My second iPhone app is available on the App Store. “Triglotta – The Book of Concord” is a version of The Book of Concord that is designed for the iPhone and is also optimized to work with the iPad. The idea was suggested by Frank Gillespie on Twitter and I picked it up and built the app. There were a couple of delays due to naming issues and iPad approval delays but if you have an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad (as of tomorrow) go download it, it’s free!

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.

I received approval last Friday evening for my first two iPhone Applications (they work on the iPod Touch and should work on the iPad when it is released). The inspiration for the Apps came from Pastor Todd Wilken when, after discussing the video I made “There’s a Pastor for That“, wished for a “Cwirla App” for his iPod Touch. Well, I couldn’t resist the inspiration and put together the Cwirla app which is available in two versions. The free version is a collection of wisdom from Pastor Cwirla excerpted from episodes of The God Whisperers. The $0.99 “blue” version includes the same excerpts, plus it includes the story about Pastor Cwirla’s confirmation class which includes some “home schooler alert” language. It also includes some risque quotes if you “shake” Pastor Cwirla. All proceeds will go to the God Whisperers coffers.

So here’s the game I’ve been working on since the start of the year. It’s a little rough, and I’m no Ed McMahon, but I hope someone finds it enjoyable.

If you want to embed it in your site, copy and paste:
<embed src=”http://joyfulgames.com/LutheranInquisition.swf” width=”600″ height=”400″ />

Update: I moved the game to my other blog. http://joyfulgames.com/2009/04/07/lutheran-inquisition-episode-1

It’s 3:45pm on Christmas Eve and I’m still at work. I’m repenting of all the sinful thoughts I’m having about my vocation.

A simple little concentration game with Martin Luther looking on. Listen to some interesting sound bytes as you complete matches. You may even hear some words from Fr. Martin.

I was catching up on some podcasts and was listening to a career coach, Dr. Marty Nemko. When asked about the trend toward generalists in any particular field he suggested becoming a serial specialist. It makes a lot of sense to me and once again puts a premium on life-long learning. I’ve been a QuickTime specialist, a Java specialist, a JSP specialist, a Struts specialist, a Ruby specialist (on the side), and now an XSLT specialist. I’ve probably got 10 – 20 more specialties left in my career, and I’m excited cause there’s a whole lot of learning to do in there.

Java, and more specifically J2EE, is boring. Yes, I make a living doing this stuff and it has become mind-numbing. If you’re in a domain you enjoy then it can be palatable, but the technology itself is a snooze. Struts/JSF, blah! So much code and configuration just to make a form. WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss, JOnAS, etc. (gotta have more than 1 capital letter). Feels like DEC to me. Keep moving to the high-end while PHP, Python, and Ruby eat up the low-end. (Read Clayton Christianson’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”) Web services, SOA, ebXML, can anyone say C.O.R.B.A.

I have 6 Java related RSS feeds and I haven’t been interested in a single posting in over a month. I cut that number to 6 after I finding most of the other feeds to be uninteresting. In a couple of weeks I’m going to kill
those 6 if I still haven’t seen anything interesting.

The thing is, I can do my job and do it well without keeping up with the latest J2EE fluff. At work, we’re still using 1.4.x and even need to support 1.3.x in some cases. It’s still a good tool to solve some problems, but the problems better be cool, because the tool isn’t.

After reading this post about intellectual honesty during job interviews, I think I need to make sure my resume is scrubbed of things I use to know, but wouldn’t dare to claim anymore. I used to do C, C++, and Mac development. I’d have a hard time answering any specific question on those topics anymore.

One thing that does bother me about this is that, depending on the interviewer and/or company, skill set can be the deciding factor in hiring. I may not be proficient in objective-C, but if someone hired my to do that work, I’m sure I would be a very productive member of the team. Where do I come up with the nerve to say this? Well, I have a track record of learning new technologies on the fly and ramping up quickly on new projects. My strength is not a deep understanding of a particular technology, but the ability to quickly understand a technology and apply it to the development of a product.