The World Really Is Flat
I have to admit to being a big fan of Thomas Friedman, both his New York Times columns, and his books, particularly The World Is Flat. In the last couple of days, while I’ve been been cranking away at localization issues, it became all the more apparent how much things have changed in the way people from around the world can so easily collaborate on software projects in real time.
I was going nuts trying to reproduce a problem with MemoryMiner when running under a Japanese system language, and after posting yesterday on Cocoa-Dev, I got the help I needed. This morning, a very nice fellow in Japan, who, after having seen the same post took the trouble to track me down on iChat. He even accepted to help get a Japanese version started. How cool is that? This afternoon, after a few rounds of IM with a fellow in Norway, I finally was able to track down a problem that kept MemoryMiner from even launching on his machine (hint: never assume that even System Fonts such as Helvetica will always be available).
If I get to meet in person even a fraction of the people I’ve met on line, I will be a very happy man.