The day of power outages

My train to London came 10 minutes late because some brief power outages. The first piece of news that I saw after coming to the office is this:

Authorities were investigating a rush-hour power blackout in parts of Southern California, Arizona and Mexico on Thursday that left more than 1 million customers without power and caused widespread traffic jams.

The day of power outages across the globe? I will check the transits when I have time.

Working hard...

Sorry, I am keeping silent for two long, so wanted to give you a heads up. I am working on a completely new version of the Five Signs app which could be a completely new app, but I decided that it will be nice to make it available for free to those who has already purchased the app.

The new version will come with Facebook integration and a couple of very new features that I hope will make the app a lot more interesting for it owners.

The new version of Five Signs will initially appear for iPhone, but soon after that I am hoping to complete the Android version of it.

More on BlackBerry and Retrograde Mercury

It was announced that RIM (the maker of BlackBerry) recalls 1000 of its new PlayBooks that were recently launched in the end of retro Mercury period. This is a good example of how things can go literally backwards when something important is done during a retrograde Mercury.

Winners and Losers: the Difference is in Timing

Back in March there were rumours circulating that in the beginning of April Apple is going to announce something new, something exciting. I was doubtful about those rumours, because, in my experience, Apple is usually quite clever when it comes to timing.

The beginning of April wasn't a good time for a major advancement in business because Mercury was retrograde. You can read about the peculiarities of retrograde motion in the “About Retrograde Planets” article. Basically, projects started at this time either don't live long or prove to be irrelevant. They can often be half-baked, not very well thought through.

The time has shown that I was correct. Apple didn't make any announcements while Mercury was retrograde, except of the astonishing report of their financial results. That, however, was a thing of the past and so was appropriate for the symbolism of retrograde motion.

Only in the last days of April, when Mercury already went direct, did Apple make a couple of major steps: first the announcement of the white iPhone, then the introduction of the new super-powerful iMacs. Mercury was still quite slow, but there was an important conjunction of Mars and Jupiter in Aries on the 1st of May, very beneficial for an advancement in business.

This is an example of a winner, how they select the time for their steps. Now let’s have a look at the other side of the spectrum.

There we shall see RIM with their BlackBerry PlayBook. They managed to announce their new product on one of the worst possible days, on the 19th of April. Not only Mercury was still retrograde, it was very slow, and still slowing down. As if this wasn't enough, Mercury was also approaching the opposition of Saturn.

It wasn’t surprising then that the very first reviews of the PlayBook were very negative, with typical for retrograde Mercury “unfinished, unusable” refrain. Most shockingly, the tablet didn't have any means of communication, like email, calendar or contacts of its own. The proud owner would have to either use a webmail or connect the tablet to a BlackBerry device using a special piece of software.

If you are familiar with astrological symbolism, you will see how the opposition of Mercury, the symbol of communication, with Saturn, the symbol of difficulties and limitations, is highly appropriate for the PlayBook's lack of means for communication.

BlackBerry PlayBook was planned to be at least as successful as Apple’s iPad, but in reality it is a failure.

Does Apple use any astrological advice for their successful timing? Not necessarily.

It was noticed many times that those people who don't have a clear idea of what they want or whose plans are still far from being cut in stone tend to become very active when Mercury is retrograde, when everything in the world is moving and shifting. Somehow, they manage to intuitively select such periods for their major advancements.

It is quite possible then that the reverse is true as well, that those people who know very well what exactly they are doing are able to intuitively select for their advancement the best possible moments in time, or at least to avoid the worst periods. I believe that Apple and its successful development is a good example of this.

Lunar Diary

Finally, I decided to create an application that I always wanted to have myself, instead of trying to guess what other people might find useful. Meet Lunar Diary.

The problem with lunar days is that their traditional descriptions are often quite contradicting, and still I find it important to take into account lunar days when planning something important.

I know that the 29th lunar day isn't good for anything, but the 21st day is good, especially for traveling. Quite often I notice that some event is very close to the topic of the lunar day when it happens, but then I forget about it, and the valuable knowledge gets lost.

Lunar Diary allows to quickly write a note and associate it with a specific lunar day, and store any number of such notes. This way, the user can accumulate the personal knowledge and experience of different lunar days and use it as a guide - the more valuable the more notes are collected.

Love Oracle

Yet another experiment - I have created a new type (well, at leas for me) of an astrological iPhone app, Love Oracle. The idea and text belong to my friends from Media Cosmics while the technical implementation is mine.

The interesting thing about this app is that it has a very popular appearance and is very easy to use and yet it is based on some serious astrology. I can tell you that the partners' natal planet positions are calculated properly and then a certain non-trivial analysis is made, similar to what an experienced professional astrologer would do.

Works very well for me :) And we are planning to add more power and insight in the future versions. The price is symbolic - 99 cents - but might increase in the future.

Lunarium Mobile

You might have noticed that I haven't updated Lunarium in any significant way for a while. That's because while I was rolling out New Lunarium, my other projects were patiently waiting, and finally the time came to give them an opportunity to be born.

Mostly those are iPhone/iPod touch projects. A couple of them were completed, both are based on numerology: Your Life Graph and Life Path. Although the names are alike, the apps are different. I am going to make a separate posting to explain why I appreciate numerology so much.

Also, I was able to complete my first Android app, that's iLuna for Android.

iLuna for BlackBerry is still in development and is a bit stuck. I am somewhat disappointed by BlackBerry platform, it is so... 1990-sh compared to iPhone and Android. But I hope to do something for that platform as well one day.

Nokia with its adoption of Qt begins to look interesting but Qt licensing isn't very exciting I'd say, at least for now.

I was planning to develop for Windows Mobile one day but it seems to be slowly dying now.

Palm Pre is an interesting platform but it doesn't allow native development, as far as I understand, and my astrological calculations just cannot be made in JavaScript.

I have another two already started iPhone projects to complete, and then I promised to port Hours to Android. Then I will put more effort into developing the website. Then I will do a round of updates for iPhone: iLuna 2.0, Hours 2.0...

If only I had more time... Keep in touch!