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Thoughts from the Publisher

Seven Years and 2100+ Pages

Issue: 8.2 (January/February 2010)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: When RBD publisher Marc Zeedar was a kid he used to create magazines just for fun. Now he's doing it for a living! You may contact him at editor@rbdeveloper.com.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,523
Starting Page Number: 5
Article Number: 8200
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New years are always a great time for retrospection and 2009 marks a special year for me as I finally completed my first novel. I've always wanted to be a novelist but I haven't been dedicated enough and last year my New Year's Resolution was to finish at least one novel by Christmas. To my amazement, I finished two!

My goal for 2010 is to find a mainstream publisher, but in the meantime I've decided to self-publish the novels. I'm not expecting to make money off them, but seeking feedback and gaining experience through the marketing process. If you're interested in fiction, here's a little about the novels.

Trust, a suspense story about a damaged woman who falls in love with a possibly too-perfect man, is currently available in paperback (and Kindle format) from Amazon.com and my personal zeedar.com website. Protecting Claudia is an unusual psychological thriller about a man's obsession with his estranged sister. Her boss has been murdered, the sister has vanished and is a suspect, and the brother embeds himself in the police investigation to try and protect her. If you like novels with surprise endings, you'll like this one. The book is in final editing and will be available soon (it can be pre-ordered directly from me).

In This Issue

Of course I'm not just writing novels--I'm still programming. For this issue I've created what I hope is a useful class: it's an auto-saving dictionary. If you like to use dictionaries as an easy data structure for your applications, my class will allow you simply pass a folderitem to the dictionary to save or read all the data. There are some limitations as detailed in the article, but I hope the community will contribute to the class and make it even better. Please let me know what you think of it!

Our cover story is an interesting essay by Jens Bendig (whom I had the pleasure of meeting last summer when he visited the United States). He proposes that software failure comes from lack of readability in code, arguing that without a programmer's vigilance, over time code becomes less and less readable which leads to lost productivity and eventual failure. He has some ideas for solving this problem.

If you've worked with Photoshop, you know how powerful layers are for manipulating graphics. JC Cruz has a REALGraphics article demonstrating how to use the powers of graphic layer blending within REALbasic.

Finally, we've an in-depth article by Craig Boyd on better database design.

Enjoy!

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