Developing the app - episode 1 - Try it yourself and then don't

Developing an app for iPad mustn't be that bad.

When I was 13, I learned Basic, a scriptural language and I used to develop amazing programs on my Commodore 64. Don't bother looking for Basic tutorial on the web, that thing is way too old for the net, you will need to get into history book. And Commodore 64 was a top computer back then, not some TV show.

A good old Basic screen

Anyway, I was sure I could do it so I started looking around for tutorials. I bought 2 books : Developing iPhone apps for Dummies and another one of the same kind. The books were all about setting up Xcode, the developer framework, for a start.

First of all, don't even think about developing on iPad or iPhone if you don't have a Mac. Apple doesn't provide any developer framework on Windows and even if here and there they explain to you how to set up Xcode on Windows, unless you are McGiver, don't even think about it. Get a Mac. By chance I happened to have one.

So I downloaded Xcode on the Mac Appstore which is for free (worth saying because there's not that many things for free in this story).

Xcode doesn't look too hard

Once with Xcode and the dummies book in your hand, you feel like Steve Jobs in his garage, well at least for the first 50 pages. Then it gets really rough.

Developing an app requires you to master Objective C, an object oriented language which is at the core of all Apple developments. I found two ways to improve my Objective C level (which was level zero when I started):
- iTunes University which provides some classes on the subject
- a website named Lynda.com which is focused on software training and has tons of really good video courses. I recommend the courses given by Simon Allardice on what is object oriented programming (mandatory) and objective C (really good).

Unfortunately coding is a full time job, well at least for me that's how it appears. A good Objective C developer is someone who knows how to re-use what's been developed by the Objective C community. And the more I digged into it, the more I realized my app was complex to code, that it would take me a year to succeed and I needed help. But having tried to learn coding, I felt more comfortable talking to someone who knew and concentrate on marketing the app.

I also needed to design the interface and that is something I didn't feel comfortable with. So help is all I needed but how much is it going to cost? And who is going to help me?