Earlier this year Adrian and I started brainstorming and learning about iPhone app development. Anyone who knows Adrian a little knows that when he starts something, he will become really good at it and will not rest until he’s the best. It all started around April 2009. Since then we launched our first iPhone App – Tipsy through our company Zooble, and have many more ideas in the pipeline. 
Tipsy is a simple and intuitive tip calculator with only one screen. It’s very fast and so far has been uncrashable. We think it’s the best tip calculator for the iPhone, but of course we are biased…
The reviews in the iTunes store have been very good so far, so we like to think that Tipsy’s users are happy with the app also.
Go and give it a try and let us know your feedback!
We know there is a lot of competition out there but we believe that anyone can be successful if they are great at what they do and don’t give up even if the competition is strong.
The tip calculator was our start project to learn about the iTunes store and do some experimenting around search optimization. We are currently working on our second app and are aiming to become the best of its category. Not too high of a goal, right?
Adrian and I are just back from a trip to Dubrovnik (pretty but too crowded) and Montenegro, my father’s country.
In Dubrovnik we stayed for 2 days and walked the city walls, had some great fish and relaxed. On Sunday we continued our trip to Montenegro.
My father organized a really affordable apartment for us which we shared with my Mum in Igalo, a small spa town just behind the Croatian border in Montenegro. It once was so popular that even president/dictator Tito built himself a gigantic summer house. It’s now all fenced in and allegedly there are Rottweilers so I did not jump over even though I really wanted to see that rotting communist building.
Igalo was our home base for the 8 days in Montenegro. We walked to Herceg Novi, which is a few kilometers down the coast and it’s just stunning to walk on the promenade on the Bay of Kotor. Herceg Novi has an old fortress on the top, which in summer gets used for plays, concerts and outdoor movie screenings.
For a couple of days we were just lazy, read a lot and swam in the clear Adriatic sea, ate local fruits, hams, cheeses, olives, fresh fish and veal filled with ham and cheese and caught up with my family, who also live in Igalo.
But we had to see more. Adrian and I took the little car with the small engine that we had rented and drove to Skadar Lake on the border of Albania. Originally we wanted to stay there for a night. Soon we realized it was really sad there so the lady in the hotel yelled at me in Serbian when we changed our mind to not take the 32 EUR a night hotel room. We just wanted to leave that ghost village by the lake (don’t ask the name, but it’s the only one). The lake is hot and boring. The air is almost 100% humidity and you can’t swim in the lake since the edges are all covered in green plants.
So we left and drove to Podgorica instead, which is the capital (One of the last capitals without a McDonald’s I learnt). Nothing is ever really far in Montenegro, it can just take you a while to get from here to there because there are no motor ways, just one lane in each direction, often 3/4 of a lane for both directions.
When we arrived in Podgorica in the afternoon it was also kind of trist and boring so we had our daily siesta and once the sun went down, the whole city (170,000 inhabitants) came out of their houses. At night, the streets turn into pedestrian zones and there’s life and action everywhere. Action may be the wrong word since the Montenegrins like to relax over a coffee or a pivo (beer) but there was a lot of people-watching to be done.
The next day we drove to Ostrog Monastary that is built into a mountain, god knows how that was ever completed. 
Modern architecture hardly ever amazes me as things that got built like this one without hardly any resources.
Next stop: Cetinje, the old historic capital. It’s very small but has a lot of character and charm. It turned out that the receptionist in the local and only hotel knows my father and uncle, which was very random. Good job I was traveling with my passport that still has my maiden name.
Last stop of our little road trip the next day was Njegoš’s mausoleum on the top of one of the peaks of Mount Lovćen. On the side of the roads you can buy local cheese, honeys and cured hams, even whole pig butts.
Of course I bought some to take home, except the hams since I did not want to risk them being taken away from me at customs.
In Kotor I bought 1.5 liters of pure olive oil from the famous olives of Bar in the south. I am just baking a cake with that oil, it’s very tasty, yet subtle. We also saw Budva and Sveti Stefan, which are both quite touristy but pretty. We prefer the less busy places so we did not stay long. 
Sveti Stefan fisher village was supposed to reopen as an Aman Resort Hotel this year but local knowledge confirmed that these investors needed more help. Apparently a Greek shipping magnate has now jumped in to help the village to reopen next year. One thing’s for sure: even if the cheapest rooms there will be at 600 EUR a night, I will have to stay there one time.
One thing we noticed: The people in Montenegro are all slim. It’s almost surreal to see how a nation looks that has no fast food and hardly any processed foods available (yet). Such an exception in this world of unhealthiness but I guess this used to be normal. Oh well, but therefore they all smoke…
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, yes, there are ATM machines in Montenegro. In every coast town and in bigger towns inland. My mother was very worried about this before our trip.
View the complete set of photos here
I constantly bug my friends and coworkers to think about better food choices. One thing we started at the office recently is a weekly fruit and nuts delivery from a local CSA company (Community Supported Agriculture).
Raising awareness and improving and maintaining health is my biggest priority, but after seeing the movie Food Inc, I understand that not only the health of people who eat food is in danger, but also the existence and health of people who grow the food.
Food Inc. does not yet play in theaters across the whole of the US, but it should. It explains why fast food chains can offer cheeseburgers at 1 USD, one of the reasons being that corn can be bought at a cheaper price than it takes farmers to grow it. It’s not right that a fast food item is more affordable than a piece of vegetable. This creates an abundance of conflicts and problems in lower income and middle class families.
I learned that pretty much everything about the US food industry is wrong. The movie compares the big food companies to tobacco companies and how they used to behave a decade ago: ruthless, out for profit only and not interested in the people working for them or buying their products. The food industry has a big advantage though: it sounds so much more harmless than the cigarette industry; cigarettes are just so much worse for you than food could ever be. But is this really true?
This movie makes you wonder. It’s not even about the animal rights (even though that part also shook me on a deep level, but I always knew that slaughter houses and the food industry do not really care about animal rights), but it’s about how these gigantic food companies, many of them monopolies, destroy farmers and their families when they don’t play as they’d like them to play. Farmers get sued for no reason to set an example, the food companies know that the farmers can’t afford the legal costs and know that other farmers will keep quiet if they don’t want to get sued.
I have reduced my meat consumption. I am not planning on becoming a vegetarian, I am perfectly happy to pay more for a piece of a cow that was raised and slaughtered the way it should have been. But I have stopped eating meat that comes from these big processing plants because I don’t feel good now I know who I would be supporting otherwise. Now I know how they do business and the whole country should know.
Find a summary of the issues mentioned in the movie and what you can do yourself:
http://www.foodincmovie.com/about-the-issues.php
Check out the Food Inc. Blog with current updates and tips on organic and sustainable eating:
http://www.takepart.com/blog/tag/hungry-for-change/
Find out which pesticides are on your food:
http://www.whatsonmyfood.org/
And most importantly:
Watch Food Inc. – the movie!
I made this the other day as part of my healthy baking series
Companies and packaging try to tell you that what you are about to consume is going to be good for you. Or at least not as bad. Or has less calories. But why would any body have to eat such a mass of scientifically engineered foods as we get offered in the supermarkets?
Whatever happened to the cooking basics? I am pretty sure that just cooking simple potatoes, vegetables and then some meat and fish would be much more satiating and nutritious than a McDonalds or any other grease-soaked and nutrient-free chain restaurant food. Even a low-income family should not see a price difference here.
Yes, French Toast can be healthy too, whole wheat bread and canola oil
For several years my dream has been to educate people on how they can eat better and why certain things sound harmless but are actually harmful. In California there is a big awareness wave about nutrition and sustainability. Local, seasonal farmers’ markets are in fashion – it’s good to be green and live healthily. But what about the rest of the country? What if you drive just 2 hours west of San Francisco and the only choice people have is Jack in the Box, Applebees and the like and steakhouses that serve the cholesterol-laden corn-fed beef?
Trader Joe's sells whole wheat pizza dough - just add your favorite toppings!
People all over the US know by now that their diets are making them sick and giving them long-term health problems. But even if they want to do better, it is really hard with the big (nutrition-less) portions you can buy at fast food chains that are so affordable, it seems at first glance. But who is calculating in the hidden costs? First of all you need to eat more in total, because if your body lacks vitamins and minerals, it keeps screaming for more. Fast food meals don’t keep your body full for long, they are empty calories and your body will let you now that and tell you. These cravings for healthy food and nutrients are often mistaken as a cravings for sweets. And then there are also the long-term costs for health care when all the doctor’s bills start rolling in from a life of malnutrition?
I don’t think it’s ever too late to choose a healthy lifestyle. Let’s just call it a normal lifestyle. Just dumping sodas and fast food from your diet can already make such a difference. Cook at home a couple times a week, it’s not that hard… besides, family dinners are good for the whole family for a bunch of other reasons too.
It’s not about being skinny, it’s not about fitting into a size 4. It’s about looking and feeling healthy, vibrant and not being obese. It’s about enjoying life and being able to because you don’t have diabetes in your young years from eating (and drinking) the wrong things. Parents, feed your children healthily. Don’t ruin their future by promoting bad health and obesity.
Let’s just work towards going back to a normal nutrition, shall we?
A recent talk with my husband and a Sunday special on NPR kicked some thoughts loose in my head about the differences of religions in Germany vs in the US:
I grew up in Germany and we have only Christian holidays, so my husband was surprised when i told him there were a lot of people in Germany who get children without being married.
So he thought Germany was a very Christian country but I think most people are actually agnostic or atheists. It’s just that the kind of immigrant country that we were in the 70s (when my father came from former Yugoslavia as well), we mainly had other Christian immigrants from southern Europe (my father is actually Greek Orthodox, but does not practice it) and then the Muslim Turks. But the Muslim holidays never made it into our German holiday calendar, I guess there were not enough other religions to justify a whole calendar reset.
Since the US have been an immigrant country for people with any religion you can imagine, I assume that encouraged a non-Christian holiday calendar, even though I recently learned that in the beginning the United States were mainly a Protestant country (I was baptized as a Protestant too).
It’s still a little weird for me to get used to the US schedule and not have plenty of days to celebrate Easter and Christmas. It’s just a whole different mind-set in the holiday times. Christmas just feels better in Europe and I guess that’s where I’ll be spending my next one.
Adrian and I have been working out pretty regularly since January and consider ourselves ‘in good shape’. Then I decided I wanted to take it up a level and we joined a boot camp for a trial week, every morning at 6am for 5 days. It went pretty well, we had some muscle aches, the running was particularly hard for me and one thing I realized is that we were not ‘in good shape’.
My upper body and abs strength is close to zero and even my legs got a tremendous soreness after running up and down some big stairs in Russian Hill for many times (I stopped counting, there was no point). So I guess spinning class two times a week and a mountain bike ride on the weekend is a lot more than a lot of people do, but still not enough to be really fit.
So after Adrian hurt his knee a little in the boot camp last week (he was sprinting up the hill next to Danielle Steel’s house backwards in shoes that were not made for running), we decided to get back to spinning. 
Our gym offers daily 6:30 spin classes, which we decided to combine with some strength training afterwards and then go to work rested and happy. And every other day gives us time for having a life, too.
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But first of all, how do we get so out of shape? Why didn’t last year’s resolution last long enough?
New Year’s resolutions seem useless to me, they only last a very short time and put people under a pressure that might eventually not motivate, but de-motivate. In the long run it’snot enough of a reason to keep up what ever your plan was. I myself need a stronger reason to change something, e.g. I am unhappy with my love handles and want to get rid of them. And I want to become really good at mountain biking this year, so I have to get in shape for it.
Whoever wants a big result needs to familiarize themselves with working hard. From nothing comes nothing, as we say in German. It’s a shame that more and more companies try to tell us we can be slim and healthy without doing anything but a pill. It’s wrong. Why? Because working hard is not as bad as it sounds. It requires some discipline but let me tell you what – it feels really good too, gives you a sense of accomplishment. Many people are lacking this sense of accomplishment and get depressed. Just try it! You will be really proud of yourself! Why don’t we just go out there, anytime of the year, and change what we don’t like about our life and habits?
For those of you with a resolution, I am not meaning to de-moralize you. Go with what you have planned. Try to aim for lasting past the New Year’s hype in the gym. Right now, I am dreading to go there tonight because it will be packed. But I know that in 2 weeks it will already be less crowded. So that is my motivation.
Be stronger than the rest of them.
Recently I found out about another new website that launched in late 2008: Offbeat Guides. It’s a very simple and great idea: you enter your destination, the dates of your trip, your name and where you’re coming from and it creates your own customized travel guide.
This is especially helpful if you need travel information very short-term (also offered as a pdf) or if you’re traveling to a destination that travel guide authors might not find worthy to write about. In our case we went to a little town in Rhode Island and had our own personalized travel guide. Well, it’s not Offbeat Guide’s fault that there is nothing much to see in Tiverton apart from old battle ships but the product is a great start to the revolutionary idea of personalizing a print product only for you and the exact time that you visit. It also ensures you get to know about current festivals, exhibitions and other seasonal happenings.
For the future I would love to see the feature of being able to include sights and things to do within a radius that I choose. Tiverton, RI, for example is 25 minutes away from Newport, RI, a famous vacation destination. It’s also about one hour south of Boston, MA and a day or weekend trip to Cape Cod would also not be too far. Having that option to include destinations within a radius that I choose before having the guide printed would make sure I have plenty of things to do if my own destination is lacking excitement. Sometimes you simply don’t know what is just around the corner.
What a great idea! I will definitely get my Mum one when she comes to San Francisco next month. She is always amazed by new products the internet brings, and so am I.
As I was looking for a unique and special Christmas present for my Mum, I stumbled upon blurb.com, where you can publish your own book. My Mum was so touched that it made her cry. The prices are good, they start at 13 USD for a softcover. I ordered a hardcover for my Mum and one for me. (Her version was personalized with photos of us around SF).
Then I saw a ‘photo book’ that my sister in law created for Christmas and it was more like a soft booklet and looked pretty cheap. I am very pleased about my Blurb book in comparison.
Check it out and look at the preview:
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