Friday, August 28, 2009

Multi-Multi Tasking

Multi tasking is not my thing. Apart maybe from listening to music while ironing, any other combination just does not work for me. When I'm doing 'serious' work (like writing software, design electronics, create a report, just anything that requires a significant level of concentration) it takes a while to get started. And any interruption, no matter how short, will cause my mind to reset and start all over. It's even worse when there are two or more tasks at hand that have equal priority. Anything (e-mail, phone, colleague bringing coffee..) can trigger me to shift my attention from one to the other and if this happens often enough none of the tasks get finished at all. And I'm not sure having many arms ( like this Indian god) would help. It's in the mind.
Well, a lengthy intro to the real reason for this post. Someone pointed me to this video on YouTube. How nice it would be if you could replace Guitar Hero with Visual Studio and the Rubiks cube with some kitchen gear so you could prepare fresh pizza while you are coding...

Monday, August 17, 2009

Criss Cross Platforming Speedup


I've written a lot so far about my fascination for cross platform development. Unfortunately my time is limited so I do not spend as much time on it as I would like. And every time I find a little time to pick it up I find to my surprise that others are proceeding down the multi platform road at a much larger pace. Like the Mono team, lead by the the brilliant Miguel de Icaza . Check out StackOverflow podcast #61 to find out he's also a amusing speaker (which is a well known rarity among good programmers...)
Here he also announces the introduction of Mono tools for Visual Studio. This will allow simultaneous development on Linux an Windows. And since Mono is also working towards iPhone application development it is getting really interesting. I believe that we are now slowly working towards the real future of software development. It will not be long before it is relatively easy to create applications that run on Windows, Windows Mobile, Mac, Linux and the iPhone. Something I would not have thought possible two years ago.