Around the beginning of the year i decided i wanted to learn a bit of coding. I’ve always had lots of ideas for apps that haven’t been made, or would never be made. So i set out with an idea for something i could use, though unfortunately won’t be much good to many people. When it’s released soon, i expect even with some minimal word of mouth advertising on websites a handful of people will download it. However, going through the paces of creating it i’ve learned a lot as it’s not a simple “hello world” application.
i started out by spending a couple bones on an old macbook, since apple only lets you program for xcode with it’s own OS. I hadn’t touched a mac since middle school. I had to learn everything from the ground up, how to install, launch, and delete programs.. copy and paste? Took me a good week to stop doing it with the control key how its done in windows.
So i started pouring myself into forums and tutorials wherever i could find online. I made a small amount of progress that way, but a lot of it still didn’t make sense to me, and if i tried to put the small pieces together, they often broke the program or didn’t communicate with each other when it was compiling.
So i got some books, I decided I’d stop trying to cheat the system and learn things in a more conventional way, mostly. I went though all the baby steps i’d passed up starting this whole thing, and suddenly as I finished a few chapters things started to make more sense. I started over from the beginning with my program. Now it’s been a few months since i’ve started this whole thing and i’m pretty glad i’ve stuck with it. I could probably strip out the testing portions of my app and publish it as is, but i want to polish it up a bit more.
Admittedly, i couldn’t completely stick to one thing at a time, and i’ve begun working on making my own book apps next. My imagination for the project is still quite a bit further ahead than my technical know-how.. but i’ve got all the time i need.