My first iPhone app

Risk Visualizer iPhone App

So, I finally published my first iPhone app: Visualize Risk! Or more accurately, Apple finally approved it after over 2 weeks in review. They need to hire more folks.

To be honest, it’s a bit embarrassing how simple an app it is. And although I had a whole boat load of feature additions already suggested to me, I wanted to see what the infamous Apple iPhone application review process was like so I cleaned it up at an early stable point and submitted it. For such a simple application, it took much longer than I expected. And after over two weeks of waiting, I sent in an email earlier today to make sure I wasn’t missing something and waiting indefinitely. 5 hours later it was approved and in the app store. Maybe that was just a coincidence, but you can be sure I’m going to send in an email soon after I submit my next app.

As for my experience building the app, it wasn’t really much work. Definitely props to Apple on how well the SDK is put together. And due to the popularity of the platform, as of the summer of 2009 there is a ton of material on the Internet that helps developers get started. There is of course the iPhone application development course that Stanford is making available to the public, but there is a ton of other material as well.

After learning Objective-C and a bit of poking around in the SDK, it really took no time at all to code it. I did have a major detour in the beginning before I figured out the power of the UIScrollViewController – which handles all the multi-touch input including zooming in and out. I went down a “wrong” path of building this by drawing everything in OpenGL ES so that I could zoom in and out. As fun as it was re-learning OpenGL, which I hadn’t touch since college, that path required a heck of a lot more coding which the UIScrollViewController takes care of.

Anyway, now that it’s finally up, I feel a little pumped up about writing more apps. Hmm, maybe a game