It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that with as many people in the World as there are, a unique idea is very rare. The likelihood that an idea I get is something that has not yet been done is very low. This is the case with my latest small project – Spooky Sound Pad for the iPhone.
I had the idea months ago and only recently spent a few hours over one weekend putting it together. Ok – so it wasn’t really just a few hours. To be honest, the app took most of the weekend, but the bulk of the effort was spent on creating the icons and editing the sound files. The dev portion was very simple.
Nearly done, the thought dawned on me that perhaps I’d search the App Store to see if anything similar already existed. Of course, once again, I was thwarted by the saturated iPhone app market. Several apps that do virtually the same thing already existed. One of which is titled something almost identical. Of course, some of them cost money and Spooky Sound Pad was to be free. Besides – there’s always room for competition, right?
In a nutshell, Spooky Sound Pad is a Halloween sound generator for the iPhone. It’s dead simple. It brings up a splash screen, loads the sound files, then brings up another window that has buttons on it. When you click the buttons the associated sound plays. That’s it. Seriously – that’s it.
Even though I’m sure that coding this app in Objective-C would have been dead easy, I opted to use Appcelerator Titanium instead. Recently Apple loosened the rules on how apps can be built for the iPhone. This update to their terms of use put me at ease with using Titanium, fairly certain that my app would probably not get turned down by the App Store police simply for using a third party framework (something that may not have been the case a few months ago).
Appcelerator Titanium isn’t necessarily rock solid (I did encounter some problems that cause several reinstalls) but what it boils down to is if you can code in Javascript, you can create an iPhone app (or Android and soon Blackberry). In total, I’d guess that I wrote about 200 lines of Javascript all said and done. Maybe even less.
Getting the app built and ready for distribution ultimately did require me to use Xcode. And more than once, things went bananas and I had to reinstall Titanium in order for things to properly load on the iPhone emulator. But overall, I think that Appcelerator Titanium is the best and easiest way to get an app idea off the ground. That said, if the app were to use OpenGL or some other API’s not supported by Titanium, I think good ol’ Objective-C and Xcode are where I’d want to head.
Another nice thing about the Titanium API is that it supports Apple’s iAd. With one line (maybe two), I was up and running with the iAd network. Very slick, but unfortunately all wasn’t gold with the iAds. I’m not one to actually read the manual much before jumping into something. I didn’t activate the iAd network before sending my binary to Apple and also made some assumptions with how iAd was supposed to display. This caused me to have to rack my brain for a while with it – surfing all over forums for some answers and coming up mostly empty handed. I’ll probably write another post on that subject.
Now that an updated binary is out, it’s really just a matter of people downloading the Free Spooky Sound Pad for the iPhone and me seeing a little advertising revenue to come in.
