My Journey to Mobile Apps Development, part 1

With a new app out and the start of a new venture I decided that I would do a blog to tell my story of how ‘Tips Across the Waters’ and hopefully many more came to begin.

I have a background of many hats including musician, photographer, video editor/maker, Information Technology professional of many years, hacker with a range of languages and web designer/coder so adding mobile apps development feels a good fit. I say hacker at range of languages, I came to computers late but ironically paralleling a relocation to New York in the early 90’s just about the time the corporate sector began to think about computer networks in their offices. I came to NY with a number years of experience in television production from my years in Arkansas. While trying to continue that in some way here in New York I fell in to initially admin assist and then help desk roles which led to various IT related over the years. Off and on during this period I would pick up a language and try to learn a bit hoping to find a door to crossover from the help desk/support world which never seemed to happen.

As my kids were growing up Apple computers came in to my world more and more, then the iPods arrived, then the Touch and then the holy grail the iPhone. I began to hear about the mini-programs through my son who said to me about a year ago, ‘dad you ought to learn the programming language to make apps’ and having delved in to BASIC, then C, then C++, then Java some, then some stuff based in the Unix/Linux world I was curious what was being used. We both thought C#. The search soon led to ‘objective c’ which I learned that I already had some foundation for, that it was essentially a custom C with classes.

So I began self teaching myself in the fall of 2010, initially with a couple of books, Head FIrst iPhone Development and then the Big Nerd Rand iPhone book, doing examples and plugging in some of my own ideas to see what would happen, then I started to google more and find examples and tutorials and by spring of this year I began to ‘get it’ to a degree.

Coming back from a school trip with my daughter I had a breakthrough in understanding and began to mull over some concepts I had thought of when I began this journey, meaning ideas that I thought might turn in to a good app and one of these was a tip calculator something I often felt a need for on a personal level.

I began playing with ideas and some structure, put together an initial interface in Information Builder and thus ‘Tips Across the Waters’ began to be created though then it was unnamed and quite a bit more simplistic. I’m going to break this entry for now and continue with the rest of the story as said in the next entry, stay tuned…