http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWEW2eRytgo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65CX0gNfKmg

Between work and being a dad, it’s hard to find the time to work on apps. But I hit on a super simple idea that I thought I might be able to do in a weekend (it actually ended up taking a few months) — make an app that just chooses someone. I wanted it for our boardgames group (in order to pick who goes first) but it could have other uses as well. Most importantly, I came up with what I considered an elegant way to do it:

• have everyone hold their finger on the iPhone
• start spinning and then select one of the touches

The nice thing is that you don’t need any instructions, or any options. It knows how many people to choose from based on how many people are touching it. And it knows when to start spinning as soon as someone touches it. So I coded it up and after some back and forth with Apple (which you can learn about in the video), it got accepted. Check it out on the iTunes Store!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jtc8BeWupXY

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’ve been on hiatus from my blog for several weeks. I’ve been on a particularly grueling project at work so I haven’t had a chance to do much beyond work, sleep, and take care of the kid in the mornings.

But we just had a three-day weekend and I’m nearly done on this project so I finally had some time to catch up on some rest and do some fun stuff like make this silly video, which is pretty self-explanatory. I also worked on another video for a very simple iPhone app that I mostly completed a couple months ago. But I’ll put that one out when / if Apple approves the app.