Every now and then, the creative juices start to bubble and I find myself toying with some random technology … if not to keep abreast of the latest gadgets out there, in the vain hope that I will one day find that elusive killer app.

I was extremely lucky to be given a Rovio by J this Christmas: the play factor of this latest gizmo is still to be fully tapped, but hacking prospects look healthy, supported by a stable following of geeks (btw, what is the collective noun for nerds?) already soldering lighting and camera modules to the unit, expanding UIRT capabilities via X10 to switch on electrical devices at home, and the ultimate mod, an AD convertor relaying voice commands received via Skype to tell Rovio to move! Anyway, this prompted me to download the JS library and the iPhone SDK with the cunning plan of creating a little app to run my Rovio whilst out and about.

Instead, I got a little side-tracked and made a travel photo diary app called iPlaces – partly because there isn’t anything out there that combines Google’s APIs (Picasa and Maps) with WordPress mobile blogging, partly because I’m fed up of losing bits of scribbled paper containing telephone numbers and links to nice restaurants, wines, cool places etc … but mainly because I’m curious to see how many 59p I can accumulate through this endeavour. Hard work it certainly is – I can’t remember the last time I did any proper coding, and Objective-C (including Apple’s Cocoa implementation) is not for the faint-hearted. Having struggled with the decision to code-up some database routines in SQLite, I’ve decided to opt for Core Data instead – costs a tad more in overheads but life’s too short to be messing around with basic (read boring) classes and methods.

Anyway, below are 2 screenshots of the imminent app. Don’t hold your breath since Apple require $99 from me to join the Developer’s programme before I can place it for sale in the App Store. Not bad eh for 1.5 days work! 😉