Author Topic: Help me think of a small ipad app idea to code (Read 38505 times)

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #25 on:** July 10, 2012, 06:52 AM »

Avoid any hair pulling ... Consider the demographic ... And then cater to the lowest common denominator...
-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2012, 06:49 AM)

In keeping with the above theme...

For those that like to hike in the woods, how about an app that will scare bears away. Don't know what it would have to sound like, but I've asked around and haven't heard of one.
-grandpastan (July 09, 2012, 11:27 PM)

I really think he's on to something. Face it coming up with a game changing, useful, functional application is fraught with complications and subjectivity. Because they really have to do something very specific, very well, and in a fashion that doesn't annoy and/or confuse users with varying to zero skill levels. However... Small toys, that will get a few laughs at parties ... Are fairly easy to get people to throw a buck at. Ya know?

Abbot: Why are you wearing that hidious hat?
Costello: To scare the lions away!
Abbot: There isn't a lion within 100 miles of here.
Costello: See! It's working...

^Click^

Renegade · « **Reply #26 on:** July 10, 2012, 08:25 AM »

Avoid any hair pulling ... Consider the demographic ... And then cater to the lowest common denominator...
-Stoic Joker (June 14, 2012, 06:49 AM)

In keeping with the above theme...

For those that like to hike in the woods, how about an app that will scare bears away. Don't know what it would have to sound like, but I've asked around and haven't heard of one.
-grandpastan (July 09, 2012, 11:27 PM)

I really think he's on to something. Face it coming up with a game changing, useful, functional application is fraught with complications and subjectivity. Because they really have to do something very specific, very well, and in a fashion that doesn't annoy and/or confuse users with varying to zero skill levels. However... Small toys, that will get a few laughs at parties ... Are fairly easy to get people to throw a buck at. Ya know?
-Stoic Joker (July 10, 2012, 06:52 AM)

Well, for something that scares bears, I think that's an specific idea to ditch if serious, but a comic one can work very well.

There are simply too many limitations on mobile devices, and it's just not possible to do. The first thing, which kills the deal, is the audio speaker quality. They're simply too poor. You need a very wide dynamic range to effectively reproduce sound. Also, the power requirements would be too large for a mobile device. (I'm thinking about the 192 kHz post by 40hz that I have yet to read [I need to schedule several hours to give it proper attention], but I can't see how it would be applicable in any way [from my distant recall from a very quick skimming] as the core considerations here are for bear hearing and dynamic range, and not sampling rates.)

But +1 for everything else StoicJoker said there.

A comic version of a "Bear Scare" app could work very well. Not all apps need to be "rational" or "functional".

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #27 on:** July 10, 2012, 08:43 AM »

A comic version of a "Bear Scare" app could work very well. Not all apps need to be "rational" or "functional".
-Renegade (July 10, 2012, 08:25 AM)

Bingo!!

Sound range is only an issue if one wants to create something that might actually work. However as a gag, it only needs to be heard by the user (e.g. Angry Birds game level sound quality). So if it just pops up a cartoon picture of a crazy old woman yelling woogie boogie boogie ... Well... That's all it really needs to do.

mouser · « **Reply #28 on:** July 17, 2012, 04:11 PM »

A quick report on getting up to speed experimenting with Ipad/Iphone development on a Mac.

My previous experiences coding for Apple products have been quite negative, and I have in general a very negative attitude towards the company and it's approach to nearly everything it does.

So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out that creating and deploying my first test application on an ipad and iphone was a wonderfully painless, smooth, even fun process..

HA! just kidding! It was basically far worse than I could have imagined. Really really a horrible convoluted, unnecessarily complicated and opaque process whose every step feels like it has been designed with the sole purpose of demonstrating the worst case vision of bureaucratic dystopia. Whether it was signing up to be given permission to pay $100 to develop applications for the ipad/iphone (which I am not kidding took about 3 weeks, 10 emails, 5 phone calls, 1 conference call) just to get the apple web site to let me register using a company name (donationcoder.com), which no one could figure out why it wouldn't go through. Or whether it was following the insane procedures for creating Provisioning Profiles, Distribution Profiles, AppIds, registering test devices, or whether it was figuring out how to trick xcode to be willing to build an iphone app that would run on my test iphone 3g (hell i would have been satisfied with a simple error message telling me why it wouldn't run rather than just silently doing nothing).

This isn't a reflection on the devices themselves or the final results, but Apple seems determined to make (getting started) developing on their platforms an honest to god hellish experience.

mouser · « **Reply #29 on:** July 17, 2012, 04:23 PM »

As a side rant: I absolutely hate the Mac OS approach to having one main menubar at the top of the screen that changes depending on the child window you choose, and the basic approach to having desktop windows that simply vanish into thin air until you can figure out where they went. God help us if people start to copy the way apple does things..

barney · « **Reply #30 on:** July 17, 2012, 04:37 PM »

... whose every step feels like it has been designed with the sole purpose of demonstrating the worst case vision of bureaucratic dystopia. Whether it was signing up to be given permission to pay $100 to develop applications ...
-mouser (July 17, 2012, 04:11 PM)

Yep, that sounds like Mr. Jobs' company, right down the line. A visionary he might have been $:-\$ , but anything else

...

Side note: never have been amenable to the whole concept of paying to be allowed to create something that someone else will sell for a ~thirty percent cut.

BTW: DC's spell check wanted to replace dystopia with dustpan ... not inappropriate in this particular instance

.

jgpaiva · « **Reply #31 on:** July 17, 2012, 06:36 PM »

As a side rant: I absolutely hate the Mac OS approach to having one main menubar at the top of the screen that changes depending on the child window you choose, and the basic approach to having desktop windows that simply vanish into thin air until you can figure out where they went. God help us if people start to copy the way apple does things..
-mouser (July 17, 2012, 04:23 PM)

Also, alt-tab switches between applications and not windows, which means that if you have more than one window of the same application open (think spreadsheets, or editors, for example), you'll have to use some other combination which switches between windows of the same application. I've been using Mac for over two years and I've resigned to the idea that I will *never* get used to that idiotic way of thinking.
Also, don't get me started on the pseudo-random mechanisms of selecting window focus when switching between workspaces (aka spaces in mac). Combine that with the alt-tab nonsense above, and you've got yourself a recipe for disaster

Then there's the idiotic maximise behavior, the random paging to disk of apps when there's more than half of the memory free, the *constant* annoyance of flash consuming 100% of the processor, dual core computers locking up for 5minutes when there's no resources (ram or cpu) being used, apps consuming 2gb of disk extra when running, and lots of other fun stuff.
I honestly have a very large appreciation for Steve Jobs for being able to sell so many of these machines. And people actually pay more for them than for a decent computer!

[edit] sorry for the rant, couldn't resist

[/edit]

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #32 on:** July 17, 2012, 07:10 PM »

Also, alt-tab switches between applications and not windows, which means that if you have more than one window of the same application open (think spreadsheets, or editors, for example), you'll have to use some other combination which switches between windows of the same application. I've been using Mac for over two years and I've resigned to the idea that I will *never* get used to that idiotic way of thinking.
-jgpaiva (July 17, 2012, 06:36 PM)

So Mac has no equivalent to the Windows Ctrl+Tab MDI document navigation? Bummer.

Renegade · « **Reply #33 on:** July 17, 2012, 08:18 PM »

HA! just kidding! It was basically far worse than I could have imagined. Really really a horrible convoluted, unnecessarily complicated and opaque process whose every step feels like it has been designed with the sole purpose of demonstrating the worst case vision of bureaucratic dystopia.
-mouser (July 17, 2012, 04:11 PM)

Oh god... I know how you feel...

At the moment I'm using the following for cross platform development:

Monodevelop
C#
GTK# (GTKSharp)

And will be incorporating these once I get to that stage:

OpenTK
MonoGame

Later on for mobile:

Mono for Android
MonoTouch

So far that has magically made the Mac so much less painful. I simply cannot express just how much nicer it is. AND, I can compile on Windows, then deploy to OS X and Linux.

At the moment I'm farting around with figuring out setup packages/packages/installers/app bundles/whateverthehellyouwannacallthem.

I suppose unsurprisingly, I've found Linux easier than Mac for packaging so far, but I'm not finished with either, so the jury is still out. We'll see.

Anyways, just wanted to throw that out there for you. Since you already know C++, C# should be trivial for you as it's managed, and you don't need to worry about things like pointer arithmetic and all that low-level memory management.

If you want to see a very simple example of an application that runs cross platform:

https://github.com/R...inds/Frackin-Reserve

The code is poor though. I copied and pasted from the original Visual Studio version, which was written linearly as a tutorial on the subject matter for non-programmers, with total disregard for any programming sanity. But whatever. It works and illustrates the basic tool-chain for cross platform development, and consequently, the regaining of sanity on the Mac platform, and a pleasantly surprising reduction in screaming profanities.

nudone · « **Reply #34 on:** July 18, 2012, 04:12 AM »

As a side rant: I absolutely hate the Mac OS approach to having one main menubar at the top of the screen that changes depending on the child window you choose, and the basic approach to having desktop windows that simply vanish into thin air until you can figure out where they went. God help us if people start to copy the way apple does things..
-mouser (July 17, 2012, 04:23 PM)

I Agree 1,000,000%. Amazing how lack of functionality and inconvenience is considered a masterpiece of design.

I wonder how much time is wasted each day for people doing "serious" work on a Mac - simply because they have to use such a terrible interface (not including the time lost whilst they gaze in wonder at all the pretty icons and brushed metal they are probably mesmerized by).

Anyway, sorry to hear your Apple development project lived up to all your worst expectations. Maybe you should try Android?

mouser · « **Reply #35 on:** July 18, 2012, 10:52 AM »

Well no worries, I'll still be making a small ipad app once I think of a little idea. And then yes, Android is on my list for experimentation as well.

40hz · « **Reply #36 on:** July 28, 2012, 10:48 AM »

Whatever you develop, beware of it being too useful lest Apple invoke some of its entitlement clauses and incorporate your functionality into one of their products - and then bounce your product out of the app store because it replicates an existing functionality.

They've already done this to other developers.

mouser · « **Reply #37 on:** July 28, 2012, 11:56 AM »

beware of it being too useful

somehow i don't think that's going to be my problem

steeladept · « **Reply #38 on:** July 31, 2012, 12:49 PM »

You are having trouble understanding why donationcoder.com was not acceptable? Let me spell it out: donationcoder.com. It is an anathema to Apple. I am suprised it didn't autocorrect it to ripyouoffcoder.com. That they could understand and even respect....

(And before anyone gets the wrong idea, donations != ripoff - quite the opposite. But I would expect Apple would equate the two).

40hz · « **Reply #39 on:** July 31, 2012, 01:05 PM »

beware of it being too useful
somehow i don't think that's going to be my problem
-mouser (July 28, 2012, 11:56 AM)

All factors considered, remind us again why you've decided to put yourself through all of this? Your weekdays can't be that slow.

:P

mouser · « **Reply #40 on:** July 31, 2012, 05:39 PM »

Trying to keep the brain sharp by learning new things!

40hz · « **Reply #41 on:** July 31, 2012, 05:52 PM »

Thank goodness! For a minute I thought you might have acquired a taste for being on the receiving end of some "recreational disciplining."

mahesh2k · « **Reply #42 on:** July 31, 2012, 05:55 PM »

You're learning xcode? or you're using some cross platform framework that deploys native app on multiple phone platform.

kilele · « **Reply #43 on:** August 07, 2012, 09:25 AM »

@Renegade/anyone, have you tried Enyo for cross platform development ?

Renegade · « **Reply #44 on:** August 07, 2012, 12:04 PM »

@Renegade/anyone, have you tried Enyo for cross platform development ?
-kilele (August 07, 2012, 09:25 AM)

I checked it out, but it won't work for a lot of the kinds of things that I like to do. There are a lot of things you just can't manage to do in JavaScript. It does look kind of cool though.

Renegade · « **Reply #45 on:** August 21, 2012, 09:05 PM »

This is mostly on topic, but humorous:

http://www.zdnet.com...eveloper-7000002761/

True confessions of a former iPhone developer

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #46 on:** August 21, 2012, 09:51 PM »

Interesting to see this bit:

In fact, here's my estimate. Given the 16 or so clones of my one DaysTo Christmas app, I'd guess that for every "real" app, there are something like 10-20 bad clones. Apple's 500,000 apps claim? My guess is there are probably less than 30,000 apps of anything resembling quality.
-The Article

I'd always wondered about that myself.

Renegade · « **Reply #47 on:** August 21, 2012, 10:21 PM »

Interesting to see this bit:

In fact, here's my estimate. Given the 16 or so clones of my one DaysTo Christmas app, I'd guess that for every "real" app, there are something like 10-20 bad clones. Apple's 500,000 apps claim? My guess is there are probably less than 30,000 apps of anything resembling quality.
-The Article

I'd always wondered about that myself.
-Stoic Joker (August 21, 2012, 09:51 PM)

Early on I noticed that the app store was full of complete garbage. Like how many "sexy bathing suit" apps do you need? I think those are mostly gone now though.

Hey! Maybe a "sexy kitty" app, eh mouser?

Stoic Joker · « **Reply #48 on:** August 22, 2012, 06:58 AM »

I was thinking a days to the Apocalypse app might be good. Just make the end of world date configurable so no one is tied to a specific bandwagon. It's fun for the whole family; look mommy, only 28 days till the comet hits/lord comes/spaceships land...

40hz · « **Reply #49 on:** August 22, 2012, 11:05 AM »

This is mostly on topic, but humorous:

http://www.zdnet.com...eveloper-7000002761/

True confessions of a former iPhone developer

-Renegade (August 21, 2012, 09:05 PM)

I can't imagine why any indy developer in their right mind, or with a shred of self-resoect, would still want to do an iOS app after reading that. You could almost excuse or overlook anything in the article except for how paid support request tickets not only went unanswered, but were apparently ignored.

How many times do small but hopeful iOS developers need to get slapped in the face and laughed at before they 'get' the message Apple is sending them?
$:-\$