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.

Things have been a bit crazy behind the scenes, and part of that is new branding and web presence for Clockwise. Here is a small crop of the new Lexikon product page that isn’t quite done:

I’ve submitted an update to Lexikon. While the current version was working fine with all of the iOS 4 betas, there was a bug in my code that was exposed via crashing in the GM build. Hopefully the update will speed through the approval process and hit before or soon after iOS 4 is released later today.

Beyond iOS 4 support the biggest new feature is easier searching, the search bar is always on the screen instead of scrolling off. In addition Lexikon will now better inform you when Lexin is unavailable, some stray memory leaks have been fixed, removal of Pinch analytics, a better default screen to explain how to use Lexikon among other misc. fixes.

As to an offline app I don’t know that I will do one. I find the Folkets Lexikon data lacking, you basically get one word translation and little context, you also don’t get helpful things like the different forms of words, important for those learning the language. I also looked at Wiktionary which has some nice information, some words even have pronunciations for some words. However the overall number of words is lacking.

This site has sadly been a bit neglected as in addition to working on Lexikon, other projects and client work I’m also redoing this site to improve marketing and communication.

I once read a report that sometimes telling the world what our plans are can satisfy that part of our brain saying we need to do something, without doing it. I think I can relate. However I don’t want to operate in complete radio silence. I am still in the transition stages from web development to iPhone, iPad and Mac development. Obviously the iPhone and iPad have been the most exciting for me, but if I find the right itch on the Mac I would like to scratch it as well.

I’m working on a 2.1 update to Lexikon. I can’t say for certain when this update will be ready to submit to Apple. The major feature will be to have the search bar always on screen as it is the main function of the app. There is also a crash to fix when your search term is non-latin and you try searching in the Swedish dictionary.

The next item in that arena will be to bring the Folkets Lexikon to the iPhone. This dictionary would be offline and contains 50% more words than Lexin. There is still some debate as to what the best way to deliver this is. Either as a separate application or an in-app purchase in Lexikon. I don’t want to have a bunch of products, but I also want to keep each application as simple as possible. It would’ve been easy to have a version of Lexikon for each language available, but at the same time the difference is very little. Folkets Lexikon on the other hand could be quite a different beast.

I am also going to look to make the Folkets Lexikon available as a plugin for the Mac OS X Dictionary.app.

I’m not certain what my plans are for the iPad at this time for Lexikon. The screen real estate is a lot and I’m not certain I’ll be able to improve on the interface elegantly to take advantage of it. I’m holding off until I have a device in my hands so I can experience it first hand.