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iPhone Development for fun and non-profit

As a transplant living in Lafayette, telecommuting to Oregeon, I’m hardly dialed in to the Boulder tech scene. Last year, I was lucky enough to stumble upon the Boulder New Tech Meetup, and attended a couple meetings. Then, real life and tight deadlines joined up to keep me heads down in my basement office for most of 2008. Once 2009 rolled around, I came up for air and was lucky enough to attend the February BDNT meetup.

It was standing room only, and I was squeezed way in the back when announcement time came around. Some guy named Dave stood up and said that he was looking for iPhone developers for a volunteering application. A couple books and a crash course on Cocoa hardly makes me an iPhone dev, but I’d been wanting to learn for some time, so I tracked him down after the meetup. And the rest is history. Recent history. Still in the making, actually, since we’re still plugging away.

Which brings me to my point: iPhone development is capital F-U-N fun. I’ve done most of the major languages, but Obj-C is the first one I’ve picked up in a matter of hours vs. days or weeks. Think about it: on Febuary 1st, I had a vague idea that the iPhone used something called Cocoa, and that Objective C “was sort of like C++, but not”. Yesterday I got my first data-bound UI up and running. And this isn’t full time by any means, just an hour here and there where possible, and a couple stints on the weekend.

But the real reason I piqued up at the iVolunteer opprotunity was that, as a telecommuter, I’ve gotten kind of bored with discussing application design and implementation with myself. So, why not share the fun? You really don’t need to know the first thing about iPhone development, just a general computer programming background is more than enough to get started. You don’t even need an iPhone, just a Mac, some curiosity, and patience while the SDK downloads.

We’ve got our data model foundation pretty well worked out, so now it’s the fun stuff: a slick UI, tight look and feel, and all the cool little bells and whistles that make an app really shine. Even if you don’t want to touch a line of code, a keen eye for design is also very welcome. So if you want a chance to learn a new technology while contributing to a really good cause, drop us a line. Or look for us at next week’s BDNT Meetup in Boulder.

Tags: Development, iPhone, iVolunteer, Meetup, Why This is Cool

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Development, iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.