Clockwise

I am job hunting. I moved to Sweden over four years ago and have been freelancing since then. There are advantages to freelancing, but I’ve been feeling that re-entering the corporate world is the best move for my career right now. Working with other talented individuals that I can learn from, and teach, in the pursuit of creating something better than we could alone.

Due to the unfortunate recent passing of a friend that I often collaborated with, right now has become the perfect time to make the switch while I have a clean break. Lexikon development will continue as it’s a good side project that I find useful in my continued pursuit of learning the Swedish language. In fact it may become a bigger priority as getting out of the house more might help motivate my studies.

I’m giving the Stack Overflow Career’s website a trial with this and my profile can be found at: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/caleb. I am currently in Falun and looking at perhaps not relocating right away, but willing to be in Stockholm often (multiple days a week). I’m willing to relocate to for the right opportunity though.

There is a very rare bug that sometimes corrupts the cache of words that Lexikon uses. This makes saving new words not function. I’m still not exactly sure how the database is corrupted as everything happens on the main thread of the program, but for less than 1 out of every 1000 users it does. Thanks to the help of the latest victim and some luck with Google I think I have a method to handle a corrupted database, extract the data without crashing the program and create a new database that will save new words. I’m doing some final testing on this and will submit the update early this week to Apple.

I have also been working on my plans for a 3.0 version of Lexikon. I had hoped to get to this sooner, but Lexikon is more of a hobby project than a work project. It isn’t a financial failure, but it’s not exactly a success considering how much time I put into it, and the number of people who are interested in the app.

After Apple’s unveiling of iOS 5 at WWDC 2011 last Monday, I have decided that Lexikon 3.0 will require iOS 5. That means it won’t come out at least until iOS 5 is released. It will be a free update for previous users. It will be a universal app and use iCloud to sync the word cache between multiple devices. I am also going to be adding favorite words and a history list of the last looked up words. My aim is that between those two tools it may help you focus on words that you might be trying to learn now.

I’m also open to other suggestions, so please get in contact via email or on this site with your suggestions. I can’t promise that I’ll have the time or that I’ll feel that the idea ultimately fits in with the goal of Lexikon, but I would like to at least explore if you have a good idea that might make Lexikon better.