2008: My year in review.

For the last few years, I’ve done a year-end post examining the past year and looking forward to the new.

2008 was very good to me.

Personally, I lost 36 pounds and for the first time in 8 years dipped below 200 pounds. I slipped a bit over the holidays, so have some make up to do, but confident I can get back to it.
Spoke at three conferences, FiTC Toronto in April, FlashForward San Francisco in August, and Flash on the Beach in Brighton in September. Conceived, contracted, wrote, and saw in print my next book, Advanced ActionScript Animation. Started www.artfromcode.com and put up a few hundred pieces of generative art. Launched the new 25 Line ActionScript Contest and had the first monthly contest, with over 90 entries and the winner receiving a CS4 Master Suite. Revived Wicked Pissah Games and launched Gravity Pods 2. Started learning Objective C 2.0 and iPhone development, working on a port of Gravity Pods for the iPhone. Spent two weeks in Japan. Bought a house and a car. Just before the start of the year, started working at Infrared5, which I can say without reservation is the best job I’ve had. Saw my daughter Kris start Kindergarten. There’s probably some other stuff, but that’s what comes to mind.

Yeah, pretty good year. In fact, when I listed it out like that, I gave myself a nice ego boost. Very good year.

So, where from here?

Who knows? The one thing I’m really excited about now is Objective C and iPhone / Mac development. Once you get over the initial hurdles, it’s a lot of fun learning a new language, with all kinds of new capabilities. It’s fun applying what I’ve learned in my years of doing Flash to a whole new platform, seeing the similarities and differences, and getting a deeper understanding of things when you have to do them in 10 steps instead of 1 or 2. Even my company, Infrared5 has some iPhone projects in the works, which is great. One thing I miss, coming from the world of Flash, is the immediacy of publishing. In Flash, I can write some code, test movie, upload it to a server, blog about it and the whole world can see it. With iPhone apps, the process is a BIT more complicated. 🙂

Other than that, no big plans for 2009. No job changings, house buyings, or book writings planned, but you never know about the books. I’ll be speaking at FiTC Amsterdam in February, and Flash on the Beach Brighton later in the year. No commitments to conferences outside of that. And I’ll most likely spend another week or two in Japan at my wife’s mother’s place in the mountains. Kris will start first grade. I hope to get down to my target weight of 180. Plan to continue on with Art from Code and 25 Lines for sure.

But you never know. Art from Code was a spur of the moment idea one Sunday morning. The idea for 25 Lines came into my head in September when I was preparing for my FlashForward talk on “putting the Flash back in Flash”. It was really only about 3-4 weeks ago that I decided to get Gravity Pods 2 done, and my iPhone development kick sprung from that. So ideas can come up quickly and change everything. Can’t really plan for that stuff, but I’m sure a few other cool opportunities like those will spring up. So I look forward to see what surprised 2009 will bring.