I have had a few mobile phones in my life – from one that had an aerial that always protruded and weighed my jacket down (UNIDEN, as I recall); through to a small, silver, Alcatel, with a very cute alarm tone; and now the iPhone.  Of all of them the iPhone is the only one where I had the opportunity to program it.  That was never really a consideration when I decided on the iPhone.  I just wanted a phone that worked, and had these new-fangled ‘apps’.

My inspiration was when I downloaded an app for working out mortgage repayment figures.  It was the sort of thing I was calculating regularly when I was studying so to have an ‘app that did that’ sounded a great idea.  The app was disappointing, if you played nice it would work out the right figures.  But it usually had a random number of digits after the decimal point.  And any suggestions invalid data resulted in “NaN” or a weird error on the screen.  Fortunately the app was free.  It was removed from my phone shortly after.  (No, I won’t name the application).

So now I want to develop some apps.

This blog will details how I am learning, what I am learning and some useful links I have found.  It will, eventually, describe the apps I have developed.  My approach to software development in general is to break problems down into small manageable chunks and to solve those problems before putting things together.

There was a post (via Reddit) entitled “Software Dev Without Estimates, Specs or Other Lies” which resonated with my experience of committing to an estimate based on a vague notion of the solution.  Unfortunately the link is now dead and I am sure that software estimation is worthy of a blog post of its own.

So for now, lets say that the time required to develop my ‘apps’ is not important.

Next time, I’ll detail my approach to learning.