build an iPhone app

I have an idea for an iPhone app for college students, which uses my recent experiences teaching them. The app would work even better on an iPad.

I’ve done software development for many years in many languages. The main thing right now is to get the time and learn Objective C and the specifics of iPhone programming. Well, it’s summer, so I have the time.

So far, I have an iPhone and an iMac with Snow Leopard and XCode installed, I just bought an iPad, I bought the Erica Sadun book on iPhone programming, and I spent this afternoon going through a tutorial on Objective C.

I bought my iPhone partly to see if I could develop for it.
I’ve had this phone for a close to 2 years and still haven’t had a go.

I’m not upgrading it – nomatter how slow it gets. Not until I have at least one app running in any state on the device…

I recon it’ll take me about a week to learn the lang and tools and maybe another week to get something really, brutally basic working. The first app doesn’t have to be flashy – just running and doing something non-trivial…

Right now this means I’m using my cheap, little samsung phone…

I really want to build an iphone app.

it’s a stick person that run’s

it’s in the store :) http://moourl.com/myworld

With any luck I’ll be receiving an email from Apple any day now informing me my app has been aproved :)

I have an iphone app idea that would be great for me to use so i want to build it for my use and send it to the iphone app store for approval.

i wanna make are iphone
who do i speak to about this

i wanna learn how to make iphone apps but dont kno where to start

plays guitar and drums

I have no experience at all, but I aim to learn to build an iphone app and get it in the apps store within a year. I have got the mac, am going to download the SDK, do the itunes stanford course (just search Evan Doll in itunes for info if you want to know about it.), get some books on cocoa, objective-c and x code. Very excited about this, esp as I am a stay at home mum of two, so have loads of good app ideas.

I heard about a kit that apple was selling in stores that has the software for it and tells you how to do it, but i havent checked it out yet.

I signed up to take the iPhone Application Development for Flash Developers here in Vegas this weekend.

Was a founding member of United Lemur.

Hi,

I want to learn how to make Iphone app and I dont have any idea that from where I should start learning. Need your help…..

haha

We are budding entepreneurs from Canada that are interested in your knowledge base regarding iphone apps. Our app. idea encompasses a wide user base that we think you’d like to be a part of developing. My friend and I had this idea six years ago and laid it to rest temporarily due to the lack of vehicle required to bring it to the world. Currently we’ve decided that the idea is too lucrative to program the app. ourselves due to being time sensitive. Please contact us through e-mail at: oz120lt@yahoo.ca

OK I have purchased MacBook, downloaded and installed the iPhone SDK, done a few hours of reading documentation….still not sure where to begin. lol

Ahhh…

I found this awesome website, http://cocoadevcentral.com/, which basically has a whole bunch of easy to follow neat tutorials on Obj-C, and cocoa, and it really just reiterated everything I knew into a very easy to understand short wrapper, and even explained things i didn’t know before, so it is a good place to leave off before i go to bed. Unfortunately, I have class in the morning, and won’t be able to work on it until late tomorrow, but i plan on using that website until i have squeezed out every ounce of info it has. Things are looking up again…

Trying to learn this is really hard. I’ve been telling my self to start learning since March, but I’ve only just started trying to do it. Unfortunately, that means i wasted the whole summer not doing it, and now that I’m back in school, I have no time to do it. Nevertheless, I won’t give up. Things I’ve done so far…

-Read about 50 pages of “The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language” from Apple’s developer site
-Read the first four chapters of “Cocoa Programming (3rd Edition)” by Aaron Hillegass to the point where it says “you have a fairly complete understanding of Objective-C”
-Read all the getting started docs on the iPhone Developers connection
-Watched about four videos from the iPhone developers connection

Unfortunately, after all this I’m still lost. I keep thinking “Oh i get it now” then try it, just to fail again. I keep getting stopped due to my lack of Cocoa vocabulary, and it also doesn’t help that I have no previous programming background. I usually can’t focus reading the dull documents that are so repetitive, but I think that if I keep reading them, I’ll eventually understand what’s going on.

Back to banging my head on my desk…

got to try to start or learn how to port web sites to iphone

Ok, so i completed the first step, of figuring out just what I need.

-I wrote a sketch draft
-Then I did a write up treatment with basic UI in a keynote. (i love keynotes!)
-Presented the app idea to my partner for feedback.
-Got some good beedback, and made alterations.
-Conceded to the fact that I should keep the first version simple (and doable) and simplified the app.

*now I will follow Busters lead and get to reading. I have no coding experience at all, just interactive UI design. I’m still not sure if I should be trying to do this myself, or pay a coder who knows what he is doing to help me. I hope to decide that this week.

sounds cool. i have minimal coding experience… but i have a good idea

It took a bit over 2 weeks from submission to the iTunes Store before it actually showed up. But it’s there now!

Here’s a direct link to its page in the iTunes Store, in case you have an iPhone and want to try it out.

After polishing up the icon and a few of the default screens, I’ve decided to go ahead and submit the app as it is to the iTunes store.

It’s a fun process: creating screenshots, writing descriptions, choosing a pricing tier, and uploading the final version of the app. It sort of feels like publishing a book, except a lot faster, and more futuristic somehow.

I put together the icon and default screen from some images I found on iStockPhoto.com, which is also pretty fun to browse around. I’ve never used them before.

Of course, right as I submitted my app, I thought of a new feature. Right now, it’s a bit awkward to include yourself in the games since most of us don’t keep our own information in our Address Book. There should be an easy to add “Me” option when selecting players. Well, now I’ll have something to add as an update later.

It sounds like it takes up to 4 days for apps to show up once they’re submitted.

I’m at a point where I think I could submit my app to the App Store, if only it would build. Learned this morning that the database I’m using, EntropyDB doesn’t actually work on the iPhone yet, but that they might post a working version of it tomorrow. We’ll see.

I finished the part where you can easily add people to games that have played before, and also a way to see which places a particular person has lost, and how much they lost.

I could work a bit on creating prettier Table View Cells for the scoreboard and the player’s games view, but it’s a highly functional app even in its current state and I’m anxious to just get it working on my phone for a while so I can use it in real life.

Meanwhile, I have a couple more ideas in the batter’s box waiting to be explored a bit further. One’s a version of Morale-O-Meter, and then I have ideas for 43 Things and 43 Places apps that could be pretty interesting.

I found a cool easy way to incorporate a database with EntropyDB. It’s an easy way to store and retrieve models directly, without having to write SQL.

It seems to work well, but already I can see that the lack of other kinds of queries is going to be a pain in the future, especially if I want to display stats or store games by lat/long and find nearby places. Things like that.

I’ve spent some time trying to figure out how to deploy my app onto my phone, but so far no luck. Part of it probably has to do with how Apple thinks my name is “Erik McLeod” because they updated my last name but not my first name. Secondly, I think I revoked a certificate when I tried to start over and now don’t know how to add a new one.

Other than that, I’ve now got the app saving Player and Game information, including place name, price of the bill, etc. It then calculates whether a player is “ahead” or “behind” in their playing… if they’re making more money by playing or losing money, and how much. Sorta cool.

Next steps:

• Figure out how to run it on my actual phone instead of just the iPhone Simulator on my computer.
• Option to let people easily select players who’ve played before rather than always have to select from the Address Book.
• Figure out if I want to display a list of games, or stats on games. Not much point in keeping track of location names unless they’re re-displayed somehow.

I spent another full day (well, closer to 4 hours) in New York working on My First App, and then didn’t think about it much at all while in Delaware.

Back at the Co-op today, I spent a good part of the day making some serious progress on my app. Finally, things like outlets and delegates and the navigation controller are starting to make sense and also become part of my instinct and second nature. There’s still a lot of referencing code samples, but it’s not with the same all-encompassing cloud of confusion that followed me around the first week.

In fact, I got my Credit Card Roulette app to be actually functional. It doesn’t save games or anything, but it definitely lets you play the game, responds to motion, and even vibrates when the game reveals the “winner”.

I found two potential bugs in the iPhone Simulator, which is otherwise pretty amazing:

1. It seems to sometimes not register a turn of the iPhone with the right direction.
2. There doesn’t seem to be a way to simulate Face Down behavior (so I’m just pretending that turning to the right is Face Down for now).

What I need to do next:

• Figure out how I want to save games. Should people be tied to their address book identity, or merely to a string of their name? Advantages for both.
• Figure out if I want to store information in a database or some other way.
• Think up ways to display stats on players.
• Figure out how to sync this with the Internet. Eric Hodel just gave me his creditcardroulette.com domain to use if I can figure this out. Awesome, right?

I have to say, this whole process has been a huge enjoyment for me. If you couldn’t tell.