Quarter Year Resolutions

I think New Year Resolutions put a little too much pressure on the resolver. Witness the hordes of people at the gym in January and February and then the inevitable drop off in March. It makes a lot more sense to avoid the societal pressures of the New Year and just set a few modest, tangible goals at a non-traditional time. Seeing incremental improvements can be tremendously motivating. Poco a poco as they say. OK, so here’s my very modest short-term goal:

Release a first version of Recipe Distiller for iOS in April.

After a couple of failed starts, I’m hoping that putting this down on (virtual) paper will serve as the swift kick in the pants I need to get this out the door.

I’m certainly not planning on being as ambitious as the iPhone app in a week guy but I’m hoping to steal his idea of blogging about the process of ramping up from zero. I hate buying books about specific technologies as these get outdated so quickly but I gave in to temptation and I am now armed with a copy of iPhone SDK Development and am ready to begin stumbling my way through it. Reading and going through code samples only takes me so far though. I generally learn better when I have a project more meaty and interesting than a simple Hello World to work on. Still, nothing like investing a little bit of cash to motivate you to start doing something (although I suppose the beer making kit sitting idle in the basement would say otherwise).

There’s also a half-working (ok maybe more like 20% done) version of a Windows Phone 7 client for Recipe Distiller waiting for me after this gets done. Part of me thinks it would have been better to go down the Appcelerator route to crank out these admittedly rather simplistic looking grocery list apps out the door as fast as possible but there is another part of me that thinks it is just more fun and interesting to dabble with languages that I don’t get to use in my day job.