I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about how bad 2009 was on Twitter and Facebook, and pretty much everywhere else. And while there were definitely some down moments, I’d have to say that for my money, 2009 was one of the best years I’ve had. So maybe your 2009 was horrible. I’m not trying to dispute that. I’m just going to politely ignore it, and go about my day.

First and foremost, our first child, Logan, was born this year. I can’t begin to put into words how awesome fatherhood has been. Watching this little person grow from barely being able to move, to already being able to walk a little in just about eleven months is incredible. Not to mention the personality he’s already got.

Then there was my business that I finally got off the ground, even if only a little. It’s still not much more than a hobby, but it’s paying my server costs. I’m currently working on version 2.0 of Logbook, and hope to get it out the door before school starts up again at the end of January. But we’ll see what my work schedule has to say about that.

And then there’s my actual day job. You know, the one that pays the bills. While 2008 saw me finally land a full time programming gig, it was Perl, and not really my first choice. But at least it wasn’t UNIX admin work anymore.

Well, November of this year, I found my perfect job. I’m working for a small startup in Boston. And while I’m working primarily on iPhone software, which I LOVE, I also get to do some Mac software. I’m working with a great group of people, and am really looking forward to 2010, and the stuff we have coming down the line.

So there you have it, my 20,000 foot view of 2009. And let me just say, I’m really looking forward to 2010 as well.

So, after my post back in March about Core Data being available for iPhone 3.0, I was asked if my enthusiasm for Core Data on in Cocoa Touch was misplaced, or at least premature. Well, now that I’ve converted the storage back end of Logbook from FMDB, which is a thin Objective-C wrapper on SQLite, to Core Data, I can safely say that Core Data is just as fast, and in some cases marginally faster.

And this time I actually have some data to back that statement up. Before I did the conversion, I added some simple timing checks to the code, and recored the times for loading table view cells using FMDB, and using Core Data.

If you look at the chart below, you can see that on average, Core Data is actually a little bit faster than FMDB, but not enough to alone make it worth the work of converting. The real win comes from the amount of code that you can just toss away after this is done.

Now, one of the questions I’ve had asked, is what about the agregate functions that SQLite, and therefore FMDB, allows you to use? The answer is tricks using NSPredicate, NSFetchRequests, and the agregate functions provided by Key/Value coding. These three features of Cocoa combined more ore less give you the same power of SQLite’s built in functions, and may even use those features of SQLite under the hood.

I am extremely happy to see this finally be allowed. I was ecstatic when Apple announced in app purchases back in March. But then immediately crashed when we were told that “free apps remain free”, and there would be no in app purchases for free apps.

Now that developers can use in app purchases to have upgrades from free apps, we’ve moved one step closer to the way most indie software is developed. We still can’t do time limited demos, but we can have feature limited free versions.

OK, so I’ve had this thought for a while, and it’s not going away. That thought is that we need a CocoaHeads chapter somewhere in central CT. I’ve enjoyed going up to Boston for their meetings, but it’s just too far to make it every month. So while I’d like to keep going up to Boston once in a while, since they’re a great group of people, I’d probably end up running the CT chapter sometime other than the typical second Thursday.

So, the general idea is start a CocoaHeads chapter somewhere in CT, preferably somewhere near Hartford or Tolland. On the other hand, location and time would depend on who’s interested, and where we can find some place to meet. So, if anyone’s interested, drop me a line (craversp@gmail.com), and we’ll see if we can’t figure something out.

I should have posted this yesterday, but the price change took forever to show up in the App Store.

Anyway, I just wanted to announce that Logbook, my fuel and maintenance tracker for the iPhone and iPod Touch is on sale to celebrate the one year aniversary of the App Store. It’ll be $0.99 until sometime tomorrow when I remember to change the price back. So go get it, while it’s cheap.