Well, this week was busy even though in some ways I feel I got nothing done! The week started on Sunday as I had agreed to work on a client’s iPhone app. It had been developed by someone else but they wanted some new functionality added. I’d suggested a day should cover it but did mention that things could take longer, I’d need to see the code before I was sure. As it happened of course things did take longer and once I’d started over the initial day on it the client had more features I could add so I ended up spending two days on that one. Unfortunately even with those two days there wasn’t enough time to track down some annoying bugs so I ended up spending hours here and there trying to improve things and will likely spend more time on it next week.

Something else that happened on Monday was that a press release went out from Clear Digital about my new non-exec director post with them. I’ve obviously known about this for a while now so when I tweeted about it and got lots of congratulations back it was a really nice surprise. It’ll be interesting to see how things go with Clear Digital. I’ll be working with them to define the technical direction they should take on the various projects they do. I’ll also work to connect them with the developer community to help them find the best people for the job on those projects. Can’t really go into any of those projects right now but should be some interesting things to talk about in the future.

Tuesday was my second planned day working on another client’s map based property database, went pretty well, got through most bugs and they want me to allocate more time later in the month to finish the rest off.

I agreed to talk at the second Ignite Liverpool event on Thursday so spent Wednesday morning preparing my slides. The format of an Ignite presentation is fixed, you must have 20 slides that appear for 15 seconds at a time leading to an interesting experience for both the presenter and the audience! A (possibly defacto) tagline for Ignite is “Inspire us, just make it quick”, people also say that you’re supposed to talk about something which you’re passionate about. I couldn’t think of anything too inspirational though I did have a few quirky ideas. In the end time got the best of me and I ended up repackaging the Why I Track My Location and You Should Too talk that I gave at Where 2.0. Though I did cheat a little on timings at the end as the laptop we used for presentations couldn’t embed my videos, I feel I got the full experience of the strict timings. At times having to pause and wait for the next slide (“as you can.. will.. can… see!”), at other times running out of time and having to skip on. I feel it went well and as ever the video of my Weasley Clock seemed to impress people more than the rest of the presentation! Take a look at the review of the event on LDP Creative.

I finally got around to submitting another three revision apps to the app store. A2 Chemistry Unit 1, AS Biology Unit 2 and AS Chemistry Unit 2 will all be appearing once apple have reviewed them.

Friday morning I spent joining Nat Severs, aka Nomad’s Land on a walk from Liverpool to Crosby. He’s attempting to walk around the entire coastline of Britain for charity. He started around Portsmouth on the 10th of January and is now somewhere around Blackpool! He’s making great progress so I wish him luck for the rest of the trip and suggest you donate some money to his charities. Our walk took about 2.5 hours and seemed to cover around 7 miles. It was good to get out for a walk as I haven’t been out for about 6 months. It was a little tempting to join him all the way up to Southport but I had things to do and had to get home!

Rest of the time this week was spent on more odds and sods. I imagine next week will be similar, I’ve already had to reshuffle my calendar to take a look at my client’s buggy iPhone app on Monday. After that I really need to get my head down and make some progress on the other app. Need to get a parser complete before I can do anything pretty.