Rewind it back a few years. When I was about to make the move to New York City, I started looking at apartments in various neighborhoods. I hardly knew the layout of the city back then. The only thing that was certain was I was drawn to the East Village/Lower East Side. One of my earliest memories of both of these places has a lot to do with apartment hunting. I would walk around the area, list in hand, trying to find the right spot. Often this would happen in the evenings – after work. I would take the train to that “wide, colorful street” known as Houston and plot paths from there.

One evening this past week, as I was walking home through this area (specifically 1st Ave and Houston), I started thinking about my first impression of the city all those years ago. For a moment there, in that weird spot where Houston and 1st Ave and 1st St and Ave A come together, where EV meets LES, where Katz’s meets the old buildings meets the park with the trees, I felt like un etranger.

I suddenly became a younger version of myself. I suddenly remembered how cold it was those evenings so long ago. I remembered what I was wearing. I remembered the excitement I felt exploring this part of the city. I remembered the places where I got food, the places I went into “just to see what it was about”, the places I entered to get out of the cold, the places I used as a spot to think over the apartments. And I made a note of places I needed “to come back to”.

I remembered how naive I was. How young I was. And then the flashback ended. I was in a familiar place again. As wise as I have become about NYC in the last few years, I still am naive – and young. In a way, it’s still the same cold evening. There’s still so much more to explore: some new, some old. It’s one of the exciting things about the city. I saw a tiny juice “shack” on the corner of A and 1st: was that there before? Why hadn’t I noticed it the last couple of times I’ve walked by?

I should like “to come back to” it.

I recently guest-lectured Dennis/Michael’s Designing Around Place class. I mostly talked to the kids about iPhone development — with some primer material on OO, MVC, etc. We wrote a lot of sample code in class (most of it got deleted shortly after class ended. wah!). Then I got to thinking that others might find this code useful too especially because there’s not much open iPhone code out yet (and almost _none_ in small bite-size chunks that beginners can use as a start). So I’m trying to package a few examples together into small working apps. The first of these apps is something I called “Pickture“. It will allow you to get an image from either your photo gallery or from the camera.