This is a must read.  It's pretty sad that it takes a foreigner to teach me new things about my motherland.  Neil Fraser is an engineer at Google who made a recent trip to Vietnam and found that Computer Science is being taught at all levels.  What surprised me even more was that he said some of the school work they are doing would allow half of the 11th graders to pass the Google interview process.  That's worth repeating ... 11TH GRADERS PASSING THE GOOGLE INTERVIEW PROCESS.  How many 11th graders in the US could say the same?  We need to wake up to the fact that the world is passing us by in terms of educating the next generation.  I for one shall be enrolling my daughter for computer camp as soon as I can.

Can't believe it's been two months since I last posted.  Things got busy, I got lazy, etc.  But lots of things coming up so felt it was a good time to get back on the saddle...

I'm currently working on a new iPhone app and starting to understand how difficult it is to build something that is both good looking and also simple to understand/use.  There are so many small nuances to consider since there isn't a lot of real estate with which to get your point across.  One of the most maddening things to get right are icons.  People don't realize how difficult it is to build great looking icons from scratch.  There are only a handful of apps that I consider beautiful and even among those, I have issues with the icons.  After revision after revision of icons from my designer, I started to scour the web for examples of good icons.  To my chagrin, the answer was staring me right in the face - Glyphish.  Here was an extensive set of beautifully designed icons that are so simple and yet so clear in what the icon is supposed to represent.  How good are these icons?  They're used by little known companies like Google, Twitter, and a small phone manufacturer called Apple.  The best part of it?  $25 for a full pro license that doesn't require attribution and can be used in an unlimited number of projects (free version requires attribution, doesn't include Retina Display version of icons).  I've seen icon sets costing four times as much that are no where near as clean and well designed.  Kudos to Joseph Wain for creating these and providing them at a ridiculously cheap price.

The good folks at Microsoft have built a great demo site to demonstrate the experience of Windows Phone. I have to admit, it looks very slick. Of course, using it in real life situations is another thing all together but so far things seem to work really well. One thing that always irked me about some versions of Android was that it felt clumsy and sluggish. Almost as if scrolling and smoothness were an after thought. Windows Mobile seems to have nailed the scrolling and smoothness factor for me. I don't know if I'd switch but I'm more likely to jump to something like this than Android. Direct link to the demo is below. Best viewed in a mobile browser.