This past February we went to Disneyland and stressed out the iPhones to check line lengths and text when we split up because the girls wanted to go on different rides. Typically around 2:00 PM my phone would dip below 20% and my wife’s would hit it a little later. The first day we just stayed together, but eventually a 5-year-old and 10-year-old run out of rides they can agree on. So the next day we said we’d take an afternoon break and go to the car to recharge our phones. It just so happened that we were apart and my phone was fading fast it was time for the break. We had some tense moments relaying where we were, where we were going, and I had a 5-year-old who was melting down to top it off.

So for our April trip to see The Mouse, I bought us a pair of New Trent External Batteries. Two because I figured we should have a backup even if we are split up, and to keep in each of our cars as emergency phone power. I decided on this model because it seemed to hold a good charge and the pair wouldn’t be too expensive ($45 ea.). The unit is a about the same thickness as an iPhone and a little wider. Not really small enough to fit in the same pants pocket as the phone, but easy enough in the same jacket pocket.

How did they work? Great! It was so nice to be able to not stress about the battery getting low, I just plugged in the iPhone and got a full-recharge. The device holds 2-3 phone recharges and I was even able to give a charge to someone while we were in line for Space Mountain. Since the trip, I’ve used the device several times when I’ve forgotten to charge my phone.  I’m not sure what more you could ask of a device like this.

I’m constantly trying to figure out ways to make a full blown business out of developing software that teaches and proclaims the Gospel. I’m still not sure that I can create a compelling enough application to attract enough paying customers to be able to leave my “day job” and focus just on this type of software.

On this journey, however, I do come up with quite a number of ideas for applications and as has been pointed out many times, ideas are worth little without execution. What I’m going to do is start to post these ideas on this site and hopefully someone will come along and execute I the idea. Also, if you think the idea is good, feel free to leave a comment so I can get a feel for what people are interested in. Finally, if you’re interested in idea but don’t have a developer to work with, I’d be willing to talk about collaborating especially if you can bring artistic, design, or other skills that are my weak areas. Please keep in mind that I’m really interested in making commercial products because I want this to be a sustainable business.

Over the next couple days I’ll be posting the ideas I currently have and will continue to add them as they come to mind.

I’m a geek and one way that this comes through is how I manage my blogs. I use a DreamHost Virtual Private Server (VPS) account to host this blog, my wife’s blog, Wittenberg Media, The Parental Office, and Joyful Games just to name a few. I do this because I can control plugins and manage podcasts and other resources at very reasonable costs (storage and bandwidth is unlimited with a DreamHost account). If I tried to do this with a more turnkey solution, I’d either be limited with what I could do (Blogger) or have to pay a lot to host all these sites (WordPress and TypePad).

With those blessings come the curse of troubleshooting technical issues. For the past couple months I’ve been getting intermittent messages telling me that my VPS has exceeded memory usage and gone down. Luckily the VPS seems to bounce back up after about a minute so there isn’t too much downtime. This week I decided that I was going to track this down because the problem seemed to be getting worse, and I really wanted to get rid of the nagging feeling that there was something I should fix.

The first thing I did was monitor the memory usage (watch free -m) of the system and saw that if I hit more than a couple of the sites the memory usage would balloon and the server would reboot. I then went to my account and bumped up my memory allotment (+$5). I tried hitting a bunch of the sites and that seemed to do the trick. The memory usage would get near the limit, but seemed to hold at that level and didn’t tip over to where it would cause a reboot.

That lasted a couple of days, but this morning I got hit with another message that the VPS had rebooted. Since the problems definitely revolved around hitting multiple WordPress sites, I did a search for optimizing WordPress on DreamHost and found this page. It turns out that the default setting when configuring a domain is to use FastCGI. This is a memory pig and overkill for WordPress. I switched all the sites to use CGI and memory consumption plummeted without a noticeable hit to performance!

So I’m thankful that God has given me the aptitude and interest that allows me to work through these problem which are caused by the aptitude and interest I have for these problems (classic Lutheran paradox!). I am also thankful that I have these gifts that I can use to serve others through the sites I mentioned above. Hopefully some find them edifying and if not those sites, I have such a wide range of interests I hope I eventually put one up that does.

Last plug. DreamHost is pretty cool in that they will host a 501c3 for free. We use them for our church and preschool.

I’m not surprised at the outpouring of emotions from people over the death of Steve Jobs. After seeing the reactions to high profile deaths of Princess Diana, Michael Jackson, etc. any community that loses such a high profile and leading member will have a strong emotional reaction, even a community as little known for its emotional response as the tech. community. No, what has surprised me is how much emotion Jobs’ death has stirred in me.

iFanboy

Yes, I am probably what many people would consider an Apple fanboy. I’ve always been a proponent of Apple products since back in the Apple II days. I learned to program on an Apple II+ like so many others. I used Macs through college, my first job was developing software for Macs, and yes I owned a Newton and thought the vision for the device was better than the Palm although I will admit the execution was lacking. However, I’ve never been a Steve Jobs apologist. I remember hearing all the stories of how he mistreated and manipulated people. I believe he was a great visionary but the way he got people to execute on that vision was not something I could get behind. That’s part of the reason I’ve never considered applying for a job at Apple. I had this fear that I’d be working there and he’d drop by, take a look at what I was doing and say, “that sucks,” and move on. I understand that is the way he gets people to push themselves, that’s just not a culture that I’d want to work in. Yes, I believe I need to be pushed to do more, excellent work, but that method for getting there would leave me angry and headed for a heart attack.

So, while I am a huge fan of the products that his company produces I’m was not a big fan of Steve Jobs and when I heard yesterday that he had died I was saddened because such a wonderful, creative mind was no longer around, but I didn’t give it a whole lot thought. But today I couldn’t stop spinning on the fact that he wasn’t around anymore. The man whose vision brought about so many products that I have and still use everyday. Tools that I and others have used to effectively proclaim the gospel. Aside from my family and Pr. Todd Wilken, nobody has had a larger effect on my day-to-day life than Steve Jobs. I think this realization is what got to me. I was really struck by the impact he had on my life.

One thing I had forgotten about Steve Jobs was that he was adopted. This really got me thinking about how if he had been conceived 18 years later he probably would have been aborted. It really amazes me that people ignore these types of stories in the whole abortion debate. I think people want to discount the adoption option because that would lead people to consider the unborn as a human rather than an unviable tissue mass.

Finally, I was reminded of Jobs’ Lutheran roots. Of course, in his later years he seemed to have more Buddhist than Christian leanings so we don’t know if he clung to the promises of Christ at the end though we can pray that he did. What this brought to mind was how this path could have easily been my path. Being a Christian in the tech. industry just isn’t a well traveled road and leaving it for Buddhism, atheism, or what not is a lot easier. Ironically, it was Apple technology that kicked podcasting into high gear and connected me back to my Lutheran roots through Issues, Etc. God truly takes care of His own through the vocation of both believers and unbelievers.

Amazon announced the Kindle Fire last week, which is their 7″ media tablet. Some have hailed it the “iPad killer“, while many others analyze how it is not. As a tech geek, I of course had to place my pre-order. I will give it an honest run to see if it will replace my iPad, but I have serious doubts.

Content

Yes, you can buy all the content you want from Amazon, but how convenient will it be to get non-Amazon content on there? Here’s a small list of non-Amazon content I carry on my iPad:

• Luther’s Works from Logos
• Music from CDs
• Movies from iTunes
• Logia issues on PDF
• Der Lutheraner issues on PDF
• Technical Docs and periodicals on PDF

I’ve read where you can get non-Amazon content onto the device through the cloud. I haven’t seen anything about the types of content, formats, etc. I’m not really sure how convenient that’s going to be. iTunes, for all its warts, makes content transfer very easy. If Amazon provides a Dropbox like interface it might make it easier, but then I have to manage two file systems to keep my media organized; not appealing. Also, once that content is on the device, how will I be able to interact with it? Specifically, I do a lot of highlighting and note taking on PDFs and then sync them back to my Mac. If that’s not available it would be a huge limitation for me.

More Than Content

In addition to the content issues I’m skeptical because I use my iPad for so much more than a media player. It is my primary productivity device during the day because I use OmniFocus for iPad to manage all my projects, to-do lists, and next actions. I also check email on it. And of course it is one of my primary device for testing apps that I’m developing.

I’m also not sold on the 7″ screen size. Some of the PDFs I read, like Logia, are hard enough to read on the 10″ screen of the iPad. This is one are where I really have to remove the bias so that I can give a fair evaluation. Also, in my mind it’s not any more portable than my iPad. Yes it will be lighter, but it won’t fit in my pocket so I still have to throw it in a bag or carry it around in my hand like a book.

My guess is that it will be a fantastic device for buying stuff from Amazon and you won’t get the full experience unless you add Amazon Prime to your account to get the streaming movies, but I’m still getting ahead of myself. I really do want to give an honest review because Amazon is a company I respect. Hopefully I’ll be able to do so. Once thing that could derail me is if the device goes “Tickle-Me Elmo” and goes for double the retail price on eBay. I’ll have no problem flipping it for a profit, something I didn’t consider with my iPad.

Developer Note

Finally, as a developer I can’t see creating any apps for this device unless Amazon changes its pricing policies. There are some horror stories out there about how Amazon sets the price of you app no matter what you want it to be. Additionally, the fragmentation this will cause within the Android ecosystem makes me even more hesitant to investigate mobile development for anything other than iOS devices.

I think there are a few geeks who follow this blog that might be interested in a post I wrote about my experience trying to write an Android app with Google App Inventor. I won’t bore the rest of you, but if you’re interested you can read the post here.

I got a new 4th gen iPod Touch so I could have an iOS 4 device to do app development and testing. So what is my favorite new feature? The front and rear facing cameras? No, although the girls and I have made some fun videos and I’m considering a vid-blog experiment. The folders? No, although they are great for organizing the mess of apps I have. My favorite “new” feature is the 2x playback in the audio player. I have so many podcasts and audio files that I want to listen to and this has allowed me to speed through some of those that tend to speak slowly or ramble off topic.

Okay so I know I lost some street cred with that admission. 2x playback has probably been around for quite some time (It may even be on my 1st gen iPod Touch) but for whatever reason I whiffed and completely missed it. Now I’m wishing that 2x speed was available in the video player and in iTunes. I tried speeding up the playback with the QuickTime Player, but it garbles the audio, but then I tried VLC and it does a good job of keeping the audio listenable and can even go faster than 2x if I really want to skim. So I’ll probably using the iPod Touch for listening to audio than I expected. If you haven’t done so already, try using 2x to listen to podcasts.

The answer is, of course, no? I won’t bring up the “A” word, but the choice of handset operating system is neither commanded nor prohibited in Scripture. In fact, at the LCMS National Convention I ran into plenty of pastors with Android phones. And, yes, even I, a qualified “Apple Fanboy” have an Android phone (HTC Hero).

So why aren’t Concordia Publishing House (CPH) and others (myself included) writing apps for the Android? I’ve seen plenty of requests on FaceBook and Twitter asking for apps to be written for Android. So there is most certainly a need to be filled. Well, I won’t presume to speak for CPH, but I think I can shed some light on their thought processes as I explain my rationales.

Allocation of Resources

Every developer has a limited number of resources so has to decide what platform(s) to develop for. In the case of iOS vs Android the installed base of iOS devices more than doubles Android devices in the US and is almost 4x the number worldwide (intomobile). In addition to that, amount people spend on iOS apps dwarfs what people spend on Android apps (GigaOm). Based on these simple numbers it’s quite easy to choose what platform to develop for.

Ease of Development

I’ve done some cursory research into Android development and it is not very developer friendly at this point. UI layout is done in XML (text) files. Just think of trying to arrange your living room furniture by writing down the coordinates of your sofa, TV, etc. Also the number of widgets available for free is rather limited. Think wood crate furniture with anything more sophisticated needing to be hand crafted. The current state of Android development is like stuff I was doing 10+ years ago.

Things are Changing

But Android has some positives. It is gaining is popularity and had greater unit shipments than the iPhone in Q2 2010 (ZDNet) and App Inventor and Google’s developer friendliness will surely make the development situation better.

Somethings Won’t

That being said, Google is unlikely to do anything that would improve the market for apps. Why? Because Google isn’t in the business of selling apps, Google is in the business of selling ads. They want apps to embed ads as the mechanism for monetization. Additionally, Google hasn’t been able to address piracy on Android devices (AndroidHeadlines). They actually don’t have any incentives to put much effort in anti-piracy. If piracy is rampant, then the only way for developers to make money is to embed ads.

Like I said, I won’t presume to speak for CPH, but it is quite clear to me that now and into the near future developing for the iOS is the platform to develop for if you have limited resources and want to try to make money by selling your apps.

I would like to see a lot more iPhone apps that entertain, encourage, and educate from a confessional perspective. To that end, I would like to encourage anyone who’s interested to start developing some apps and I’d be willing to help to the best of my abilities. One book I can recommend on the subject that I just finished reading is Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. It’s not an iPhone programming book, it’s about how to design the look and feel of and interaction with an iPhone app. It’s the first technical book I’ve read from cover-to-cover in a while.

What follows are the download statistics for the first full week that “Cwirla” was available. I have no idea what they mean. I’m just surprised that France and China were 2nd and 3rd in downloads.