Digital Life (23/9/09)

I am going to start a new section in my blog - Digital Life Afterthought. This is basically a weekly report summarizing on the content of Digital Life. Quite useful for those who have forgotten to buy the newspaper. Just for your information, I only buy The Straits Times on Wednesday just for the Digital Life pull-out. (And yes, I am pretty much a geeky reader on IT stuff myself.)

I was a bit awe-struck the amount of time I spent reading EVERYTHING. I was on the train traveling from Tanah Merah to Kathib (50 minutes) and I only finish reading 9 pages (11 articles). Perhaps that is a hint that I am a slow reader. I only just crawled out of the jungle of words just now and I am glad all that reading was over (for now).

The first article (dl says. - Making life easy) is an pseudo-preface to this week's special feature, talking about how software development is being more and more popular - specifically on mobile phone applications development (such as Apple App store). The article also give a brief history of mobile phone application.

The second article (feature - Take a bow) give us a bit of background into the inaugural Digital Life Singapore 50 Successful Developers. One interesting thing is that all the 26 featured in this week's DL are all men. Only 3 of the 50 applications are women. The person chairing this project noted that "we do need more women in the industry".

The next 13 pages are individual reports of each of the award recipients aged range from 18 to 45 years old. Some of them are students, one of them still in NS, some are directors and there is even a CEO-cum-SEA Game medalist featured. A few of the awardees have been featured in previous DL issue as well.

What actually caught my interests was 'Pet passion' and 'His trick lies in the pricing'. The former is about a Actionscript 3 programmer who has created quite a number of games including 9 from Neopets.com! The latter is a current NSman who created 2 Apple App. He is also a graduate from NYP.

The rest are the usual stuff in DL. First is a article about a local MMORPG in development that seeks to teach Singapore history through it. Next is a business article on cloud computing. After that are two game reviews (The Beatles: Rock Band and Aion Online) followed by 6 products reviews (I never read them 'cause I can't afford them now anyway). Lastly is the 'Help desk' followed by an interview with the president of Sony Computer Entertainment Asia.

This week's issue is quite a read, so if you can somehow get a copy (such as borrowing from your friends), I am sure you can learn a lot about software development and what it takes to be a good IT developer.