My First iPhone App

I didn’t think this would happen, but it did — I released my first iPhone game on October 12, 2010. It’s a simple card matching game called Memory Flash. It was originally intended as a learning project as I try to fight my way through learning Objective-C and object-oriented programming. Since I ended up with a functional game, I thought I might as well try to release it on the App Store, and much to my pleasant surprise, Apple approved it.

I’ve had several people ask me why I’m taking on programming even though my bread and butter is front-end design and development. Even though that is what I enjoy doing the most, I constantly felt that I was limited by content management systems that require arm-twisting. I wanted more control over the things I design. So I started learning Ruby on Rails and Objective-C. Yes, I’m trying to learn both, and that’s after I caught myself trying to do too much reading about Django, CodeIgniter, and Drupal. I decided to settle on Rails because I was already familiar with it, and Objective-C because it’s a channel into the mobile arena.

Programming is hard, and object-oriented programming was a lot to wrap my brain around. And let’s not even get into memory management. I was close to giving up on Objective-C many times until I stumbled across the excellent cocos2d framework. With that, things started to make more sense, and I was able to build off of some tutorials. To be honest, I’m still very shaky with Objective-C — I think I only finished this game through sheer determination, and lots of time.

I actually finished the game in July, but didn’t submit it because I thought I should be supporting Retina Display. Unfortunately, conflicts between Apple’sUIKit and cocos2d prevented proper display of hi-res images. And so my app sat there for 2 months collecting dust. It wasn’t until two weeks ago that I decided to follow through on the old software adage: “Release early, release often.” I’m glad I did. I’ve already submitted my first patch to fix a scoring bug. Hi-res display is coming soon as well. In its first three days of release the game has been downloaded almost 300 times. Nothing spectacular for sure, but much better than the 10 friend downloads I was expecting.

So, am I thinking of making another game? I’m not sure, but I do have an idea that I think might be decent. Stay tuned.