It’s been more than a year since I posted here. A year! What happened?

Apparently I hadn’t completely gotten programming out of my system. I thought I had, but then during one of our trips I had this idea: a shared travel journal. We usually travel with some family members and we all try to share photos and remember aspects of the trip such as where we ate, or stayed, or had a great time together.

I thought writing an app to do this would be great. Sure, there are other apps out there, but for some reason, I again wanted to write my own. And that was it. I was hooked on the idea and got to work. I put all my other projects, including this blog, on hold.

I spent a year working on the app and made some good progress. We were even able to test the app on a recent trip to Scandinavia. It worked really well!

However, a few things started nagging me toward the end of the year: First, several times during development, Apple made changes to either the operating system or their cloud services that broke my app. So, in addition to trying to finish up features I had to work around these issues. One of them was pretty major and, had my app been released, there would have been many unhappy users.

Next, I was finding that in order to keep up my focus on the app, I had to spend a lot of time on it, almost every day. If I tried to take a break, I’d have a coming up to speed time period when I wanted to jump back in. It was feeling more like a job instead of a hobby.

Probably most significantly, I started to see very clearly that while the development part of the app was mostly enjoyable, the finishing, that is, staying current with Apple’s changes, supporting each new OS update, supporting users and their issues, etc., was going to be almost a full time job. If I wanted to keep working on features (or other apps), I would not really have the time to do that and all the required support work. I am retired after all!

And, lastly, I really missed writing.

Here I am again…

So, once again, I’ve decided to put aside development work and get back to my other projects. You’re probably thinking: oh, here he goes again. Well, you’re not alone. I’m saying the same thing to myself!

For 2019, I’ll be back here, writing about tech, life, writing, traveling, and the like. I’ve also started a new endeavor inspired by my family. I’ve always been the family tech guy, and in the past some of my family members suggested I put together a regular newsletter to share tech tips and how to better use technology. So, I created a newsletter site to do that.

In addition to that, I hope to spend time getting back to my novel.

There you have it. I’m back and intend to stay for a while.

Happy New Year to you all.