3 Great iPhone Apps from First-time Programmers on Skillshare
/Over the past three weeks I had been teaching and coaching students through their first iPhone apps. I never enjoyed mindless and theoretical lectures, so hands-on iPhone learning appeals to me. My iPhone class is taught in a mixed media format with live stream lectures, offices hours, and recorded videos. In the future, I see real-time chat as a game changer where students can collaborate and help teach each other faster than traditional forums. (Who says talking in class is a bad thing?)
3 Great iPhone Apps and Ideas
I challenged my students to pick an idea, sketch it, and then build it. During the three week course on Skillshare they learned how to turn an idea into an app. It's not as hard as you think, but it does require work.
1. Dominion Set Randomizer
"Dominion is a very popular deck-building card game where players acquire various cards to create a large kingdom. These cards comprise of treasure cards, victory cards and kingdom cards. Only 10 sets of kingdom cards are used in any given game, but there are so many more different sets that can possibly be selected.
Dominion: Select 10 Random Cards
One of the more exciting ways to play the game is to randomize the set of kingdom cards used. The set of cards includes a "randomizer" deck that players can shuffle then deal out a random set of 10 to use in the game. With only the base game, this only involves 25 cards. When expansions get included, this can go on to reach over 100 cards.
Rather than having players shuffle 100+ cards to randomly pick 10, I have decided to make an iOS app that facilitates this process to better streamline the process of playing Dominion." - Tien Le
App Progress and Details
- Tien's Skillshare project page
App ideas start on paper. It's the fastest way to capture an idea.
Video
2. Abacus - A freelance calculator
"Abacus is a tool that helps creative professionals establish their prices when contracting independently. With Abacus freelancers can focus in being creative while the app calculates, suggests a quoting price and sets them up for success.
One of the key features of the app is educating creative professionals into establishing their prices. Furthermore its calculator uses an algorithm that adds up the price based on the amount of hours per project, then dividing those amounts into 3 separate buckets:
- Company - This is pure revenue that goes into savings to invest back in the "company". Be it a new laptop, software upgrades or more hard drives for backup, this is the bucket for that.
- Operations - Traveling, materials, phone calls, emails, time spent developing documentation is all taken care of on this bucket. The leftover can go back to the Company bucket for savings or can become a nice bonus check for all the effort!
- Salaries - This bucket is used to pay for your services and anybody else that collaborated.
Calculations are based on a sole number that is established by the professional on his/her profile. This number can change and the educational documentation needed in order to find that perfect number is provided through the app." - Alberto Orsini
App Progress and Details
- Alberto's Skillshare project page
Video
3. CapeShare
"CapeShare is a guidebook for the best that Cape Cod has to offer from non biased locals. This App contains the essential things to do while on vacation here broken out by town. Whether you are looking for the best beach or the best place to get a lobster roll we give you the tips you need to make your experience on the Cape more memorable. Over 6 million people visit Cape Cod each year and we have created this App to help them avoid crowds, get to great beaches, enjoy great meals and do so much more while on vacation.
I see a huge need for this app whenever I visit a city or region and try to cobble together yelp, google reviews, etc and sometimes don't end up with the best spots. For instance we hit up San Francisco - the first day we were on our own and checked out some ok places but then we met up with someone who lives there and we were able to dig more into the real city. If we had this app for San Francisco broken up by the different regions we would had a much better trip." - Chris Gillis
App Progress and Details
- Chris's Skillshare project page
CapeShare for iPhone: A crafted guidebook
A rough sketch and interface walkthrough
Video
Feedback
- What do you think? I found the sketches, final designs, and videos inspiring.
- Email me at PaulSolt@ArtworkEvolution.com
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