If you're like me and love to create, then you'll love the present. It's a great time to be alive! I was fortunate in that I have this creative talent that has been unlocked! I love what I do and couldn't be happier knowing that God has given me the talents, and Apple has given me the tools to help me succeed! I just celebrated my first year wedding anniversary, and Apple has given me a gift that I'll never forget; the permission to sell my new app, Hippos Name in the App Store! This is only the beginning, but it's the start of something big. I've already started the wheels turning on the second book and have a mile long list of things I need to do for the first one. But this is where the fun continues. I get to tell people about how much fun it was to create this app. How I started with an idea almost 18 years ago telling stories to my niece and nephew and taking those characters today and weilding them into something more than words in the air. It was my nephew who at age 18 told me to take those characters that I created and make them real. Draw them out. Give them names and personalities and traits. That was eight years ago. And I did do that that three years ago, but it never came off the ground. I had trademarks, logos, a web site. But it just wasn't there still. So I changed the name of the collection, kept the original names, and changed the focus. It's now turned into something wonderful and I'm very proud of it. I'd love to one day be able to hire my nephew and write books together, but I'll have to sell a lot of apps to do that. In the meantime, I hope you will join with me in celebrating this great feat. In the next few days, I'll post some of my original pencil drawings and how the characters have matured over the course of three years.

How can one man make a difference? Just read the headlines of one of the most prolific men in our century. Some called him a brilliant marketer! Others called him one of the greatest inventors of our time and that he should be mentioned along side with Einstein and Edison! I merely knew him as someone whom changed my life. I remember seeing my first Mac in 1984. My coworker and roommate bought one and brought it to the office at a local Time Warner Cable branch where we worked. 

Fresh out of college, I created parodies at college even before the "Onion" was around. From 1980-1984, we cut and pasted from copy machines. The desktop publishing revolution happened in the mid-to-late 80s. I graduated in 1984. The Apple Macintosh was this little beige, box with a mouse. All I remember is how fascinated I was with the prospect that not only could I change the text or font from Courier to Palatino, but that I was learning about page layout, typography, and design. These were things that were not taught in college. And even if they were, they couldn't have accomplished what I learned in those fleeting moments sitting in front of a Macintosh, this game-changer. I like many of my college graduates wasn't sure what direction my life would take. Here I was, a promising business graduate from the largest university in New York State and I had no direction. Steve Jobs helped change that. Getting my hands on the Mac as much as I could was not only my mantra but a hunger. I quit that job, went back to school to learn more about this crazy machine called the Macintosh. From that point on, I worked at jobs that had large Macintosh installations. I worked for the first magazine to incorporate the Macintosh in 100% of the production, design, and editorial of the magazine (American Demographics magazine). I later went on to work at an Apple Retail store where I took classes from Apple on how to sell more Macs and educate the consumer. I founded two greeting card companies (NickCards and Fishlip Greetings) where I created my work on a Macintosh. The latter is where I was awarded a Finalist award for the LOUIE awards. It's the most prestigious awards given out to greeting card writers and illustrators. I later became a graphic designer with an award-winning, advertising agency in New York State where we worked on Macintoshes. And now here I am more than twenty-seven years later, an Apple Developer, Apple stockholder, and Apple owner of some of the most amazing technology that was ever designed. And behind every design, and every conceptual idea, Steve Jobs was there helping me along the way. Providing me with the tools to succeed. I followed his every step. I have all the magazine covers, have attended numerous Mac conventions. I followed him at NeXt and Pixar.

Steve Jobs is personally responsible for my successes and helping my dreams become reality. He has taught me that you can dream and do whatever your heart desires. Just believe in yourself and go do it! And for this, I will miss you. Thank you for your contributions to my life and those around me. You are an inspiration, and I'm thankful I got to know you.

Some cool facts that book publishers should be made aware of is that there are now 250 million iPads out in the world now. It used to be that you wanted to stretch your reach, you would need to publish on the iPhone to reach the 400 million iPhone users and only 50 million iPad users. But now that we're reaching more and more iPad users, our content won't be compromised. That's great news for us as we try to create experiences only on the iPad that would simply be futile on the smaller screens of the iPhones and iTouches.

The other thing that is very exciting is that Apple has reported that there are now 1,000 schools participating in a program to award one iPad per child  in their schools. So if we continue to provide great content aimed at children, we'll have even more eyeballs directed at our products.

Some other news in the news is Adobe. Back before the Flash debacle between Adobe and Apple, Adobe was creating apps using their software. And then Apple lowered the iron fist on third party software developers and told them only xcode would be allowed to make apps. Well the reigns have loosened and now you'll see more and more companies that are building software frameworks that sit on top of xcode. One of which is a new software title called, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Create single, custom iPad applications for a one-time payment of just $395. Leading publishers and companies are already using Adobe® Digital Publishing Suite to deliver their next generation content—and soon freelancer designers and small design studios can too. Starting next month, create dynamic reading experiences, attract new audiences, and broaden your business capabilities. With new Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition, you can use the classical design qualities of print, add interactivity, and draw on your imagination to develop engaging content for the iPad—all within the Adobe InDesign® CS5.5 software you already know and love. More to come when we hear more about this.

If you don't know by now, we use Corona SDK to build our apps. The first one, My Basketball Stats was built directly in xcode using Objective-C. The last one, "Opening Rome" and the new one, yet to be released, "Hippos Name" was built using a combination of "Kwik" extension for Photoshop and Corona SDK. Both work very well together. Corona gives us the flexibility to create special effects for our app that would have taken months to figure out in Xcode alone. Granted this process isn't entirely easy. We've had some hiccups along the way we hope to resolve soon, so that you can see our great new book, "Hippos Name!"

All in all, it's an exciting time for all of us involved in technology and publishing. We're off to a great start in 2011, and 2012 promises to be even better! Keep coming back for more info. Enjoy!

I decided to write two entries this weekend. Today's posting is about the last few days and hours before a submission. We're in our final hours and we've actually pushed back our deadline a couple of days. There really is no "deadline" per se. We're not trying to get it out by a certain date but we need to get it done quickly so that we can start our next project for Christmas! As we were setting up the schedule, we didn't account for the hours and hours of testing that's needed. Sometimes things work so beautifully on the simulator but when you build it to your device you notice some artwork needs tweaking, or volume controls aren't consistent. That's what we're doing now. I have a little time to write as my programmer is taking a much needed nap before the big push.

For narration, I decided to make it a "read to me" book because I wanted it to be read to someone at night and I wanted it as a complete package. The ultimate in its capability. Afterall, eventually the book will be made available as an ebook, and in print so we wanted to have each character's voice to shine. Since that was me who was narrating and I have a very deep voice, some of the character's personalities just weren't making it onto the mic. So we scrapped that idea for now and after we changed all the narration, we think it actually sounds better! This goes back to my last posting about learning to "ADAPT!" So here we are and I'm now writing down all of the places we still need narration fixes, sound FX fixes or insertions, and last-minute copy changes. Now let me speak to the copy for a minute. We went through 6 revisions in the script and we thought we finally had it until we played it all out on the iPad. And low and behold there were two places that just didn't sound right then when it was read. So we're still brainstorming some text towards the end of the book to make it sound perfect. But you know, that's what I love about this gig! Each day is different and we always expect it one way, but it always ends up something else.

I really can't wait to share this story with you. It's a cute story that is great for all ages and we hope that the story will remain timeless. So I'm heading back into the trenches. Look for me tomorrow where I will finally share some artwork with you and my plans to market the app. Oh now it gets really fun!

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