http://aaron.vegh.ca adventures in cocoa Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:05:44 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In the fall of 2010, I began working "full time" for ContactMonkey, a Toronto-based startup focusing on making it easy to give people your contact details. At the same time, I've continued to run Innoveghtive, my own web development shop. I don't do a ton of client work these days, ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2012/01/agency-focus-product-focus/ The Mac is the computer that doesn't get in my way. I have shit to do, and the Mac lets me do it. It gets bonus points for letting me do it in style. I've been a Mac user for more than 20 years, and despite the headline of this column, ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/12/lion-pisses-me-off/ I loved the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. It provides an even-keeled, unblinking account of a very complicated man. After reading this book, that's the most concise word I can think of for Jobs: complicated. How else can anyone account for what he accomplished in his life? People, from the ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/11/let-a-thousand-steves-bloom/ When I was fifteen years old, I was introduced to the Macintosh for the first time. It was 1988, and before that moment I was almost completely ignorant about computers. But this strange, peppy little box with its monochrome 9-inch display ended up turning my life upside down. Before that moment, ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/10/neutron-star/ It's with great relief that I stand on the other side of this Blitz Talk presentation for SecondConf 2011. I've done lots of presentations for larger groups, but nothing has been as challenging as those five minutes! There's no margin for error if you have 15 seconds per slide, so ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/09/my-secondconf-blitz-talk-the-idea-factory/ When I was in my teens, I was a twig of a kid, tall and skinny. I think we all get our personal perception of our body type from how we were in high school. So I still have this picture in my head of myself as your average nerdy ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/09/sit-stand-walk/ About three months ago, I switched my Internet service from Rogers to TekSavvy. While the quality of my service with Rogers was just fine, it was an easy decision to make: TekSavvy leases Rogers' cable lines, and offers dramatically higher monthly bandwidth (300GB vs 95), for a lower price. The switchover ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/09/the-teksavvy-nightmare-scenario/ Late last week, HP announced that it was exiting the WebOS hardware business, little more than a month after the TouchPad tablet was launched. Since the operating system's early days as a smartphone OS I have long admired its graphical style and adherence to quality. Of course, given the choice ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/08/the-99-hp-touchpad-review/ I finally had an opportunity to play with a couple of the recent arrivals in the tablet space: the RIM Blackberry Playbook and the Motorola Xoom. Having read the reviews and evaluated the specs, I was looking to compare my Internet-provided conceptions with actual experience. The results were surprising. Given the ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/05/tablets-as-demo-pieces/ You couldn't say the warning signs weren't there. But I doubt anyone would have guessed that the end would come so abruptly. Twitter did it today: they killed my app. It's kind of a joke among developers to say that you're working on a Twitter client. Let's face it, there's no shortage, ... http://aaron.vegh.ca/2011/03/twitter-killed-my-app/