback of my previous year of existence. I like to do this just to reflect on what I spent my year doing, so I can better figure out what I’m going to do from here.

Hands-down, it’s been an absolutely ludicrous year; much more different, and much more transformative than I think I could have anticipated this time last year. So much has happened, so much has changed, and I’m really happy it turned out the way it did.

Continue reading →

Over the years, I’ve built up a pretty crazy list of features that I want to add to iComics. One feature on that list that’s been kicking around since pretty much day 1 has been the ability to crop page images.

Continue reading →