DigitalNeurosurgeon.com

My first neurosurgical iPhone application is undergoing serious progress. Version 0.7 is ready now, which includes content additions, improved navigation and -necessary, I think- a disclaimer. Below is a screenshot compilation of what it looks like now (click for large version):

January 2010 I will check the content with the head of our department, and then I intend to submit the application to the App Store. Content updates can be done later, depending on the wishes of the community. I want to get it out now…. for free!

What a weekend… after falling in love with Tweetie, I decided to have another affair. No, I don’t play golf… I discovered visual bookmarking.

My new darling I couldn’t stop playing with listens to the name Pearltrees. You may be familiar with Del.icio.us, the online bookmark sharing system. So you can get a notice what other sites may be interesting for you.

For some reason, Del.icio.us never worked for me. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like in my bookmark folder… haven’t used it since a year, it just looked a little too messy. And I really do like some order in the chaos, especially visual order. Like mindmaps, infographs, and so.

I discovered Pearltrees on the information aesthetics website, “where form follows data“. Useful quote, although the best one I recently read was from the Apple Human Interface Guidelines: “Provide solutions, not features”. Nevertheless, this article was more than interesting in my opinion. I created an account, added some “pearls” to it, and already now I like what I see.

And as they say: one image means more than a thousand words. So maybe you just want to compare a Pearltrees screenshot (full size) with that from Del.icio.us…

In the first week of December I did the course “Flex 3: Developing Rich Internet Applications” with Prisma IT near Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It is a combination of two separate courses: “Flex 3: Developing Rich Client Applications” and “Flex 3 and LiveCycle Data Services: Integrating with Data and Messaging“. And I am quite proud to present my certificate… as I do not know that much doctors who are quite serious into programming and software development themselves. To be honest, in neurosurgery I don’t know any (other) of them…

I really liked the Flex 3 course. Although I had some experience with Flex and ActionScript from the NeuroCards application and reading some books, the course was:

1. Good to refresh my knowledge
2. Very good for some tips and tricks you don’t learn from books
3. Excellent to discuss some broader topics on programming

Before I went to the course, I was really in doubt whether I should focus on learning Java for web development with the Google Web Toolkit, or expand my knowledge on Flex and ActionScript. After some discussion with professional programmers who worked with all of them, I am confident that staying with Adobe’s techniques is the right decision for now.

Flex offers better tools for visualization, call it infographics if you want. And as a MD in neurosurgery, I truly believe (and experienced!) the benefits of mindmapping to combine “left hemisphere learning” with “right hemisphere learning”. Besides, the ability to deploy both for the web (although it requires the Flash plugin, but it’s installed at most computers) and all desktop platforms (using Adobe AIR) is very attractive.

The one thing I am curious about, is whether FlashBuilder 4 (the new Flex IDE in development) will support iPhone development with ActionScript, as is published for Flash CS5. Oh wait, Adobe Labs has a post on this: in 2010 we can expect a mobile Flex framework called Slider (whitepaper) that may work on iPhone as well. Because I do not like the timeframe-approach from Flash, I really prefer Flex… but maybe we can work with pure ActionScript from within Flex?

Anyway, I am curious on this… currently I am finishing my first iPhone application and then I will quickly round up the second one. Then I am really looking forward to start working in Flex again, it’s just a lot cleaner than the iPhone SDK where DRY seems to be a way of life… as you notice, I do not like the different @interface (*.h) and @implementation (*.m) approach. And although I understand why memory management is useful here, I am not really fond of it either! ;-)

Yes! After working for half a day in Google Docs I have the “Procedures” category in the upcoming NeuroMind iPhone application almost complete. Some refining still needs to be done, but now I have 10 procedures in 4 categories as shown in the image (click for large version).

Meaning: added 8 new procedures and added all the categories today… happy about it! :-)

NeuroMind procedures update

After some struggling I found my way on Twitter. That means, now I start to like it. I find it much more useful to follow “topics” (searches) than people. Yes, of course I do follow some people, but more and more I get my information from the searches. Something Twitter’s website is not so good at.

I am a visual learner and I like graphics to keep my mind clean. So far I have been using Tweetdeck on my MacBook , but since this weekend I’ve fallen in love with Tweetie!

After upgrading my first iPhone version to Tweetie 2 for iPhone I was hugely impressed with what I saw! This is Feng Shui for my screen! Clean, easy to follow, and effortless to maintain. As the amount of information keeps increasing, working harder will not be the lasting solution. Working smarter is what we’ll have to do, and I am confident this kind of software is helping to do the job. It’s even addictive…

Tweetie for Mac

Just compare these Tweetie for Mac or iPhone screenshots with the same search in Tweetdeck. No words necessary…

And what did I learn from the tweets that I found so easily and pleasantly? Well, most important that the United Nations do have a mobile health platform… this may be valuable information for the future.

Second, Colen Publishing is also working on an interesting iPhone application, soon to be available in the App Store. Follow @MyNeurosurgeon on Twitter to stay updated!