The first foray into NoSQL and my tools list

This week, I dipped my toes into the NoSQL world. Currently, I’m evaluating MongoDB for a project. It’s amazing that people are thinking this is new and revolutionary. I was doing this stuff in the late 80s with PICK, Universe, UniData, Revelation and a number of other “post-relational” databases. Back then, it was all green (or amber) VT100 screens. That, I don’t miss one bit. With Mongo, I can use a native Java client, which is a huge plus. I’m hoping to have a prototype done in the next couple of weeks. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

One of the biggest pieces of news from the iPhone front this week was Apple is now allowing in-app purchases inside of free applications. To me, this is probably one of the biggest pieces of news for the year. After building free and paid versions of an app for a client, I see how much of a pain it is to do. However, I think there will still be legitimate cases where you want free and paid versions of an app. Looking forward to trying this one out soon as well.

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks localizing an iPhone app into French.  Through that process, I’ve decided that my new process for writing applications will be to localize in the initial stages of development. It doesn’t take an extra time and it actually makes my code look a lot cleaner by extracting all the app copy to a file. Why didn’t I think of this before? Forest for the trees.

This weekend, I’m putting the finishing touches on the talk I’m giving at the Charlotte JUG on Wednesday night on iPhone Development with RESTful Java Web services. If you are in the Charlotte area, please come on down to CPCC downtown and check out the presentation. As an added incentive, there’s free food as well 🙂

A number of people have asked me what tools I use to do my work on a day to day basis. I’ve listed them below in no certain order.

Mac:

• TextWrangler
• AppViz
• Xcode
• Cyberduck
• NetNewsWire
• Nambu
• VMware Fusion
• Parallels
• Audio Hijack Pro
• Carbon Copy Cloner
• Chicken of the VNC
• Handbrake
• iTerm
• iWork ‘09
• MacSpeech Dictate
• MAMP
• MindNode Pro
• svnX

Windows:

• Ultraedit
• SQLyog Enterprise
• WinSCP
• QuickBooks
• Putty
• Chrome
• Mp3tag
• Macrium Reflect
• Vopt
• TortoiseSVN
• Cygwin
• Cucusoft Video Converter
• IrfanView
• SnagIt
• Xenu’s Link Sleuth
• CSE HTML Validator
• MindManager

Both:

• VLC
• Audacity
• Evernote
• Eclipse
• Firefox
• Skype
• JungleDisk
• Filezilla
• OpenOffice (on the Mac, I actually use NeoOffice
• GotoMeeting/GotoWebinar
• Remember The Milk
• Minute7
• Google Apps (for email, calendaring and documents)

I’m sure I have a handful of other programs that I do use, but these are the core. If you have any suggestions of any apps I should be using, post a comment below.

Thanks for dropping by today. Now, back to polishing the presentation. Have a great day!