So there have been many, many things I've talked about doing in my spare time over the last year and a half since I moved back to San Francisco. Getting more into photography, working on my website, doing a whole bunch of stuff on my Raytracer, writing a MEL to Maya Python converter... so, so many things. I feel like actually there have been a lot of ideas flowing now that I finally have a chance to live on my own and have my own space, and - to a greater extent - the fact that my evenings are no longer taken over by schoolwork.
I have taken the great Professor Larry Smith's advice, and taken time for solitude. I've spent several hours on the weekend just sitting on the docks near the Ferry Building in San Francisco, looking at the waves, catching up with my week and myself, and letting my mind wander.
So I don't think there have been any major shortages of interesting ideas, or things I've come up with that would be a fun way to spend some of my spare time in the evenings or on the weekends... but so far they haven't become a reality. Why? Well these things involve such a large time commitment, and I guess a lot of them just seemed more like large-scale ideas without any over-arching GOAL to them. They are all interesting, for sure... but... why do them? Other than the pursuit of knowledge, and for the joy of learning, of course. But what if I could do something that could... change the world, teach and inspire young children, even maybe be able to donate to charities... AND I'd also be learning some new programming languages, new development environments, and chasing that relentless pursuit of knowledge at the same time.
Dare I say, "Eureka".
Matt Parrott and I have been talking over the last month or so, since I got my new iPod Touch. Within about 2 days, I was completely convinced of the effectiveness and the pure genius of the App Store on the iPhone. Almost instantly the ideas started flowing. Matt and I work so well together and our skills really bounce off one another, and we found that we were suggesting things to each other that were really, really, really interesting... and we both loved the ideas we were coming up with. It was a natural and obvious conclusion that we would band our forces together to create some exciting, interesting iPod Touch and iPhone Apps - things that WE want to write, and software that WE think people would like and that WE think people should have. This is AWESOME.
The KEY DIFFERENCE here between my random ideas and this iPhone Development, is that Apple has gotten rid of so many of the start-up costs and problems with distribution and marketing etc related to software. This makes such a clean and feasible platform for coming up with interesting ideas. This rocks. This meets so many of the over-arching goals of a personal extracurricular project, and the ceiling is infinite. Amazing. So... we're gonna see how it goes. We're going to try our first idea and see if we can somehow (it's gonna be hard, but we're gonna try to) release it in the next couple of months. Stay tuned here for updates throughout our development process.
Matt aka Cabernet is back from NYC where his girlfriend was being awesome and touring in the Ballet there. Amazing. We wasted absolutely no time, and jumped right back on the ball.
We chatted about our App ideas some more and Matt told me about some great contacts he made in NYC that will be related to our App. Sweet.
Tonight I've been reading through some interesting stuff here on these tutorial pages.
- iPhone Dev Center
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/ - iCodeBlog
http://icodeblog.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment