This is the tribute video of Freddie Mercery’s 65th birthday – a compilation of some of his previous interviews. It’s a glimpse of his view to his own art and legacy.

“If all my money end tomorrow, I will still be the same person.”, Freddie Mercury

Almost a year of work. Booting up, failed, rebooting, taking a different path, changing course, resuming… Numerous interface tweaks, feature change, extra radiation exposures in cross pacific flight, thousands of hours time and life…

Nowbox is now in “New and Noteworthy” category of US iTunes App Store.

Kevin who used to be curator of TEDx Tapiei, once, when we were sharing event after thought, said, “這些都是用生命跟血換的…”

True! It’s great reward of a great journey. 但真的這累…

Let’s move on in 2012.

I railed about the architecture of their build before. This post has nothing to do with that.

So, teaching… it’s hard. Freaking hard.

Problem: You mix a bunch of adults with different background. Make them sit in the same class and, hopefully, make them be able to develop iOS application without having to spend much effort apart from attending class.

I segment my students into 3 major categories…

1. Designers – they know design. Maybe some HTML and Javascript. But they are definitely not the type of designer who would read A-List-Apart.
2. IT professionals – they had some formal technical education before. They know some kind of programming languages and they’ve probably written some code at some point in their life
3. People from nowhere – they can be a clerical worker, admin officer, like a random person you encounter on the street

I had 2 classes already. In the first class, I know nothing about the students. Got some basic understanding about them. And got a better understanding about myself as well.

Second class… I started explaining Obj-C and doing some coding with the students. It’s hell difficult to get everyone in the same page.

Those who understand coding… they fell asleep once I began the basics… types, variables, control flow (conditions, loop). Those who don’t get it… they fell asleep as well.

Fuck! I am one of those boring teacher incapable of explaining things and keep students interested in the subject! (Actually, it’s not that bad. But definitely need to better prepare for class)

I need to fix this.

3 problems:

1. How to give interesting lecture?
2. How to make those smart guys interested in the topic? And, at the same time, …
3. How to keep those random people on track and learn something?

Gotta think through this tonight. Had 4 shots of coffee. It will be an enjoyable night of thinking.

If you’ve got advice for me, let me know!

When I made the purchase in Amazon, the “recommended books to buy” list shows the Amazon book all the time! Is it really the book that people who bought Steve’s biography would most likely buy? Or, it’s just a shameless free-rider act?

慢靈魂 – 盧廣仲
A lovely song by 盧廣仲 and 小虎.

Slow soul is the piece of you where you live under your passion creating your own art in your own pace.

Hope you can find your piece and your pace too.

Salesforce.com’s CEO Marc Benioff interviewed Eric Schmidt in Dreamforce 2011.

I like the interview. I personally hate Google betraying Apple to secretly start the Andriod thing. But that doesn’t change the fact that Eric is one of the smartest executives in the Valley.

It is insightful to me in many parts where Marc asked Eric to relate his past experience and look into the future tech landscape. He made some detail analysis to how cloud computing, as a technology, has enabled all sorts of innovation that cannot happen just 10 years ago.

Things like small agile team building very scalable products like 4sq, Angrybirds, etc. And how some companies (like Apple and Google) succeeds and why some (namely, Microsoft) failed. Very intriguing.

In the course of this interview, he showed great respect to companies building simple yet technically complex products. And, in detail, analyzed why Microsoft fails in recent years – “Microsoft was built around the model of control and licensing… They do not organize around the consumers. They organize around the industry structure… And, Apple proves, if you organize around the consumers, the rest will follow…”

There’s more in the interview… his advice to America, what are the characters to exceed Mark Zuckerberg to be the next new star… Check the interview. (But skip the first 3, 5 mins of boring flattery intro crap)

Examples:

Industrial design Matt at fuseproject – Two dollar frame for kids in Mexico

The, kinda, idea wall at Idea Couture

Illustrating scenarios at Adaptive Path for Global Pulse & Hunch Works

I still remember my mum telling me her childhood stories how she and my grandparents got to Macau to get away from of the 2nd World War and the civil war between Communism and Democratic parties in China, how they made a living by making fireworks…

That’s what I wanna do with my products. It’s a story as sticky, as authentic and as inspiring as the stories my parents told me. Stories that define human and push us to pursue a better world.

Thank you so much to Greg, Jean and Philip for inviting me to the Smile WWDC Party. It was great fun.

WWDC has changed a lot since introduction of iPhone and the real uptake in mobile computing. The conference changes from Mac, Server and QuickTime focused to, now, mainly iOS. Mac OS X has become something, I feel, tagging along its mobile counterpart.

The party tonight is different. It is purely a Mac indie party. I met and chatted with loads of people. There were people, for sure, from Smile Software, OmniGroup, Bonix and some indie developers.

It’s great fun chatting with Philip, Ken, Greg and other great developers. Topics like the upcoming changes in Lion, Mac App Store strategy, demo of their apps, dev scenes in Munich, etc. That’s the kind of Mac indie conversation I long for.

They truly reminded me about authenticity and dedication.

Paper, pen and pencil are the essential tool (still today) when I think through the architecture of an app, database schema, interactions, etc. It’s simply impossible for me to focus and think without notebook or, at least, an A4 paper.

In this cloud computing era with tools like dropbox, evernote, box.net… it is still hard for people like me to translate tactile manual script into digital format. Well, there are scanners, digital cameras, iPhones and iPads which can bridge some gaps. When it comes to engineering sketches, I guess scanner or DC is still the best tool to preserve the detail. But scanning pages in flatbed scanner or taking out a quality DSLR to picture every single hand sketches in my notepad is like asking me to fold the stack of clothes pied on the sofa – not mission impossible but you wanna avoid it as much as possible.

I heard about a new product in Briefly Awesome podcast called Noteslate.

It’s a e-ink-like display with 1-bit color. It uses Wifi for internet connectivity. The cool thing about it is… it’s just a blank canvas. Sketch your stuff on it and it will be recorded. They are saying there’s OCR recognition.

The product is still in development. Not sure how well it functions. I’d like to give a try when it’s out. I want something that can bridge my hand sketches and my Mac.

The site says the retail price will be $99. If you are interested in it as well, you can sign up for their newsletter.

Make no mistake, the one in photo is really our ex-KCR chairman 田北辰. He and a bunch of rich “elites” are the cast of the new RTHK documentary show – 窮富翁大作戰II.

Look forward to the season.