This year I am publicly stating a single goal, although of course I have many other things I want to accomplish during the year, I am only publicly documenting one goal.
Goal: Produce one application for the iOS platform, and sell at least one copy in the iTunes App Store (to preferably not me, or someone I know, but this will suffice if it’s Dec. 31st 2012 at 11:59pm.)
iOS applications are built using Objective-C with Apple’s robust Cocoa framework. It’s an object oriented programming language, with syntax structure possibly a bit more advanced than other OOPs.
So why iOS? I believe Apple has the largest existing framework for mobile development. Meaning that I could build cooler programs in less time, and also they have a vibrant development community, and consumer community. And of course, developing for mobile is an exciting platform, as the mobile (Phone + Tablet) experience is the most diverse experience.
Thus I’m starting out trying to learn C, the basis of Objective-C, and Java, a general OOP language, that is used in many introductory programming resources.
I have a good career in producing video content, so why am I planning on dedicating so much of my free time to learning how to develop an iOS application? Well, there is a saying going around “Program or be Programmed”, and I want to learn how to program.
This is the first application that I built, a simple drawing application. It was built in the Flash environment, built in Flashes OOP language, ActionScript. I built this web app in 2010.
Also, there is the documented ’10,000′ hour rule of becomming an expert, as reviewed in Gladwell’s book ‘Outliers’. Meaning that I would have to dedicate about 10 years to become an ‘expert’. That’s the plan anyways.
It will be fun to document my journey here. I don’t think I will have a viable application to share until December, as I want it to be cool. And that will take time. But I’m planning to allocate at least on average about 2 hours a day to my education of programming. And I might eventually post some ‘learning applications’ that I develop along my journey. My end goal is not to necessarily become a ‘software engineer’, but more become a programming expert on how to use coding as an artform to help define our future medium. How can one consider themselves a New Media Producer without being knowledgeable in the platform itself is not known. So if I become a software engineer of sorts in the process, it will be through the goal of wanting to help build platforms to experience and deliver content. I’m interested in helping design programs, and the interfaces that we use to consume media.
But basically I just want to be able to produce, design, and build cool stuff.