Sam Soffes

Litely

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For the last 5 months, I’ve been working on Litely for iOS. It’s a photo app for iOS designed by my friend Cole Rise that I had the pleasure of building. Litely is available for iPhone and iPad, in 14 languages, starting today!

Cole is an amazing photographer and designer. I’ve been following Cole since 2010 when I saw some of his photography as my friend’s iPad background. I immediately bought his Litely presets for Lightroom when they were released. (By the way, you should follow Cole on Instagram.)

Litely started as a set of photo presets for Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, and Adobe Camera Raw. They are very subtle effects that make a huge difference. I bugged him on Twitter one day to make Litely for iPhone and he was into the idea. A few weeks later, he hired me to start working on it.

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Apple Developer Tools

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Recently, my friend, Brian Minor, pointed out that only iTunes Connect and iAd Gallery are the only two Apple iPhone apps that haven’t been updated to iOS 7 yet. Sure, we complain about Apple developer tools all the time. Let’s take a closer look.

Compared to the Android tools, Xcode is fantastic. I plan on doing a more in-depth comparison on Android & iOS soonish. Anyway, if you look at any of the other tools, Xcode is fantastic. It’s pretty, generally works well, and is overall a joy to use. Imagine if we had to do all of this with Makefiles and Terminal.

iTunes Connect let’s you publish to the store. You can upload your app right from Xcode. We have team management in the developer portal. We can make certs whenever we want. There’s a lot there.

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Twenty-five

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Today, I’m twenty-five. A quarter century. According to this, I’ll live 82.53 years. I have 69.7% of my life remaining. So much left to do.

I set a goal to retire at 25 (which really means financially independent) about two years ago. While I still have to work, I have plenty of time to work on whatever I want. I don’t consider the goal met, but I’m on my way. I’ll take that.

Now that I’m older, I feel more perspective. I still constantly disappoint myself. I wish I was more productive. I feel like I can accomplish anything and then work on stuff that doesn’t matter or no one will ever see. It’s depressing.

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