My first iPhone app
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!