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This is a First Test to blog from my New iPad. While it is for most users nothing but an Advanced Gaming Device with a nice touch, I see good use for it in my daily work. Already after a couple of days I do my news reading and tweeting preferably on the iPad. RSS Feeds are synched via my GoogleReader account by Feeddler. It integrates really well all those tasks in my daily rhythm, yet, I assume it can do much more. I plan to try sketching, GTD and note taking (especially for developing ideas) to do mainly on the iPad in the Next weeks. What I already dislike a lot is how hard it is to manage the iPad App store. Finding good apps is hard and expensive. Instead of having a trial period, you'll have to pay quite some squids to test drive apps. Often to find that the app is just not what I need. this truly has to improve if the iPad should once replace netbooks or laptops. And: tipping in english while the iPad is set to german is a pain.

For my business mailing list needs I started to use MailChimp. had to work with it a couple of years ago and decided to not roll my onw stuff. First struggle was to get my AddressBook (Thanks Apple, no CSV export) into a list there. Thanks for all spammers who made me click a couple of times that someone wants to get listed. Yes. Of course. By written request. Show ya. Now, next thing was to write an actual newsletter and send it through the service. Mailchimp offers a rather large number of templates. While I have enough html knowledge and experience to do an html newsletter my self, I decided to focus on contents and all the rest. Thus, one of the templates was fine for me this time. So, now content is written, campgain is set up... and I just have to dare to send... will keep you updated.

SnowLeopard introduced a new feature called Blocks. I know, I am lagging behind a bit, but my users still run 10.4 (some, few only), and mainly 10.5. So I had no real need to learn all the new stuff the first day I had a SL version running. Now I am playing around with all that. While I see its power in general, I see also many scenarios in modern apps that will make life hard when using blocks - or at least larger blocks. For example bcAdmin 2 uses CoreData quite a lot in the background. Many tasks that are computation intensive (finding bat calls) will regularly access a ManagedObjectContext. Haven't played around with it, but knowing of how fragile that gets when using threads manually, I fear some of my ideas will just not work out as I expect leaving my CD stack/context in a mess. :-(

My main occupation throughout the last quarter of 2009 was bcAdmin 2.0. While having some feedback by users, the main goal was not only to implement these feature requests but also make the under-workings more stable and expandable. While I think I managed to do that quite well, I also found man new problems after I thought all design and coding was more or less finished. For one thing, you not only learn when learning, but mainly learn when using the things you exercised before. Especially for CoreData I have to admit that one needs a couple of try/error cycles to get through to the inner workings. While I am now 90% content with what I have managed, still some minor things will be tweaked to bcAdmin 2.1 or so. Even more so, I have to admit, that SnowLeopard improved many things in that field. While I have to stick at least for now to 10.5 support, I would love to move on to support 10.6 only. Just for all the benefits in CoreData alone. Apart from re-doing all the inner workings I al

2009 zipped past, as did the last few years. Many things went well in 2009, I managed to check most topics on my to do list. As usually some things didn't work out in the end as planned. Nevertheless i am happy with the end results of 2009. So, for 2010 I already have a plateful of ideas and stuff that wants or has to be done. One thing is to not only keep this blog here going, but also to add a business blog. Will start softly with a RSS feed for my company site. I also have plans to release one major desktop app, at least one smaller desktop app and one iPhone app. Then, I will need to clone my self to keep those apps running, or pay someone else for doing that. We'll see. Happy 2010