Sherri Cruz

I’m not a thrill seeker in the vein of skydiving or climbing the highest mountain. But I do like a challenge, and so I’m on an adventure to develop an app for the iPhone. I do have some programming background — learned a bit of Basic, Pascal, C++ at college programmed in the now-ancient COBOL language — but I don’t remember a whole lot except for overarching concepts. Despite the slight advantage, I’ve been a journalist five times longer than my time spent programming.

Anyway, Apple has all of the resources on its iOS (operating system for Apple’s mobile devices) developer site and so I wanted to see if I could teach myself and develop an app from scratch. I could hire a programmer or I could use an app builder such as a AppMakr or iSites, but I want the satisfaction of doing it myself.

And so the adventure has begun (the journey could take a few months or even a year) and I thought I might document my progress here. So far I’m reading up on Objective-C and immersed mostly in terminology, such as Cocoa Touch, SDK, Nib files and XCode. I don’t feel over my head — yet. I don’t plan to sign up as a developer, officially, and pay the $99 a year (what a nice income stream for Apple) until I feel comfortable with the basics. 

Somewhere along the line I’ll need to spend time designing the app (which will remain secret for now) — how it will work and how it will look to the user. It seems, as is with journalism, the more work you put in on the front end (reporting/designing), the better off you’ll be.

Moomins, just because.