Sam Soffes

Web Services with Cocoa Surprise

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This week I have a talk at the first Oklahoma City CocoaHeads meeting. I was going to talk about transferring data from web services with plists. I spend most of the day working on SSConnection, my simple Foundation class for easily transferring plist data from a web service to a Cocoa application.

I was so into plists because at the Austin iPhone Tech talk I attended, they encouraged you to transfer data in plists because it had native parsing. I have to admit the native parsing is quite awesome. One method and everything is all parsed and ready.

I was using JSON (javascript object notation) to transfer everything with the JSON Framework. I had started switching everything to use plists. I spend a ton of time writing a PHP class to convert arrays to and from plist strings.

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Why I Do Not Profit Share

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As a freelancer, I get a lot of people pitch me ideas they want me to work on. On average, I get one of these ideas pitched to me every two days. This is great. I am always looking for something to work on.

Almost all of these app ideas are iPhone apps. I welcome iPhone work as I absolutely love the platform. Now that I'm doing iPhone work, I've had clients want to profit share with me instead of paying upfront. They have an idea they probably spent a few hours on and they want me to work on it for weeks and then share all of the profit with me. There are several reasons why I do not do this, ever.

  1. I am fully capable of coming up with my own ideas and then getting all of the money. Why would I work on the customer's idea that I'm less passionate about and get half of the money?

  2. If the customer really believed in their idea, they should take out a business loan and pay me the small amount of money compared to what they will make if their ideas is as good as they think it is.

  3. It is a bad idea for the customer because I will be way less motivated to work on something with future compensation that I may never receive.

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I Don't Have A Boss Anymore

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As of May 8th, I will no longer work for LifeChurch.tv. I am leaving (on good terms) to get out there and do my own thing. Everyone there has been very supportive of this decision.

This is a scary and exciting time for me. In the short term, I'll be doing freelance work full time. I already have about 3 months of work booked. It was awesome get that much work lined up just days after I officially resigned at LifeChurch.tv.

Most of the stuff I'll be doing is iPhone and web apps. The end goal will be doing Trimonix (my company) full time. I absolutely love creating my own software. Freelance pays the bills and is fun because you get to work with lots of different people and learn new things, but I'd rather make my own stuff.

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