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It being the new year, I thought that I would do like everyone else, and list sort of a retrospective of 2008 technologies that have been making a significant difference in my life. However, instead of only looking at it as if it’s a retrospective, I’d rather look at it from the perspective of looking forward, meaning that this is a list of technologies that I’m currently so enjoying using that I really look forward to using them in 2009 to do more great things.

So, here’s a list of technologies that really helped me in 2008, and I really hope that I will get more opportunities to use in 2009:

iPhone and the App Store

Obviously, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the iPhone. If there’s any one thing that made a huge difference in my life last year, it’s been the iPhone and the App Store. I won’t rehash all the things that make the iPhone a wonderful platform to develop on. I’ll just say it is, and leave it at that. I love doing iPhone development. It’s really returned to me the passion that I used to have for writing code. It inspires me, and excites me. As hokey as it sounds, I feel like writing apps for this platform is what I was born to do.

When the App Store launched in July, we had two applications available in it. They were iZen Garden and Tiles. Between the two of them, we’d spent about three months of development time building them, and were very nervous to see how they’d do. Would they flop? Would they be a great success? Thankfully, it was the latter, they were a tremendous success. This enabled us to create even more applications, and we later shipped Edibles, and What’s Goin down. These have made 2008 our best year yet.

As a result, in 2009, we’re looking forward to continuing our success by growing our iPhone business significantly. We already have updates in the queue for Edibles, and we expect to be updating our other applications in the coming weeks and months. In addition to that, we’re going to expand our product line and introduce new applications. I hope that by this time next year I’ll be saying the same thing, that 2009 was our best year yet – even better than 2008!

Ruby on Rails

In conjunction with our iPhone development, I began to work with Ruby on Rails. I have to say, Ruby on Rails is one of the best web development environments I’ve ever used. For the last 10 years, I’ve been using Zope for almost all my web development. I really haven’t had much need to change, and it’s really done a pretty decent job of getting the job done. However, my experience with Ruby on rails this year has caused me to decide that it’s finally time to dump Zope. So in 2009 I hope to transition all of my Zope based websites to Ruby on Rails instead.

You might wonder, what brought me to this decision. Zope has been very faithful to me, but at the end of the day it’s simply not been advancing to move with the times. Ruby on Rails gives me everything that I once used Zope for and even more. In particular, I’m really excited by how Ruby on Rails embraces modern technologies like CSS, and unit testing.

I’ve already written my own blog software implementation in Rails, and with a few more tweaks, I’ll be ready to deploy it. It’s already more powerful, and more integrated than COREBlog which is what I use here now. I have a secret project completely written in Rails that I’ll be unveiling very very soon. So overall, yeah, I’m totally in love with Rails currently.

Time Machine

I’ve never really been very good about backups, and in fact actually one might say that I’ve always sort of lived on the edge with my data. I’ve always had good backups of my source code of course, but all my other stuff like documents, settings, and software, I’ve never really backed up.

So, when Apple added Time Machine to Mac OS X, I saw it as an opportunity to finally have the backup system that I very badly needed. Thankfully, I’ve only actually had to use Time Machine’s restore capabilities a couple of times since I started using it. However, it gives me comfort at night, knowing that my data is safe and if I need to use it I can.

Additionally, when we recently upgraded a machine, the machine that we were replacing was using Time Machine with an external USB drive, when we brought in the new machine, we simply plugged in the old time machine backup drive, and chose to restore our settings from there. The new machine basically did the entire operating system installation and all of our software, and then booted up with almost no interaction from us required.

That’s the way that technology should be, it should just work, silently in the background.

I said when I started this that I wanted to talk about things I hope to use more of in 2009. Since Time Machine only really gets USED when there’s data loss, I’ll say I hope I continue to not have to use it at all. That said though, it’s nice to know that if I need to, it’ll be there for me!

Notebooks

No, I don’t mean notebook computers. I mean, notebooks. The paper, bound kind. When the iPhone SDK came out, I was so filled with ideas for applications, I knew that if I didn’t write them down, I would lose them. So I immediately went out and bought several notebooks and designated them for ideas, bug lists, to-do lists, and so forth. I was surprised at how effective it was to write things down as I went so that I could free my mind to focus on the current task by queuing up future tasks in my notebooks. I started off in April with just some lab notebooks from Staples, and by the end of the year, I was spending far more money than I should be on fancy Moleskines.

I’m particularly fond of the ones with graph paper. I find that they’re useful not only for taking notes, but also for doing user interface diagrams, or graphing test results.

In 2009, I expect to continue to use notebooks on a daily basis. I now carry a small one with me at all times for whenever inspiration strikes, as well as having particular ones designated for new ideas, and bug lists, and so forth.

So, in summary, as they say, “these are a few of my favorite things.” I’m looking forward to using these in 2009 to do great things.

The creator of “Lost,” J.J. Abrams has a saying about Macintosh computers, “They challenge me to do things worthy of them.”

To me, this is the epitome of a great tool. A tool so great, so awesome, so beautiful, that you crave to use it, and hope that you can make something with it that is worthy of the tool being used upon it. I feel that way about Macs too… and all the things I’ve listed above. They are things that are so great, that I want to make things just so I can use them.

That’s what we should all strive to instill in our own products.