Category Archives: Programming

Don’t put all your Eggs in One Basket.

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As the last couple of posts have shown, it’s important to continue to grow and expand your knowledge. It won’t work if you simply get something to work and just step back. You have to keep updating so your programs work with any current systems and that they still provide the experiences that your users want.

I have to admit that I have failed a bit at this, but as I’ve mentioned in the past there have been some efforts to fix things. At this point, all my apps are currently only in the Apple App store, though several of them are available for iOS along with Macs. I would be better off if I also made them available for Android. I have put a little effort into that, but I really need to focus more.

This blog is a way to keep me accountable and also to push myself.

Before the end of this year I plan to have at least a couple of my converted to Android. I actually plan to have it happen before that, but I have some other projects that need to be finished first.

Never Stop Learning! (You should always love learning new things)

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I’ve been programming in one way or another since the mid 1980’s. In those years, I have never stopped learning new things. Heck, even after I had some minor success with iOS apps, I continued to read websites and buy books to continue to grow my knowledge.

I started with an Apple IIe back in the ’80s and moved up at an Apple IIgs around 1986 and into the mid 1990’s. Yes, I kept that Apple IIgs through all of those years. In fact, it put away currently in a closet a few feet from where I’m writing this. But, I didn’t stop learning. I had dozens of books and probably at least 100 magazines devoted to that computer. I mainly used Applesoft BASIC on that computer along with a bit of assembly language. I also started to pick up a bit with Macs at school. When I stepped into college in the early 1990’s I started to work with MSDOS and Windows a bit. I also started to expand my programming languages into Pascal and Fortran and C. Pascal was the main language used in school, but C would be the most useful for my later endeavours.

After college I ended up doing retail work and the programming drifted to the background. But, eventually it came back once programming for iPhones became a thing. That seemed like the perfect opportunity that I could finally write my own software and distribute it. I bought a book or two and started the process of learning new things, yet again. This time the language was Objective-C. I managed to create several apps using that language, though it never felt fully comfortable to me. The C side of it made sense, and even some of the object oriented aspects but as a whole it never fully clicked.

Then, Apple introduced Swift. I fell for Swift quickly. I again started picking up and reading through books and websites as I gained confidence in Swift. It was a bit of a curve because the language was still being developed and would undergo major changes a couple of times a year at least. It took a lot more research to stay on top of things, but I kept developing apps using the language. I liked the language enough that I rewrote many of my early apps to be exclusively in Swift instead of Objective-C.

Over the last year, I started to look into a couple of new languages – Kotlin and Python. They both are widely used in areas that I would like to explore more. One of them being Android programming. I would like more of my apps to be available to Android systems – especially since my current phone in an Android phone.

That’s a brief rundown of my programming growth. I didn’t go into much detail along the way, but it does give a good overview of my journey. Over time, I plan to delve more into various aspects, but for now I hope you enjoyed a taste of how I got here.

Ideas Continued to Grow – Part two of my Personal Mobile App Development Journey

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Today, I’ll continue on with a few more apps that I created and what inspired them.

The next app I will talk about is called Time Clock Helper. At the time I wrote this app I was working in a retail job that was going through a slow season and cut our hours to get through it. The hours were cut to such an extent that we could file for unemployment, and many of us did. One of the requirements to claim unemployment each week was to let them know the number of hours you worked. Well, this job used an old paper style punch card so I had to do the math manually each week. Within a week or two I decided to write an app to do it for me, instead.

The app was pretty basic and didn’t take long to write so I decided to offer it for free. After a couple of days and a ton of downloads, I began to charge for it. That app ended up becoming my most successful app and has gone through many changes over the years. You now have the ability to save days and even email the totals when you are done.

Just like I said in my last post, the best apps are the ones that you are writing for yourself. I then wrote a few small things – mainly games. Some of them were released, while others have never been fully finished.

The next app that became popular is called: Project Pricing. To help raise some more money, I also sold some little craft items – small clay ducks and the like. If you are interested in them, there are some examples and a link at the bottom of this page. Well, the Project Pricing app grew out of a need to make pricing these items easier. The app allows you to enter various costs related to the item – including time to make them and your hourly rate. The app will then take that information and let you know how much it costs you to make each one and then will give you an ideal price to sell the item at using whatever margin you selected. It also allows you to easily change the margin so that you can see how that affects the price of the item.

Along with that app, I also made a timer app so that you can track how long it takes to do a project. The app consists of an play/stop button that keeps a running total of the time you have been working on the project. It was a quick and dirty app that works. While, it isn’t as clean of an app as I’d like, it still works to do what it is supposed to do.

That covers the major apps that I have created. There were several games mentioned throughout these two posts and I hope to cover them in more detail in the future. I wish I could say they sell well, but games are hard to market. They are great learning experiences, though.