So since my (somewhat) recent post on iPhone App Ideas, I’ve seen a number of site visitors apparently searching for iPhone app ideas themselves. If you are here looking for your own ideas, I’d recommend doing something no one else has thought of yet.
Oh wait, you mean you are having difficulty figuring something like that out? Yeah, it’s tough isn’t it.
Anyway, thought you might like to know that I do have some app ideas, I’m just not sharing them because I’m hoping to find the time to develop them myself.
If you are looking for some of what I’ve been tinkering around with, check out fictionalities.com — I haven’t worked on it lately (in all honestly), but I thought you might find it interesting, especially if you are interested in seeing some fun, artsy things you can do with just JavaScript.
Perhaps my favorite moment of today’s inauguration of President Barack Obama was the instrumental quartet that played John Williams‘ arrangement/composition called “Air and Simple Gifts.” The quartet featured wonderful musicians:
The piece pulls in a great American song called “Simple Gifts” — a nineteenth century Shaker melody that was popularized by perhaps the greatest of American composers, Aaron Copeland (a favorite of the newly inaugurated President).
You can watch and listen to the performance courtesy of Hulu, below. I have also provided the unsung lyrics to the clear melody. The melody comes out a little ways into the song with the clarinet — after the initial violin-led “Air” opening, an opening that keeps the song from being disjointed from the not-so-rosy-times America finds herself in. These lyrics and their “Simple Gifts” theme, however, remind us that our circumstances need not define us, nor are they what is important in life:
‘Tis the gift to be simple, ’tis the gift to be free,
’Tis the gift to come down where you ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
’Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
Covering two things I love: Christmas and Narnia, Laura Miller writes an interesting op-ed, published in the New York Times this week, called “It’s a Narnia Christmas.” Calling Christmas essentially a “Victorian fabrication,” she links the much-beloved Narnia books, by C.S. Lewis, to Christmas. The connection is not a difficult one to make, given Father Christmas’s appearance (among other things) in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first-published of the Chronicles of Narnia books.
I appreciate the way she appreciates Narnia and find it interesting to consider Christmas as a conglomeration of various traditions from over the years. Given C.S. Lewis’s appreciation for the ways in which the literature he studied did similiar things, that does make some sense, and seems apparent given the various literary and mythical traditions he pulls into his Narnia novels.
Of course, as a Christian, I necessarily see Christmas as primarily a time to remember how God came to the earth like even the least of us, to show us how much he loves us. When I read the Chronicles of Narnia, I similarly cannot help but find the often beautiful ideas of a creator who would give his life for even the worst of us children. I look forward to giving my children Narnia one day, soon!
, by C.S. Lewis, to Christmas. The connection is not a difficult one to make, given Father Christmas’s appearance (among other things) in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first-published of the Chronicles of Narnia books.