The northlondonhippy

Archive for April 30th, 2009

With the mas­sive suc­cess of the iPhone app store, app devel­op­ment is on the upswing. I’m see­ing report after report about peo­ple who’ve never writ­ten a line of code in their lives, sud­denly try­ing to learn how to cre­ate apps for the iPhone.

Its sen­si­ble, as the rel­a­tive ease with which you can sell your app com­bined with the poten­tial prof­its make this a very appeal­ing propo­si­tion to many.

Per­son­ally, I haven’t writ­ten any soft­ware in nearly 30 years, when I used to have a very rudi­men­tary under­stand­ing of BASIC. Here’s a sam­ple of what I mean:

10 Print “Fuck You”
20 Goto 10

Yes, that’s about how sophis­ti­cated I got. And wow, did that lit­tle pro­gramme make peo­ple laugh. Things have changed a lot since then.

The prob­lem with devel­op­ing apps for the iPhone is the amount you need to learn to do it. It’s the steep learn­ing curve that is prob­a­bly putting some peo­ple off trying.

What if you didn’t have to learn anything?

What if you could piece an app together the same way you’d design a web­site or automa­tor action?

Enter iApp, the lat­est soft­ware to join the other pro­grams in iLife.

Well, tech­ni­cally it hasn’t yet, but I am tak­ing a wild guess that it will in the future.

iPhone apps are just chunks of code and APIs strung together, so why can’t Apple build an iLife style appli­ca­tion that would allow dum­mies like me to design appli­ca­tions for the iPhone with a sim­ple, clean and easy to use interface.

Just imag­ine assem­bling a list of sim­ple instruc­tions, the same way you would put together an automa­tor script, which are then com­piled and trans­ferred to your iPhone via iTunes.

Apple have already done this for music, video, DVD author­ing, ring-tone cre­at­ing and web­site design, so why can’t they do it for iPhone applications?

The short answer is that they can and if I was to ven­ture a guess, they are prob­a­bly work­ing on just such a prod­uct right now.

Think about it: they could com­pletely democ­ra­tise pro­gram­ming apps for the iPhone, allow­ing any­one with a good idea and some free time the chance to design their very own appli­ca­tion with a very gen­tle learn­ing curve. And if you think your app is good enough and would be of inter­est to oth­ers, you can reg­is­ter to sell it on iTunes and watch the dosh roll in.

Do I think this is com­ing soon? Who knows?

I do think some form of sim­ple iPhone app cre­ation will come. And its going to be a major game-changer when it does.