Author Archives: alankent
LiveScribe, 6 months on
Well I got a new laptop recently and finally got around to installing the LiveScribe pulse pen software on it. I had not been to the LiveScribe developer forums for 6 months or so, so I thought I would check out to see if anything much had changed. “Platform SDK 1.0 is out” – that […]
Early experiences with serious Scala code
A few quick notes on my first experiences writing serious Scala code. I had heard the IDE plug-ins had some bugs. For me, understatement of the year! The Eclipse plugin would not even let me paste in text, frequently would not let me insert text into source code with syntax errors in it – had […]
My first real use of Scala Actors
I have written lots of multi-threaded code in C++ and more recently Java. I have always found it a bit tricky to get right, but more importantly it was easy for someone else maintaining the code to trip up on some of the subtleties. All these mutable data structures that got shared between threads. You […]
At what age should we teach children to write?
I came across the article “Increased academic rigor in kindergarten questioned” in the “Early Childhood Learning, Child Care, and CCR&R Professionals and Forum” in LinkedIn. Its US centric, but raised some interesting points. Fundamentally it says that even 5 and 6 year olds can be taught to write their first sentences, and it does seem […]
Can you make money on Blackberry or iPhone apps?
Lots of people ask the question – can you make money writing apps for smart phones like the iPhone and Blackberry? There are certainly stories of great successes, but many more of disappointment. An app is written, released, great reviews are written, and the sales don’t come. It has been interesting trying to develop and […]
New site for iPhone reviews for young children – atouchoflearning.com
Just a quick note – I have moved the iPhone reviews I was doing to a separate blog available from http://atouchoflearning.com/. I have moved all the existing reviews over there and started adding new reviews. I am going to keep this personal blog for other misceallenous stuff.
PBS Child Development Tracker
This post contains a summary of the PBS child development tracker web site. It contains per age group from 1 to 8 years old, the typical developmental stage of the child.
Google App Engine versus Amazon Cloud
A quick comparison of the Google App Engine and Amazon’s EC2 models. Google App Engine is free to start out, no OS to manage (just deploy a WAR file), so less to look after – but less control. Amazon EC2 model is a box that you control down to the OS level and manage yourself.
iPhone preschooler app review – Wheels on the Bus
The “Wheels on the Bus” interactive book is a high quality book for young children. However, for some reason, Big-T (my 3yo boy) does not enjoy it! Go figure.
iPhone preschooler app review – Animal Farm
A good little iPhone game for young children that has photos of animals, sounds, a learning mode, and a quiz mode.
Alan Kent's Blog 