Your friend's version attempts to ‘smooth’ your rhetoric and add what he takes to be an important additional consideration—that the applications you will develop will be appropriate to all conceivable users and situations. But he has changed your meaning.
Your version names three abilities which the courses will hone:
- information gathering and analysis
- information digitization
- development of appropriate applications
His version also names three abilities (slightly different ones) which the courses will hone—
- to gather information
- to digitize information
- to analyze information ...
but he goes on to states that you will hone these abilities while—that is, in the course of—developing applications.
Now it may be that he is right: that you will not get any better at developing applications and that developing applications is merely the context within which you will get better at handling information. Only you can determine whether that is the case.
But I suspect what has happened here is that your friend noted that you speak of three operations performed on ‘information’ and found an elegant way to wrap these up in a single coordinate construction: “gather, digitize, and analyze information”. And then he had to deal with your third ability. He wanted to avoid another and right away (this is called the horror aequi principle), so he joined this to what went before with a while construction.
WARNING: This replacement of coordinating conjunctions with subordinating expressions such as while or as well as or in addition to is a very common error in business and technical writing. Take note that these expressions are not equivalent to and: they signify quite different relationships between clauses.
If in fact your friend is wrong, and developing applications is in fact one of the abilities you expect the courses to hone, I suggest that what is missing is the relationship between those applications and your previously mentioned operations on information. Perhaps what you mean is something like this:
The courses will hone my ability to gather and analyze information; to structure that information in appropriate digital form; and to develop applications which will enable users to access that information in a variety of useful formats.
While is used only about a continuous state, and another event or state that happens during that time. It does not imply or refute causality.
The doorbell rang while I was making dinner. - single
I listened to the radio while i was making dinner. Continuous
When implies a causal relationship between two things: when X happens Y happens. It can be used about a single event, an intermittent state or a continuous state
Please come and see me when you are free. - single
When the red light is showing, you can't cross the road. - intermittent (whenever)
When we were young, life was simpler. - continuous
When as is used about time, it implies two events or states happening by chance at the same time
I saw her as I was leaving. - event
The doorbell rang as she slept. - event/state
The sun was setting as the boat sailed away. - state/state
As @Peter pointed out, as can also mean because.
The phone rang as she was sleeping. (time)
She didn't answer the phone, as she was sleeping. (because)
The best word to use in your example is while. When is not suitable because there is no causality. As is possible and clear in this case, but may be ambiguous in similar situations.
Best Answer
The only real difference is that in the first line you use the past continuous tense while in the second line you use the past tense to describe your actions with the car. The wife part is unchanged.
In general the past continuous is used to describe something that happened in the past but is still ongoing. This mostly only affects the flow of the following sentence. In some situations either will work fine but in others you may have an issue.
The implication is that the wife completed the task while you were in the process of cleaning the car.
Here there is no implication of who finished the task first or at what point in time the following sentence takes place, just that both things were happening at the same time.
Now follow that with something like:
It only works if she did not finish her task while yours was ongoing.
That is about the crux of it. "ed" denotes the end of something while "was - ing" denotes the task in progress. Both sentences are grammatically correct but they do have a slightly different meaning.