At last, some real progress

by George on Jan.11, 2010, under About Us, Applications

Back in March of last year, Sam and I began working on developing apps for the iPhone. Now, nine months later, our first app has been submitted for review. It’s a reasonably simple app, a pleasing on the eye version of the Game of Life, by John Conway. It was originally our ‘proof of concept’, or ‘one day app‘, a chance to dip our toes in the waters of the App Store. So what happened? Below are a few thoughts (not excuses)…

We’re both very busy people. Having full time work and multiple children just takes up time.
Tied in to the first point, at times when our lives have got busier than normal, one of us drops off the grid for a bit. This can stall the other team member and when you come back to the code again there’s the problem of getting back up to speed again.
We lost our way a few times. The final app we’ve submitted is very different for the original plan. Several times we’ve reduced the scope of the app to keep it more focused and manageable. But each of these changes has meant re-examining and amending the existing code base.
We started working at the OpenGL level. Both of us are completely at home writing OpenGL code, and so we made the initial decision to write our own ‘engine’. Eventually we switched to Cocos 2d and life became significantly easier.

Still, that’s in the past (with the exception of Apple’s review process). What we have now is a stick in the sand – we can produce an app in nine months. My personal goal is to reduce that to six months, and get a couple of apps out this year. Will we get there? Time will tell, but I have a good feeling about this year.

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Brandon Mantzey
March 8th, 2010 on 2:21 pm
George, we’re in the same boat with having family obligations, so I feel you on that notion. I’m honestly surprised you decided not to go with your own engine given that you are so comfortable with OpenGL. I have a pretty decent OpenGL graphics engine myself. I’ve worked with Unity but not Cocos2D. I hate having limited control over the code that I have in development. It makes it harder to troubleshoot. Maybe I’m a little wet behind the ears or maybe I need to open my mind to script driven engines, who knows?

Depending on the scope of your project, I bet you could cut that time down to three months, even with full time jobs and family obligations if you focused on a polished engine.

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Forrest
July 4th, 2010 on 1:38 am
Glad to know people , develop iPhone program in spare time, I am also in this boat.

I have created two apps , actually “one day app” , but I have long time tracking and knowledge, so it is not really one day.

Really hope to talk with people who have same goals and hobby.

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