I just started developing for Adobe AIR like 15 minutes ago, so bear with me here. :)

I wanted a small desktop app that I could run in the corner that would auto-refresh and show me where my friends currently are. So I whipped up ‘foursquair’ quick. It basically wraps the foursquare mobile web (http://m.playfoursquare.com) and refreshes once every 5 minutes.

In the near future, I’m hoping we can make the app use the foursquare API (coming soon). Get the source (and let me know if you want to collaborate/help out) and get version 0.1 of the app.

From Don’t — The secret of self-control:

At the time, psychologists assumed that children’s ability to wait depended on how badly they wanted the marshmallow. But it soon became obvious that every child craved the extra treat. What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the Sirens’ song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification. “What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

I’m trying not to think about the marshmallow.

(Btw, I’m getting so much reading done this weekend at the house.)

So I’ve been writing a lot of code the past few months :). Some are just small apps that I wrote to learn iPhone coding. Others are hacks that I’ve been using for a while in various projects. A lot of it is just sitting on my computer taking up space. I thought it would be neat if I just open-sourced it and let everybody play (and maybe learn something in the process).

I’ve been slowly cleaning up recent projects and putting them up on github for everyone to download. Right now, you’ll find Emojicon (a hack to get the Emoji keyboard on your iPhone), Pickture (a HOWTO app I wrote for Dennis’ class back in the Fall) and Round Robin (a small experiment/game we ran at MobileCamp a few months ago).

There’s a whole folder of this kind of stuff on my Desktop — I think I’m going to slowly start sharing it all.