Warning: Spoilers This is a brief rant on Seveneves, Neal Stephenson’s latest novel. I was pretty enthusiastic about the book when I first got into it. To wit: People, people. Are you reading @nealstephenson’s new book, Seveneves? Holy shit get on it, I can’t put it down so you can’t even have mine. — Aaron Vegh (@aaronvegh) August 1, 2015 But later in the book my excitement waned, then became bitter disappointment.

Here’s the short version: I’m looking for someone to team up with, hopefully for the long term. Someone who can take what I build, and make sure the right people know about it. A “business person”, if you will. Here’s the long version: I’m a maker of software. I’ve been doing it for something like 15 years. I’ve built web sites, but nowadays I write iOS and Mac apps. I really love doing it.

Developer Greg Gardner, whose app was rejected in September for violated unpublished guidelines, wrote a detailed account of the process. App development is seriously difficult work. The competitive landscape is brutishly crowded. The APIs that developers use to write apps are complex and ever-changing. The tools that we use to compose code and run it on our devices are byzantine, unreliable and becoming increasingly more so. And even when everything is going smoothly, developing a high-quality app is a huge endeavour, best done with the contributions of several people with multiple skill sets.

While working on my sooper-sekrit project today, I came across a surprising hurdle. I wanted to accomplish the following feats using Interface Builder inside Xcode 6 (running iOS 8): A fixed-size UITableView, one that doesn’t scroll, but rather alters its height in its superview as the contents change; The table view has rows of varying height; Inside a UIScrollView that contains other views, above the table view, such that the full view, including the table view, scroll together; Using AutoLayout and iOS 8’s new Size Classes Turns out that it wasn’t easy!

I’m working on a sooper-sekrit project right now, which I’m hoping to launch before the end of this year, and which will support iOS 8 only. I’ve been enthusiastically picking up as many of the new technologies as I can, and one of the most exciting, to me, is the introduction of size classes. This technology brings a change of thinking for developers: we discard the idea of fixed-size layouts, and use the power of AutoLayout to ensure our apps fit a variety of screen sizes.