This is how it all began

Over the Christmas break I was cleaning out the storage room in our basement and came across a box of my old programming books. Inside the box was a binder with some of my app ideas, and some old code.

If you are unfamiliar with my app story you can read more here. Reality is, I love apple products and I love my iPhone. When the app store started I really wanted to create an app. I didn’t have the money to start a business or hire a programmer, and I certainly had no idea how to program anything. But, I was determined to get an app on the app store.

So, I bought a book on building apps. I realized that somewhere down the line that book was not going to help me because it was too complex. So I bought another, and another, until I understood what I needed to build an app. I needed to display a question from a set of random questions on the screen.

Unfortunately, I realized very quickly that I would need to code in order to accomplish this very simple task. Here is my first shot at building code, I checked this from three different books and all three seemed to agree that this method might achieve what I wanted to do. What a gong show. So I tried it out, I got error after error but finally my words showed up on the screen like I wanted them to.

Then, I needed to build a random set of questions that would appear whenever the user clicked the screen. Here is a portion of that preliminary code.

For those of you who actually are programmers this code will most likely seem rudimentary and broken but this is what I gleaned from reading the manuals and textbooks. Obviously this code went through a few iterations as well before it actually worked.

Here is one more page of code that I found in that binder. This code did not work at all and was never used in the final app but it’s exciting to me to see what I was attempting to do when moving from knowing nothing about code to actually building my own line of conversation starter apps.

Now, I am reading some more tutorial books focussed on learning a new programming language, Swift. Hopefully soon I will be able to incorporate what I am learning in my current apps and hopefully build some brand new apps that I have been dreaming about for a very long time.

As always, thanks for the downloads and have a great day.

Chet Kennedy