Michael Taylor

Web Design/Applications

1^st Period

5/26/2011

My Goal:

My main inspiration was to do something fun while showing the class all the work that goes into a project. I had several ideas – one being doing a Joomla site and another to write an iPhone app. I chose the iPhone app because it was really different and because I actually plan to continue doing this for the first 5 weeks of the summer – this will be my summer job – I hope if I can get enough different ideas in the app Store that one will catch on and I can make $10,000. That’s my monetary goal. For the class I said specifically that I’d have one app in the app Store by mid-project, which I did with Bazillionaire ©, and another one in progress – CoolClock is almost finished.

Problems:

The kind of problems I ran into were usually how to do something and I could generally look it up in the documentation or on the internet. The one problem I gave up on was trying to load an entire set of images at once into the clock. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure this out and there was no easy way to do it.

Learnings:

I definitely enjoyed this project. One thing I re-learned is that it’s important for me to change gears every now and then. When I’m stuck on a problem, leaving it for a while and doing something else often helps me figure out the answer. Sometimes when I sit down and look at it with fresh eyes, I immediately see my mistake.

Another thing I learned is I’m not that into doing cool graphics – maybe because I haven’t done a lot of them or maybe because they take so long – but I’m more into the interaction and plot than how the information is delivered.

If I had more time:

If I had more time I would do lots more projects and get the class to help both come up with ideas as well as design a lot of the graphics. One idea I already had was a “fake Bazillionaire” where you could secretly press a button and always get it right when your friend would always get it wrong. I’d also finish watching the game programming videos – but they are really long and I’m not sure how much I’m learning from them.

Final Result/Self Evaluation:

Bazillionaire is getting a fair number of downloads and was fun to do. The CoolClock will be interesting to see if anyone likes it. This has been a good way to force myself to get back into iPhone programming and has set the stage for me to do more of it this summer. I definitely learn a lot by reading other people’s code and should dedicate at least an hour a day to doing this type of activity. I give myself an A!

485 Words.