Well, 2012 turned out to be quite a busy year for me on the contracting front.
Some of the main highlights:
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Most of the coding for the iOS game Bag It and Bin It was actually done in 2011, but it finally came out at the end of the year, and I did a bit more work on an update during 2012. Written using Cocos2D, this was great to work on, and it was nice to get the chance to do a little game from scratch.
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On the other end of the spectrum, I spent some time in the summer wrapping up a C++ library and turning it into an Objective-C iOS framework for another client. This couldn’t be more different from writing a game, but designing code to be used by other programmers is also something that I enjoy, so this was also a nice little job.
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In the early spring, I started doing some MacOS X work for Karelia, which continued through the year (and hopefully on into 2013!). This work has covered all sorts of territory, from unit testing their libraries to some networking and user interface work for their main product Sandvox. They like to keep me on my toes…
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Finally, in the autumn I also started working on the SVG import/export component of Bohemian Coding’s excellent MacOS X vector graphics app Sketch. Once again, a very different area to work in, with a whole new set of challenges, but definitely fun. The SVG standard is a bit of a monster, and making software that can understand everything in the standard would be a monumental task, so we took a pragmatic approach, trying to identify the areas that are most often used and tackle them first. It feels a bit like painting the Forth Bridge, in that by the time we’ve done everything there will probably be a new version of the standard out :)
So a pretty varied year, and those are just the highlights.
The one down side of this is that the time I’ve had to spend on Neu, Ambientweet, and some other as-yet-unreleased projects of my own, has been somewhat limited. I really hope that I can rectify that in 2013, and give them a bit more love.
The only problem is that the work for Karelia and Bohemian is continuing, and I’m enjoying it too! If anyone invents a time machine, please let me know…