Blog
Chronic Daily Migraines Suck
Before we launched this web site, I had great hopes for creating new software for the Mac and iPad. Things have not gone as planned.
First, there was a disaster in which both my Mac source code and the backups of that source code were destroyed, along with a lot of our other possessions. Still, I was confident that I could recreate some of the software since most of it involved graphics and animation programming that I’d been doing for my whole career in education and research. I also still had my programming notes, and my wife had not lost the background graphics files she created for these programs. Unfortunately, this proved to not be the limiting factor in my progress.
For the past two decades, I’ve been battling chronic daily migraines. The migraines were at first relatively rare, but with time they increased in both frequency and intensity until they occurred every single day! They eventually worsened to the point where I could barely struggle to get through a work day due to the pain, nausea, dizziness (and falling over every so often), and difficulty concentrating and remembering vital information. Every light and sound caused my head to explode, and focusing on any task was stressful. I could not sleep more than a few hours at night, if that much, or could drop asleep suddenly. I was exhausted most of the time. There were also other sporadic strange symptoms such as being unable to speak some words — I’d have to try to think of a synonym that I could vocalize, which can be difficult with technical terms — that seemed to strike a lot when I was lecturing.
Latest Developments
It's been about three years since we launched this web site and it's looked pretty sparse outside of the blog posts. Our graphics work has marched on with new color illustrations appearing in an updated edition of one of the textbooks we've illustrated. Unfortunately, my software development has been sporadic and slow since a long-standing illness saps my productivity on many days (more on that in the next post). Even so, I've gradually revamped two Mac educational programs and completed a totally new Mac application.
At the same time, I’m slowly honing my iOS and Swift programming skills so I can port some of our educational software to the iPad and then create all-new iPad apps. Once we both feel we’re ready to design and build a truly world-class Cocoa Touch-based app, we’ll submit it to the App Store. And not a moment sooner.
Why? We're iPad enthusiasts ourselves. Every day we're using our iPads for one task or another. We can't take photos of each other without an iPad blocking the view of our faces (OK, that's exaggerating a bit. We don't take photos of each other). We love the apps we've purchased for it. We highly respect other iOS developers. So we simply can't bring ourselves to add crap to the App Store. If you wouldn't be proud of owning our apps, we won't be proud of developing them.