I didn’t expect a fast response to my job inquiries since they were made in the middle of the Swedish summer. When winter is as long and dark as it is in Sweden, you really need that long summer vacation to recharge for the coming year. Still even during summer companies are hungry to fill positions. I quickly had two interviews lined up for the next Monday in Stockholm. I had some other potentials, but I decided to take these two most promising leads first and then, as needed, follow up on other opportunities.

My first interview went as well as an interview can go, exciting opportunity that matched my skills, experience and interests and a good feeling about work conditions and expectations. It also ended in a verbal offer being extended which is always nice to leave with.

The second interview was rocky. The position wasn’t really what I ideally wanted to do, but the opportunity was too intriguing to not at least take a closer look. There wasn’t anything surprising about the interview, but I was maybe a little rusty and it was my first textbook programmer position interview. While I’m still completely aware of Big O, it’s been so long since I’ve had to explain or define it that I stumbled, and I was afraid that the question wasn’t so simple so I spent a bit of time nervously parsing the questions. Perhaps the most annoying part was that the position described to me seemed to only require the small bits of computer science of using the right tool for the job, array vs. hash, etc. It also was a bit of a wake up call when questions that I used to think were good barometers proved to be outdated. I don’t really read any programming blogs anymore. I still have 100+ blogs I’m subscribed to, but posts are infrequent, if at all. In the age of Twitter and link aggregation sites like Hacker News or Reddit /r/programming it’s easier to let good things bubble up rather than necessarily worrying about my news reader.

Both companies have a good business model that I feel adds value. Indeed it was really interesting in the case of the second company. However after the interview I just wasn’t sure that I was a good fit, the CTO was interested in the esoteric parts of computer science, which also created this dissonance in that I felt the company’s business model and value didn’t rely much on technology to solve the problem, once it was scaled properly the real value was analytics and statistics. That made it even more interesting to me since I feel pure computer science doesn’t mean much, you need to apply it somehow to really make the magic happen.

It is a big change to re-enter the world of the employed. Especially since this is the first Swedish company I am working for, and being based in Stockholm I’m now weekly commuting until my wife and I figure out longer-term plans, besides Stockholm’s housing market is not easily entered overnight. Indeed I spent my first month of work sleeping at a hotel and with family in the area. Now I have a room in a friend’s house that can serve as long as I need it.

My consulting has essentially been shut down. I have some existing clients I want to take care, but I’m shying away from bigger projects for my own benefit, that of my employer’s and the client’s. Lexikon is still a side project for me, and things will probably only get better as I’m now out interacting in Swedish more, I’m working full-time on iOS stuff, and work and home are segregated cleanly. I don’t want to make too many promises, but Lexikon 3.0 will be a universal app, and contain lots of goodies for those who upgrade to iOS 5.

Due to the unfortunate recent passing of a friend that I often collaborated with, right now has become the perfect time to make the switch while I have a clean break. Lexikon development will continue as it’s a good side project that I find useful in my continued pursuit of learning the Swedish language. In fact it may become a bigger priority as getting out of the house more might help motivate my studies.

I’m giving the Stack Overflow Career’s website a trial with this and my profile can be found at: http://careers.stackoverflow.com/caleb. I am currently in Falun and looking at perhaps not relocating right away, but willing to be in Stockholm often (multiple days a week). I’m willing to relocate to for the right opportunity though.

I have also been working on my plans for a 3.0 version of Lexikon. I had hoped to get to this sooner, but Lexikon is more of a hobby project than a work project. It isn’t a financial failure, but it’s not exactly a success considering how much time I put into it, and the number of people who are interested in the app.

After Apple’s unveiling of iOS 5 at WWDC 2011 last Monday, I have decided that Lexikon 3.0 will require iOS 5. That means it won’t come out at least until iOS 5 is released. It will be a free update for previous users. It will be a universal app and use iCloud to sync the word cache between multiple devices. I am also going to be adding favorite words and a history list of the last looked up words. My aim is that between those two tools it may help you focus on words that you might be trying to learn now.

I’m also open to other suggestions, so please get in contact via email or on this site with your suggestions. I can’t promise that I’ll have the time or that I’ll feel that the idea ultimately fits in with the goal of Lexikon, but I would like to at least explore if you have a good idea that might make Lexikon better.

Update: Lexikon 2.5.5 was approved and is available via the App Store.

Update: I received word on Tuesday that the update has been marked as a priority review for critical updates. Hopefully it will be approved later today or tomorrow.

Update 2: The update has been approved and is being processed for the App Store. It should appear within about an hour.

Beyond iOS 4 support the biggest new feature is easier searching, the search bar is always on the screen instead of scrolling off. In addition Lexikon will now better inform you when Lexin is unavailable, some stray memory leaks have been fixed, removal of Pinch analytics, a better default screen to explain how to use Lexikon among other misc. fixes.

As to an offline app I don’t know that I will do one. I find the Folkets Lexikon data lacking, you basically get one word translation and little context, you also don’t get helpful things like the different forms of words, important for those learning the language. I also looked at Wiktionary which has some nice information, some words even have pronunciations for some words. However the overall number of words is lacking.

This site has sadly been a bit neglected as in addition to working on Lexikon, other projects and client work I’m also redoing this site to improve marketing and communication.

I’m working on a 2.1 update to Lexikon. I can’t say for certain when this update will be ready to submit to Apple. The major feature will be to have the search bar always on screen as it is the main function of the app. There is also a crash to fix when your search term is non-latin and you try searching in the Swedish dictionary.

The next item in that arena will be to bring the Folkets Lexikon to the iPhone. This dictionary would be offline and contains 50% more words than Lexin. There is still some debate as to what the best way to deliver this is. Either as a separate application or an in-app purchase in Lexikon. I don’t want to have a bunch of products, but I also want to keep each application as simple as possible. It would’ve been easy to have a version of Lexikon for each language available, but at the same time the difference is very little. Folkets Lexikon on the other hand could be quite a different beast.

I am also going to look to make the Folkets Lexikon available as a plugin for the Mac OS X Dictionary.app.

I’m not certain what my plans are for the iPad at this time for Lexikon. The screen real estate is a lot and I’m not certain I’ll be able to improve on the interface elegantly to take advantage of it. I’m holding off until I have a device in my hands so I can experience it first hand.

There are many improvements in this release. The application does a better job of remembering where you were and getting you back to that state. Term figures are now cached for later viewing in addition to the words, these are the bildtema you might see linked in a word’s definition. It’s easier to find the word you want as you will be presented with suggested corrections if the term you enter is not found. If Lexin can tell what word you meant if will automatically correct it and load the definition. The number of words in the list is now in the table footer. Lexin’s Swedish dictionary is supported now. In addition support for almost all the languages in Lexin: Albanian, Arabic, Bosnian, Croatian, Finnish, Greek, Kurmanji, Russian, Serbian (Latin & Cyrillic), Somali, Spanish and Turkish.

Next I will be tackling putting the Folkets Lexikon into an application. This app will be separate from Lexikon, only have English, have over 50% more words (Lexin has about 28,500 English words and Folkets Lexikon has over 46,000 word pairs). I have no ETA on this as there are still many things to work out, especially that it is indeed feasible to do as an application.

Update: After three days Apple has approved Lexikon 2.0 and it is available on the App Store.

Update 2: A small bug was found with selecting words from the filtered search list. An update has been built, tested and sent to Apple.