However, I am very excited today to announce the latest 2 apps we have developed which go hand in hand perfectly for Valentine’s day. The apps are ‘I love Her’ and ‘I love Him’ which offer you the simplest way to call or text your loved one directly from your iPhone’s home screen.

You can download the apps for FREE between now and Valentine’s day on the iTunes App store worldwide! – Here and Here

Yes I know, it’s a very imaginative step forward from our first app (Christmas Gift Finder), but it does boast a couple of new features as well as a few tweaks under the hood, and really it’s just a start of greater things to come. So if you want a little bit of help finding a gift for that special someone and you also want to save some money, then check out the Valentine Gift Finder app available now on the Apple App store for both the iPhone and iPod touch. – Oh yeah, did I mention it is FREE

Click HERE to get the app for FREE now!

The app is developmed under the name VerySoftware which is the name me and Sergei will be using for future iPhone (and other) apps we have planned – check out www.VerySoftware.co.uk for more…

In the past few months I continued doing some Azure development but put the idea to rest for a while after the Azure pricing model was mentioned (as I discussed here). After that I did various other bits of development such as a bit of work on an XNA game (which I should really get back to doing) and some iPhone development (more on this in the next post ).

Finally the big news from the past few months is I got a job! I’m now a Build Engineer at Lionhead Studios working on the Milo, I can’t really say much more but here is a video from the E3 Announcement:

Windows Azure:
O Compute @ $0.12 / hour
O Storage @ $0.15 / GB / month stored
O Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

Now at first glance this doesn’t look too bad. However, as pointed out in a number of blog posts and forum threads (such as this one on the MSDN Azure Forum), the actual bare minimum cost of running a website comes to about $86.40 per month. This is for a site consisting of a single web role and a single backend worker role (regardless of amount of work actually performed by either) and could actually be $172.80 per month depending on whether a single web role and a single worker role count as two separate instances.

Now for the project I was working on this simply isn’t feasible, I was experimenting with an idea and wanted to try out the data driven site on Azure as it provided the means to have an ASP.NET powered site with background work being performed as required, on demand and on schedules. Unfortunately as it was an experiment there was no guaranteed income from it and so would very quickly have become a fairly expensive side-project to be running in my spare time.

Initially I had paused the project pending any further news about the Azure pricing, but as you can see from that forum thread some details are not 100% clear yet. As it has now been a couple of weeks I’ve decided to partially continue work on the project but am currently segregating my storage and other Azure related parts so that I can easily swap these out for an alternative platform without too much wasted work… We shall see!