Welcome to Dan'sFormers

My first experience with programming (and with computers, for that matter) was with the Tandy TRS-80. At that time programs were distributed on paper and had to be manually typed into the computer. This taught you to be extremely careful while transcoding the program from page to screen since it only took one typo to make the program fail. Fortunately, due to advanced magnetic data storage technology known as 'Tape Cassettes', the working program could be converted into audio binary (modem-speak) and kept for later use.
In Junior High School we were introduced to Logo, a magic system that allowed you to draw shapes on the screen of your computer. Typos in Logo were more fun than those on the TRS-80 since they usually resulted in abstract art.
After moving on to High School, with it's lab full of IBM PCjrs, I was introduced to BASIC and the most historically significant piece of code ever:
10 PRINT "Hello"
20 GOTO 10
In the second half of junior year my best friend, who was on the school paper, showed me the new computer that they were using to typeset their stories - an Apple Mac SE. This was an epiphany for me - it was like Logo on steroids - the entire screen was filled with images but, unlike Logo, these images could be "clicked on" using a Mouse to activate different functions. And the images made sense! The hard drive looked like a hard drive and clicking on it did exactly what you'd expect - a visual dir command! Then there was the Laser Printer - it printed out documents that just like they did on the screen and the text came out black instead of the usual blue/grey I was accustomed to. That first day with the SE imprinted the idea that computers could be useful onto my brain.
The next year the school installed a new computer lab full of Mac Pluses which they put into a class room at the front of the school, not hidden in the back of the second floor of the library like the PCjrs. Soon I was a lab assistant helping other students (and teachers) to use the Macs and creating new startup disks when they erased or lost theirs. It was in that lab that I was introduced to Hypercard, the first system that I actually used for development. It was amazing; you could order disks with and endless variety of pre-built Hypercard Stacks from the silly to the actually useful. Soon I was building by own stacks - although I have to admit that they were all on the silly end of the spectrum.
That changed at college. My parents had gotten me my own Mac SE after I graduated from High School so I not only had my own private computer but my own copy of Hypercard. My first non-silly application was built for Alpha Phi Omega, a co-ed service fraternity that I was a member of. We were starting a new alumni outreach project and needed a way to keep the address information accessible and easy to update. This stack was also a foreshadowing of things to come as it was my first database application.
I took several programming classes while "at University" but none of them really stuck. To be honest, I cannot recall offhand whether they were in PASCAL or BASIC although I clearly remember that one of the programs was a plate-tracking system for a cafeteria (a lousy cafeteria too - they only had 15 plates!). But the stacks kept going.
In Junior year at College I started an Independent Study along with another student that I was friends with working with a Journalism professor who was also a Karate instructor. She wanted to utilize a new computer purchased by the school's Foreign Language Resource Center to build a multimedia Karate education program to assist students. The lab had purchased a Mac with a high-end video card capable of connecting to a large screen TV and importing video and a Laser Disk player for interactive language education programs. The concept for the program we were going to write was not fully fleshed out, to the point that the Independent Study lasted all the way through senior year, constantly growing and changing. Sadly we never officially finished the program before my friend and I graduated but it did teach me the importance of having a specific scope for a project to prevent the frustration of chasing a moving goal.
Because of this project, and my natural proclivities, I was often on hand to help with computer problems being experienced in the lab and ended up working there senior year. The highlight of this job was that it marked my first for-pay programming work. A graduate student wanted a program to help teaching prepositions in German which change depending on the state of the object being spoken of. Turning to the familiar, this was built in Hypercard with several scenarios where the preposition would change. The user would be given a pre-recorded instruction at the start of each scenario with the options available there. For example: the program could ask you to move a lamp from a shelf onto a table, there would be one preposition for the proposed relocation and another for when it was actually on the table.
Like many graduates, I did not have a clear idea of exactly what I wanted to do except that it needed to have computers associated with it. I finally decided to pursue Desktop Publishing but there was always an aspect of tech support and eventually I found myself programming again. There came a point when I was with Architectural Partners where they needed an easier way to store and retrieve certain boiler plate data. By this point I was disillusioned with Hypercard, primarily since it hadn't been updated since I graduated so I had to find another option and one that would work with their Macintosh server. I decided to use FileMaker and was able to put together a small database to suit their needs.
Soon after, Architectural Partners wanted an automated method of tracking employee time and what projects they were working on. Since we already had FileMaker the time tracker was written there. But, due to a slow network and an under-spec'd server the roll out was disappointing to say the least. Performance when running the program from the server was abysmal - someone, and I don't want to name names here, had neglected to live test the program. I was able to tweak the program, upgrade the memory of the server and add a faster hard drive for data and things got better, but I was never completely happy with it's performance.
During my tweaking phase my boss' wife's company, American Surveying Company of Boston, was experiencing and extremely high rate of business. They had a dbase system for taking orders and billing them and had hired a consultant to build them a job tracking system in Microsoft Access so that they could more quickly get the current status of a job when a customer inquired about it. Unfortunately they were getting frustrated, after every update or bug fix there always seemed to be something missing or broken and it could take weeks to get the next fix. So, I was loaned out to them to see what I could do with the system. After getting up to speed on what was there I was able to reduce the patch time to a few hours or a few days depending on the complexity of the problem and, more importantly, whether I was at that office when it was discovered. Once the first round of bugs were exterminated it was determined that it would be easier if both programs were merged into a single system.
Eventually the entire system was ported to Access 97. With a stable and modern base to work from, the status system was expanded to include a time tracking system for employees and contractors. It also provided the opportunity to add more reports to help management eliminate waste and streamline workflows.
When the wireless industry boomed, a need for firms to coordinate their increased surveying needs for new locations, ASC of Boston created a new subsidy called ASC National, LLC meet that need. To increase our competitive advantage we created a specially modified version of the ASC of Boston database to meet the new requirements of the survey coordination work flow. The biggest difference was that, being coordinators, their contractors were spread across the country. The time tracking system was replaced with a transaction tracking system to help keep track of all of the different steps involved in completing a land survey.
As the years passed, ASC of Boston's Access-based systems performance began to degrade and, after a detailed examination of the options, it was decided to rewrite the system as a web application. The technology chosen for this task was the PHP programming language interfacing with a MySQL back-end. After a year of programming and testing, the Quinsail Project Management System was born.
Quinsail was built from the ground up to allow for multiple company modules with an unified login system. The ASC of Boston module replicated all of the functions of the Access version but enabled new features like online ordering for clients and remote access.
The online ordering experience was called Client Tools and not only allowed jobs to be ordered, but also updated and cancelled - both of which would immediately reflect in Quinsail. Another feature that we were able to offer was live status reports detailing the exact stage of production the job was in.
While the ASC National module of Quinsail was being developed, the parent company of ASC of Boston and ASC National along with several other Oklahoma-based companies was bought out. Unfortunately the new owners wanted to centralize operations in Oklahoma where wages were far lower than in Boston so they closed both companies leaving the ASC National module incomplete.
This turned out to be a blessing in disguise - a VERY good disguise. The closure of the Boston offices occurred right at the beginning of what would become the first US Recession of the new century. It also came shortly after the introduction of Apple's iPhone (one of which I had received as a gift from a good friend) and just before the release of the first iPhone Software Development Kit.
Since jobs were scarce in IT, I answered an ad on Criagslist looking for a starting iPhone developer, no experience necessary. The result of this was a collaberation that gave birth to Flutter from Juice Wireless - the first application to address the original iPhone's lack of multimedia messaging (MMS). It got a lot of good press, but a failure in the online registration database over the first weekend resulted in many bad reviews giving it a two star rating.
Since I had extensive project management experience and a firm grasp of the capabilities of the iPhone, my work started drifting into more of a fascilitation role. In this role I would write the initial specifications for the project, based on the client's requirements, then pass of the actual programming to an off-shore team of programmers and finally take the result and package it for submission to the App Store. It was during this phase that I worked on ReachOut!, an Address Book reminder application that suggests contacts that you haven't spoken to in a while. There were also several other projects that never made it past the planning stages or were handed off to others.
Wanting to get back to the programming side, I collaborated on one final project. For this I wrote the Objective-C port of Localytics that would be made available as a library other iPhone developers could integrate into their applications and track how their product was being used.
In early 2009, I founded my own company DLdeveloper, Inc. to handle my growing number of iPhone projects. Through this company I also started offereing tech support to a variety of clients small and large.
In September of 2009, my company submitted Meet Me Here to Apple's App Store. Meet Me Here is a location sharing application that allows you to email your current location and receive locations from other Meet Me Here users and view them on an integrated map.
In March 2010, Bullet Development released Bullet Skater for $.99 on the iTunes App Store.
DLdeveloper also released two puzzle applications; Frog Slide and Frog Jig. Frog Slide is a simple slide puzzle but Frog Jig is a complete jigsaw puzzle simulator. Version 1 of Frog Jig was designed exclusively for the iPad but version 2 supports all iOS devices.
I was also fortunate enough to get the opportunity to build a companion application for the international Doctor Who podcast Doctor Who Podshock from the Gallifreyan Embassy. The DW Podshock Companion features access to news, episodes, tweets as well as exclusive content.
To be continued...

SugarQuill.net:
- Just Deserts (30 January 04)
- Into the Dark (31 August 2003)
MacBC.com (this site is no longer online - the following links are archived PDFs) Lyons' Den Columns:
- iTunes: Making your Digital Hub Work For You (19 March 2001)
- Palming Across Platforms: Crow tastes just like Chicken (6 October 2000)
- Block Six: the Apple iSlab (22 July 2000)
- I Have Seen the Printer, and it is Laser (22 June 2000)
- The Webs we Weave: Fallout from the WWDC Rumors (17 May 2000)
- Will Apple's Next Ad Tout a 2 GHz PowerMac? (4 May 2000)
- Top 10 Slogans for Microsoft's New Ad Campaign (27 April 2000)
- Why Does My Refrigerator Need an ISP? (28 March 2000)
- First Tokyo, Now Boston: The New G4/400 Arrives (24 February 2000)
- Mac Did You Know: that Macs Make Better Copy than WinTels, Even when Promoting W2K? (22 February 2000)
- OS Evolution (4 February 2000)
- OSX: Thoughts, Analysis, Rambling (20 January 2000)
- CompUSA, How Could You? (17 December 1999)
- MacOS X Server, Where's the Machine to Match? (9 December 1999)

Transformers: The Transformers captured my imagination when they were released in 1984 and I've never managed to recover. I officially became a "Collector" (i.e.: someone who's too old to be buying toys but does anyways) between High School and College when I started finding toys that I'd missed at yard sales.
Computers: I prefer Macs (see Programming History) but have worked with both Macs and Windows PCs in support, networking and management levels.
Science Fiction: Especially Star Trek, Asimov, Doctor Who, Star Wars & Firefly. I also enjoy less-than-serious takes on the subject, especially Futurama & Red Dwarf.
Photography: After my old digital camera took only blurs at my wedding I decided to get something a little more advanced, not that much more, but anyways. I had managed to take the occasional landscape that I was happy with before the new camera, so I thought I'd try doing it a little more regularly. Click here for some sample shots.
Monopoly: The one board game that I remember most from childhood is Monopoly - my family used to play it fairly often and I was always the car. I can't claim to be any great Monopoly Master but I do still enjoy playing and own several copies of the game.