People give Windows a hard time. It has a lot going for it, although “polished UI” has never been a particularly fitting bullet point for the operating system’s apps. I’m not sure why Windows developers have had such a hard time with UI… I thought WPF might change the landscape a bit, but it hasn’t done much. Hopefully the new UI changes in Windows 8 (Metro), in addition to the inclusion of a Windows 8 App Store (finally!), might get some Windows developers to design prettier applications… Time will tell.

I have BreakTime on my Mac, but I’m working on my Windows PC for my day job quite a bit, and I wanted something similar for Windows. I was appalled by the selections.

First, let me show you 3 break timer apps from the Mac App Store:

Breaktime

Break Timer

Breaktify

Now for the Windows contenders…

Scirocco …

Please read How I Developed Christmas Crazy Eights for the first part of this epic tale.

I was getting a decent number of sales the first week or two; not great, but I thought it would pick up even more as it got closer to Christmas.

The opposite happened, though. As it got closer to Christmas, the number of downloads dropped off considerably, averaging about 1-2 per day on iTunes, and I don’t even want to talk about the Android Market or the Amazon App Store for Android. Let’s just say that two hands were sufficient to count the total Android sales.

Somewhere around this time I got two 1-star reviews from people who didn’t understand that Christmas Crazy Eights is not a game by itself, but an add-on to a real life game, and that you need real cards and at …

I started this project back in September… I had the idea for doing an “augmented” game where you’d use the mobile device as a part of the game, but not really *the* game. The game logic would be with the players, and the mobile device would just add-on to the game.

I thought the easiest way to experiment with this idea would be to do an augmented version of the classic card game Crazy Eights because the rules are pretty simple, and it would be easy to add some additional fun things into it. Zombie Crazy Eights was my first thought, but since it was already September, I would be working on it only in my spare time, and I’d never used the Corona SDK before, I figured I better shoot for something more attainable like Christmas. Christmas Crazy Eights …

I just finished reading The Noticer by Andy Andrews. It’s all about changing your perspective. Things aren’t as bad as you think — stuff like that. It’s a great book, and the character Jones (a wise old man) dispenses excellent advice to the various townsfolk that helps them through some difficult situations. The day I finished it, my friend Sergei “Jonesed” me — on a small level, but I still think it’s worth mentioning.

I switched from Sencha Touch to Corona SDK for the latest app/game I’m working on. The Corona SDK is $349/year to build for the iOS app store and Android Market. The art has cost ~$200 so far.  I was complaining to Sergei about how I hate having to pay over $500 when I don’t even know if my little app will make any money.

He said, “$500 — …

While supplies last, I’m going to give away paperback copies of my book How to Find and Land a Microsoft .NET Development Job to computer science teachers for free.

If you teach software development at a high school, college, university, or whatever, just contact me and send me your name and mailing address (preferably your school/university mailing address), and I’ll send you a book!  (U.S. addresses only.)

Hurry because I only have limited quantities available!

The following post originally appeared on http://developerjobresource.com.

I’ve been reading a book lately called The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz, and I totally recommend it. It’s very motivational. While there are newer editions, I suggest searching amazon zShops or ebay to get one of the old versions from 1959.  It’s like stepping into a time machine. 

Dr. Schwartz uses a lot of terminology that was probably hip with the youngsters of that time, and it makes for a very amusing read.  He talks about the top salesman at the company making a whopping $25,000/year, while the other salesmen are only making $5,000. There is a lot of stuff like that in there.

The title of this post is referring to a quote from the book:

“Being licked is valuable if we learn from it.”

I know you probably came here thinking this …