This is a boring updated on the status of several of my projects. If you don’t care about them then just give this post a miss. There’ll be a new post in a couple of months which may be more interesting.

My situation’s changed a lot in the past couple of months. I’m now at university, living away from my parents, studying what I want to study with some great people. It’s pretty awesome. It’s also a lot of work which is why I’m changing what projects I’m focusing on in my spare time.

SimpleCode

SimpleCode is dead. The website’s been inactive for some time now¹ and, on December 4^th 2013, I let the domain name expire. I’ve been waiting to kill this project and I’m glad that it’s finally gone. Looking back on the programming tutorials I wrote when I was a less experienced programmer I feel sorry for anybody who tried to learn from them. There’s so much incorrect or poorly explained information, it’s horrible. I feel only a small bit of sadness killing this projects as it was the first website that I actively maintained and the first domain name I ever owned.

SymSteam

SymSteam is on an indefinite hiatus. I love SymSteam. It was the first Mac application I worked on where I actually understood most of what I was doing. I didn’t need to refer to Stack Overflow² every other line of code and I was actively trying to follow best practices rather than doing my own thing. It was also my first useful application. SimpleCalc was useless, there are thousands of calculators far more powerful than it but SymSteam, as far as I can tell, is unique.

Work on beta 3 of SymSteam started in April 2013 and the most recent commit was in the tail end of June. Since then, the project’s stalled. Ever since building a dedicated computer for gaming, I’ve failed to find the motivation to work on SymSteam and it’s for this reason that I’m officially putting it on hold. I’m not calling the project dead because one day I may find the motivation to start working on it again but for now, it just isn’t there.

Appcastr

It’s dead. Appcastr’s a funny project. I enjoyed making it despite the constant headaches autolayout gave me but for some reason, I completely lost interest in it. It’s annoying because I still have ideas for features to add but I don’t want to set aside the time to work on them when there’s other things I can be doing.

The project page for Appcastr has, for almost a year, said that it’s not dead and that version 0.2 will be released some day. That’s not happening. If you want to try out version 0.2, compile it from the 0.2 branch in the git repository. Otherwise, you can download a ‘stable’ and usable build of version 0.1.1.

Geography AS Notes

It’s alive!. Work on Geography AS Notes has been all over the place this year. At the start of the year, I rewrote the rivers topic over the space of three months, replacing the old content that was essentially notes with researched prose³. After the rewrite though, I haven’t done much but manage the technical side of the website. In the coming months, I’m going to start focusing on the website’s content again.

Currently, I’m converting diagrams to the SVG format so that they look good at all resolutions. I’m also adding more information to several of the diagrams to make them more useful. After this, there will be some significant content updates to the coasts and population change topics. The latter topic is in desperate need of a rewrite so I’ll try to prioritise this. After that, I will look into adding some new content. I’d like to write something about volcanoes & plate tectonics so I think that’ll probably be what’s coming next.

A Prototype

Although my main focus for the coming months is going to be my degree and Geography AS Notes, I recently started prototyping an application that I may or may not develop further. I don’t want to reveal too much about it as it’s something that I’m considering making for profit but let’s just say it’d be my first proper attempt at iOS & graphics programming⁴ and it’d be related to my degree…