Hello World!

I recently decided to teach myself how to write iPhone apps, and this blog is all about that. I’ve worked in the software business for years, but despite starting out as a software engineer, for the last umpteen years I’ve mostly been a technical writer and so my programming has been limited to short example programs, scanning the source code for information needed in the manuals that the developers didn’t think to tell me, and so on. Oh and the odd perl script to automate various technical authoring tasks. Boring stuff, in other words.

Back when I was paid to write software it was mostly C on Unix (or Borland C on PC), and most of what I wrote was either systems stuff or computer graphics stuff, so I’ve not too much experience of implementing GUIs in modern development environments. Of course, these days what employers seem to be looking for is C# or C++ which mostly seems to mean knowing MS Visual Studio backwards. I’ve never really got to grips with Visual Studio, so wanted to do something more, well… fun.

So, the idea struck me that learning how to write iPhone apps would be a good, and more importantly fun, way to get back into developing software. There seems to be a lot of relatively simple software for sale or free download in Apple’s App Store, in a way it reminds me of the home computer thing in the 1980s. I don’t expect to become a millionaire from writing a hit app (most of the obvious ideas have probably already been done) but it also occurs to me that there’s a lot of scope for mobile front ends for a lot of software, as these devices (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.) are pretty commonplace nowadays. And again, the iPhone seems the most fun (sorry Blackberry fans…). I’ve even seen proper job adverts asking for iPhone developers. So it seems a good bet.