The United States is an educational application designed to help K-5 students learn their United States geography. It was originally envisioned by my son after many interruptions from my daughter asking where a particular state was on the map. Developed by me over several months and play tested by my daughter. Now that all our family members are experts at identifying the states of the Union, it’s your turn.

It was August 28, 2011 when I first made a mockup of a virtual pinball machine that came to be known as ‘MiniPin’. The virtual pinball feever had started a few days earler when a friend saw the Kids Mame 1 build on my website and said, innocently, “…you should build a virtual pin cabinet.”. Of course, that’s exactly what I did.

Late yesterday afternoon the project I have been working on for much of the summer was made available in Apple App Store. This was of course, great news!

The Good Turn application is a simple yet hi-tech replacement for the age-old good turn coin carried by many scouts to remind them to “Do a good turn daily.” It was primarily designed for the iPhone and iPod touch. It works on the iPad in the double-size mode. The fully functional application is free of charge. Additional in-app purchases provide different stylized coins, bronze, silver, and gold, for flipping each time a good turn is done. The cost of these goes towards keeping the web companion site running, future development, and most importantly supporting our local Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts.

A few weeks before leaving for a conference, where connectivity was in question, I asked the question, “how can I continue to use version control on my project?” Subversion has been my best friend for quite a while, both at work and home. Even though most of my projects are single-developer project, the work, test, check-in cycle has been the staple of my work cycle. It allows me to be ruthless with removing large chunks of code, with re-factoring like a madman, and letting the keyboard take over in tying new approaches.

Summer is here, in University terms, and I’ve been thinking about what projects to take on. I’ve always kept notebooks with doodles, designs, ideas, etc.. But only in the past year have I kept a separate “project notebook” separate from shopping lists and to-do items. This has been a love-hate idea in itself. Looking through the project notebook makes me think, “o.k., which one are you going to do?”

A Livescribe Pulse Smartpen application that implements a simple countdown timer. The pen itself has several applications for recording written notes and audio. Many users had requested a countdown timer application even before Livescribe released a development kit for the pen. This application was also entered in the Livescribe Developer Challenge .