The App Maker

04:04:19

[DC]

what motivated you to get into mobile apps

04:04:38

[JG]

Interest, mostly.

04:05:18

[DC]

what did the app you developed do

04:05:18

[JG]

I was looking through different classes and there was one available on mobile apps, which I use a lot

04:05:55

[JG]

I’ve made a couple

04:06:05

[JG]

Let’s see

04:07:04

[JG]

The one I developed during that class was just a sort of little game- it rendered a procedurally generated worm on screen and let you customize it

04:08:04

[JG]

Aside from that I wrote an application engine that used the compass on an Android smartphone to allow you to move through a virtual environment

04:08:33

[JG]

It didn’t end up working very well, because the compass was really badly calibrated, though

04:09:07

[JG]

I also wrote a small app to scan through a webcomic and store indivisdual comic strips in an on-phone database

04:09:13

[JG]

*individual

04:10:03

[DC]

where these all on andriod based devices? did you build them using eclipse ?

04:10:41

[JG]

No, the class was on iOS, so that app was build for an iPod with apple’s Xcode

04:11:00

[JG]

But for the others I used eclipse

04:11:21

[JG]

(and a text editor and terminal, for when eclipse wasn’t working)

04:11:47

[DC]

Which phone do you prefer? and which dev environment did you prefer

04:12:19

[JG]

Oh, I just remembered, I wrote a security demonstration app for Android- it showed how easy it is to use an app to get user information

04:12:29

[JG]

but, regarding the question

04:13:14

[JG]

iOs and objective-C are very well documented and they tend to be less glitchy

04:14:24

[JG]

But they are also very rigid- apple forces you to use a particular application model and use data in specific ways- plus they’re closed-source

04:14:48

[JG]

Android is open-source, and has a very active dev community so it’s easy to get online support with

04:18:16

[DC]

back to your comic strip app - could you expose a comic strip of the day or allow users to search for specific comic strips?

04:18:23

[JG]

um]

04:18:39

[JG]

it depends

04:20:37

[JG]

they could search through their archived comic strips, and import all strips with just tags to search and only download the images when they wanted to view the comics

04:20:52

[JG]

harry.the.gilles: but I didn’t implement a web search but there was a ‘download current strip’ button too

04:21:57

[DC]

Pretty cool, so a user could create their own personal archive

04:22:02

[JG]

Yeah

04:22:11

[JG]

Sort of

04:22:31

[DC]

did you ever think about exposing any of these apps to the App Store

04:22:48

[JG]

Yes

04:23:30

[JG]

But I never really had a full app to put on an App Store. I usually just do proof of concept / practice work for myself.

04:24:02

[DC]

how much time do you think you spent on the comic strip app

04:24:18

[JG]

meh

04:25:08

[JG]

like 1 hour for the actual coding, fifteen minutes sketching it out, 3 hours debugging

04:25:16

[JG]

story of my life

04:25:30

[JG]

It was pretty spur-of-the-moment

04:26:30

[DC]

pretty neat that you could get a proof of concept pulled together in a long afternoon, how long do you think it would take to finish and publish it?

04:26:46

[JG]

As an actual app?

04:26:49

[JG]

um

04:26:55

[JG]

couple days

04:27:16

[JG]

Assuming I had money for hosting fees and whatnot

04:29:08

[DC]

that is what I find most amazing about the mobile app space given a good idea and a couple of weeks of work you have access to an amazing marketplace of potential users/buyers

04:29:14

[JG]

Yeah

04:29:28

[JG]

the most difficult thing is getting users to buy in

04:30:22

[JG]

They have so much content available that they really can be picky about applications and throw away applications that they don’t like

04:30:57

[DC]

I wish my kids were more picky about apps - they each must have 75 apps on their phones

04:31:07

[JG]

[JG]Heh, yeah, me too

04:31:14

[DC]

what is your favorite app

04:31:18

[JG]

Hm

04:31:32

[JG]

I mostly use my browser app, honestly

04:31:58

[JG]

also the Facebook app, the email app, sometimes a game or two

04:32:27

[JG]

Oh, and music streaming apps

04:33:53

[JG]

The best apps are the ones that are really intuitive amd useful

04:33:57

[JG]

*and

04:34:46

[JG]

If I have to spend a long time figuring out how to use something I’ll just go look for something easier

04:35:05

[DC]

Agreed I often talk about one very simple app at was well worth the $1 - it crawled all of the train schedules, you told it where you live and it would use the GPS to tell you when the next express train was leaving

04:35:41

[DC]

If there was one app you wish you had today what would it be

04:35:49

[DC]

hard question

04:37:24

[JG]

It would be something that let me accomplish something that is typically cumbersome more easily. Maybe a Wikipedia app, or an app for some other website that doesn’t work supremely well on a phone

04:44:57

[DC]

last question - do you know what you want to do after school

04:45:32

[JG]

Well, probably get something to eat and do my homework

04:45:35

[JG]

But

04:45:38

[JG]

Seriously

04:45:52

[JG]

Probably be a developer / software engineer

04:46:37

[JG]

Or a scientist - or an activist

04:47:02

[DC]

I think you are off to a good start - I certainly was not developing mobile apps at 15

04:47:31

[JG]

Ha, well, I have resources available to me that you didn’t

04:47:34

[JG]

Like the entire internet / open dev community

04:48:11

[DC]

well, you’re being generous. The cell phone didn’t exist when I was 15

04:48:59

[DC]

I think I bought our first mobile phone when I was 20 or so - and it was a big bag phone about the size of today’s laptop

04:49:22

[JG]

Wow

04:49:40

[JG]

Well, exponential growth

04:49:46

[DC]

Thanks for taking the time today

04:49:58

[JG]

It was fun, thanks for inviting me