Mobile applications have been available for many years, but it wasn’t until the introduction of Apple’s App store that the App industry began to gain any serious traction. In the few short years since the App Store launched, mobile applications have gone from being almost a gimmick, which served little purpose beyond novelty and entertainment, to being powerful tools that enhance people’s lives in powerful and dynamic ways.
While the mobile application market is primarily dominated by games, there are many innovative apps which show the potential mobile devices could have to change our lives; one such app called “Word Lens” allows you to point your camera at a sign in Spanish and it will instantly translate the sign and display its contents in English, and vice-versa. An App called “TuneIn Radio” lets you listen to over 50,000 radio stations from all over the world sorted by genre, location, or popularity. Other Apps, such as those for Facebook and Twitter let you stay connected and on top of your social life literally 24 hours a day. The era of being allowed to take half a day to respond to emails or Facebook messages is rapidly coming to an end as rapidly changing social norms now create the expectation of immediate and total connectivity at all hours of the day and night.
The Apps becoming available, and the technology powering mobile devices are changing so quickly it has become very difficult to predict what kinds of trends and technology will be in favor a few years, or even months, from now. However given current trends I think it seems very likely that mobile devices will eclipse personal computers in terms of usefulness and usage-hours sometime in the very near future.
Over Winter break a few months ago I decided it would be a fun experiment to try to develop my own iPhone App. I downloaded the iPhone Software Development Kit (which is completely free, but you have to pay $100 before you can submit your app to the App store, and you need to have a Mac), and found it to be an extremely powerful and well thought out platform. There is a bit of a learning curve associated with understanding how to use the software, and with learning Apple’s special programming language “Objective-C”, but there are a lot of extremely well made tutorials on YouTube and elsewhere that can help you get started quickly, and whenever you encounter errors or do not know how to do something, you can Google your issue and you will almost always be able find the solution very quickly on sites like stackoverflow.com or iphonedevsdt.com. Whatever your problem is, chances are thousands of other people have encountered it already, and the solution is only a quick Google Search away. Programmers tend to be extremely nice about answering questions, and helping people along in online forums. I have Goggled many hundreds of Objective-C errors and how-to type questions, and I think I have yet to encounter a situation in which a solution is not available online somewhere.
iPhone development isn’t exactly for the technologically faint of heart, but if you are willing to invest the time necessary to learn a new language and development platform, and you are looking for a way to change the world in a way that doesn’t require much start up capitol, I think iPhone (or Android) development is a very exciting path.
If you are looking for ways to get started, DO NOT start with Apple’s official tutorials and documentation – they are terrible and will probably discourage you unless you are already a pro Mac developer. Instead, go to YouTube and type “Xcode Tutorial”, then follow along and do exactly what the 10-year-old super genius coders are doing. You can learn how to make a very simple iPhone App almost immediately this way.
This is probably the approach I would recommend for learning any new programming languages actually, if you are trying to do so on your own. Do not start with official documentation unless you are a pro, always start with YouTube tutorials or tutorials from elsewhere. The internet is full of wonderfully helpful tutorials, and they can usually get you up and running much faster, and with much less pain than books or official documentation.
The App I was working on is mostly finished, and it has a relatively functional prototype right now, but I haven’t had much time to work on it in the last few months. I hope to finish it and hopefully get it released over the summer.
To anyone else who wants to give iPhone dev a try, best of luck! Especially for people who are into programming, I think it can be quite fun.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/App_Store
http://tunein.com/
http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/ios/index.action
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