This week I achieved a goal that’s been simmering on the back burner for a while: getting started with iPhone app development. Apple calls each of its new products “revolutionary,” but the iPhone platform (which also includes the iPod touch and the upcoming iPad) actually is, because it creates new ways to interact with the device. Beyond moving a mouse or clicking a button, the iPhone responds to movement, multi-touch and even puffs of air directed at the microphone. Because of the latter, virtual musical instruments are a popular app genre, and since I’m a musician that’s where I put my foot in the door.

My app is designed for aficionados of jug band music, a form of traditional blues and jazz played on homemade instruments. The app includes a washboard, spoons, kazoo and jug. The trick is that they each play like the real instrument: you rub the washboard, tap the spoons against your knee, hum into the kazoo and buzz your lips into the jug. I made a demo video to show how it works.

Programming for this device was pretty brutal, because most of my experience is with the loosely-typed PHP, and the iPhone runs on the strongly-typed Objective C. Simple commands that would have taken me less than a minute in PHP took me hours in Objective C, until I started thinking in terms of data types. The syntax was killing me for a while — figuring out where to place an asterisk, an at-sign or a square bracket — but I’ve experienced that in moving from JavaScript to Perl to PHP over the years. I’m working on a second app now, and the new challenge is memory management, but I’m getting the hang of that, too.

I was especially curious about the infamous App Store approval process, which Apple uses to ensure quality apps and, some suspect, protect its business interests. But I didn’t have any problems here. The code-signing process was cumbersome, but I followed all the tutorials and my app was approved on the first try. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch and can spare $.99, you can buy a copy now. Who knows, you might even get hooked on jug band music!

The article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” is a year and a half old, but I keep running into it:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

The premise is that because we now have instant access to a wealth of reference information online, we’re losing our ability to read long passages, concentrate and think. I disagree; here’s why.

Regarding access to reference information, I think that’s a quantitative rather than qualitative difference from the pre-Internet days. When I was reading books in school, I was always encouraged to look up a word in the dictionary if I didn’t know it. I never did it much, but I do it a lot more now that I can access a dictionary online with a few clicks. If that was good advice with a book, how could it be bad advice with a computer? Now I can not only look up vocabulary words, but local wildlife, art history and world politics as I run across them in my daily life. I would conclude that this makes me more intellectually curious — because it rewards my curiosity with new knowledge — not less intelligent.

As for reading long passages, I use the web as much as anyone, and (compared to other people I’ve browsed with) I’m quite good at seeing how the information is organized on a web page and jumping from one link to another. I also do a lot of skimming, as the author describes. But this is when I’m looking for something in particular, like a street address or a bit of programming code or a song lyric. I did the same thing in college when I was researching a paper at the library. Reading for enjoyment is a different skill, and I haven’t lost it. When J.D. Salinger died last week and I decided to revisit The Catcher in the Rye, I read it in two, three-hour sittings.

Perhaps a lack of concentration is the author’s real problem, but I don’t think that comes from using the web. Like a book, that goes at our pace and doesn’t interrupt our train of thought. That’s not the case with other technologies like television, telephones and instant messaging. I tend to use those as little as possible when I’m working, but if they were talking, beeping and flashing at me all day, I’d probably feel like the author does.

I guess my motto would be, tune out, turn off, log on!