Part of that is because I’ve left behind the sun-drenched beaches of Los Angeles for the slightly chillier climate of the Bay Area – San Francisco to be precise. Despite dropping about 10 degrees in temperature (5.5 degrees, Celsius readers) I’m very much enjoying the change. It’s nice being back in a city where walking and public transport are a part of everyday life, definitely an improvement over the car-centric nature of Los Angeles. Also I’m living in the North Beach district which means I have a huuge number of bars, restaurants and shops just a few blocks away, which is fantastic for those summer weekends and evenings

And with a change of city comes a change of job! About a month ago I started at LucasArts and so far it’s been brilliant. I’m part of a team working on something that’s fantastically exciting, but also highly highly confidential and several years away. I’ve always avoided talking about work here other than in the abstract and that’ll continue, but I do look forward to the day when I can say more

This of course means that I’m no longer at Seven, something that has mixed emotions for me. On one hand there’s some great people I’ll really miss working with, but on the other the last twelve months were pretty grim with layoffs, salary cuts, and the public lawsuit around our game, Scratch: The Ultimate DJ.

I think all of us at Seven felt that Scratch had the potential to be pretty special so having it taken away was hard, and not helped by then seeing our former publisher hawk the game at E3 or various parties. Or butcher our original concept art into a pretty horrific website. But hey, it’s their game now. I’m not sure if they’ll ever manage to release it, but if they do hopefully they’ll stay true to the game and it won’t be just another button-pressing music game.

Being bought by Activision, even with the loss of Scratch, is definitely the best thing that could have happened to Seven. I wish all those guys the best of luck and look forward to seeing what they come up with next.

On a totally different note, now that life should be a little less hectic I’m going to hopefully have a lot more time to devote to personal projects. On the Whiist side there’s a few things in progress that I really need to finalize so I can release a new version. I also have a new plugin for Windows Home Server that was part of Whiist but made more sense as a standalone item.

And then there’s the iPhone… Some of the changes in 3.0 while not outright breaking Photo Speed Dial have definitely made it less useful (such as the OS now prompting before initiating calls from 3rd party apps, urghh!). This weekend will be dedicated to deciding if and how I’ll try to work around these issues. I have a number of changes for Better Christmas List that I’m grouping together into a bigger release for later this year. It might just be me, but I tend not to think about Christmas shopping until at least September I also have a couple of ideas/prototypes for new apps that I’ve been working on,  hopefully things that will stand out in some way from the gazillion apps that are now to be found on the app store!

Anyway, I’m off to play the Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition that we just released