Red Arrows on Flickr
My name is William Warby. You can read a little more about me on my “about” page if you’re interested. I couldn’t decide initially whether to include a blog in the design of my new site but in the end I decided I needed a channel through which to publish news about what I’m doing or planning to do with my iPhone applications and a blog seemed as good a channel as any though which to do it. As well as news about my iPhone applications I will probably publish technical posts occasionally about programming because, well – it’s my blog, and I want to. The odd photograph might find it’s way on to the blog too – photography is my main hobby besides programming.
So on to Mobster Lobster then. About a month before iPhone OS 2.0 was launched in July 2008 I decided I was going to learn Objective-C and become a millionaire programming the iPhone. I knew at least a dozen programming languages to some degree and I considered myself an expert in at least 5 of them, so I figured one more wouldn’t be much of a challenge. I was wrong. I’ll be posting about my experience of learning Objective-C for anyone who’s interested, but for now let’s just say it was more different than I expected it to be – a lot more different.
You may remember that at the time Apple had in place a non-disclosure agreement that forbade anyone from discussing anything to do with development on the iPhone SDK, even in private. That also meant nobody could write any tutorials, books, code samples or libraries for the device – there could be no knowledge sharing whatsoever. This, combined with my frustration at how different the language and programming tools were and my desperation to get in early on the gold rush saw to it that I failed completely on the whole endeavour and gave up. A year later and with three weeks to go before my £59 investment in the right to test my applications on a real iPhone expired, I decided to give it another go, and this time I had more success.
SlidePix
My first app is called SlidePix. It’s a version of the a 135 year old 15-puzzle. It has been done dozens of times in the iTunes App Store with varying degrees of finesse and perhaps the world didn’t really need yet another sliding tile game, but I wanted my first project to be something relatively simple that I could do well without taking too many risks as I learned how to program for the iPhone. The last thing I wanted to do was ruin one of my better ideas with a poor realisation of a concept due to my novice status, so I picked an app I’d already written years ago for the Christmas game on our company Intranet which I knew I could do competently learning as I went.
It’s not going to make my a millionaire – at least, I don’t think it is. I’ll be publishing my sales stats on this blog, so we’ll soon find out. I hope that the graphics, feature set, price point and included photos will put it in good standing with the competition, but I realise it’s not going to be the next Flight Control.
I haven’t decided what my next app is going to be yet but it will be a bigger and more ambitious project. Now that I know what I’m doing in X-Code and I’ve built a website to publicise and support my efforts, I can’t wait to get started on something new. Thanks for reading 
