Chuck Freedman
It’s an amazing thing to watch your child learn — especially as they start figuring out how to spell and write. I captured this photo on a recent weekend morning, when it was just me and my 5 year old in the kitchen cooking up some pancakes. As I was mixing up the eggs, water [...]
What $100 in Facebook Ads gets you
My wife and I recently self-published a children’s book. “Welcome to Plow Town” is about a family of snow plows that live in a two garage apartment. As the winter approaches, they work together to help people throughout the town. Over the course of several months, we’ve made the book available across all digital e-book [...]
Managing photos on vacation with an iPad
The words ‘photos’ and ‘vacation’ go together much better than ‘managing’ and ‘vacation’. But with today’s devices, we’ve come to accept there’s a little work to having so much technology at our finger tips. My family and I just returned from an amazing trip to Disney World in Orlando. Part of our efforts to refresh [...]
APIs in Life, Music and Wiffleball
This talk expresses my love and intrigue of APIs, demonstrating where I’ve found platforms and APIs in real life, music and things like wiffleball. I have a lot of fun with this one. At one point during this talk, I walk across the stage (or room) and throw various wiffleball pitches at my laptop, with [...]
New approach to platform evangelism
Back in 2005 when the “mashup” craze was really taking off, we were getting reports at Yahoo! about how many developers were using our Maps API. The report was broken down into technologies, web sites, and how many API calls were made from each. Sites like programmableweb.com were busy cataloging platforms and counting how many [...]
AIR/Flex for iOS & Android app deployment notes
It’s been 2 years since I wrote a native iPhone app and successfully launched it to the App store. I have been working with native Android off and on since July of 2010. Learning (really playing) with these respective platform technologies has been challenging and fun. In researching some new platform strategies for litl, I [...]
Welcoming ideas for my @GeekyByNature talk
Later this month I’m presenting at Geeky By Nature. Just to give you an idea of the contextual brain power, the schedule includes Brendan Hall, Joshua Davis, Andre Michelle, Sir Keith Peters, Grant Skinner, Jared Tarbell, Lisa Larson-Kelley, Joe Ebert, Hillman Curtis, Gmunk, Robert Hodgin, Paula Scher, Alan Klement, Jer Throp, Rich Shupe, Joel Gethin [...]
Video: Review and demo of AIR for TV
In this video, I review Adobe’s AIR for TV Developer Kit and discuss where it could have great potential for developers getting content and apps on TVs. Also demoed is a 3D Flash game Kevin Suttle and I originally created for litl’s accelerometer-driven set top box prototype. The ported version of the game relies on [...]
Developer beware: How to assess a device platform
I doubt there’s a developer out there who hasn’t been tempted by the mighty powerful marketing forces of device makers calling for apps on their HOT, NEW, COMING SOON device! I should know. As Chief Channel Evangelist for Litl, it was my job for much of 2010 to encourage developers to build apps for a [...]
Speaking of 2011
We’re all a couple of weeks into 2011. Time to get serious about planning for this year. First, I really enjoyed 2010. It was equally exciting and stable for me and my family. We didn’t move across the country — something we’ve done twice in the past 5 years. However, we did have a baby [...]
