Screaming Penguin

I forgot to mention it here, but a small app I have been working on for a few weekends is now in the market: BookWorm. BookWorm is an app that keeps track of books, those you have read (your collection), and those you want to read. (Props to my wife for the idea, this started as an app she wanted.)

So Bruce challenged us to write about this years' Java Posse Roundup. He specifically mentioned the future of computing session, and I admit, of the sessions I went to, this one evoked the most strong views, so I will start with this and work out.

First, one of the things that Bruce proffered that passed with almost no objection was the idea that the border between memory and storage would evaporate. This, I completely agree with, and I think will be the biggest deal in computing in my lifetime.

Ada Lovelace Day has come back around. This year I would like to draw your attention to someone who certainly had a big impact on my childhood and certainly the industry, if not Computer Science:

Roberta Williams along with her husband, founded Sierra Online, and was a primary designer and programmer on a number of now classic games, not the least of which was King's Querst, which might be Sierra's signature title.

These were the heady young days of the personal computer revolution. Ken and Roberta started producing games for the Apple II. Their frist game, "Mystery House" was a Christie-style murder mystery and was the first game to combine the play of a text adventure with graphics. It sold 11,000 copies and netted the couple a cool $300,000. While that might be a rounding error for the modern gaming industry, it was hugely successful for the time.

Roberta went on to create TWENTY EIGHT more games over the next 24 years and established Sierra as one of the leading game developers in the world. She also posed as the titlular character on the cover of "Mixed-Up Mother Goose", below.

Enjoy Costa Rica. If you want, you can forward your mail to me and I will Fed Ex it to you.

So I was one of the speakers at DevNexus 2010. DevNexus is a fairly large (respectively) Atlanta area tech conference that is organized by the folks at AJUG.

My presentation for this conference was about Android, basically a fast whirlwind tour of Android at the 101 level. I put a good deal of effort into trying to distill my 1:10, and the attendees seemed to really enjoy it. Everyone I spoke to said they liked it quite a lot (though I am sure it was too fast in some areas at times, it really was a very ambitious amount of ground to cover in that time frame, an error on my part).

The Prezi is here: Unlocking Android Development Prezi.