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05/24/11 | Uncategorized

What You Can Make in a 6-Hour iPhone App Intro Class

By Bess Ho (Mobile Architect, Archimedes Ventures)
I regularly teach classes on iPhone development for all levels. Here are some students who took a class called “iOS SDK for Beginners”, a 6-hour class held in Mountain View. The next class is on “iOS SDK for Intermediates – Design Concepts” this Saturday, May 28 in Mountain View.

Ayesha Ahmed is Co-Founder and CEO of Flocking Apps, creating iPhone and iPad applications. Ayesha had no Objective-C / iOS experience or any coding background outside of creating basic HTML pages. She took the one-day iOS SDK Development class “to get a better understanding of the technical aspects of iPhone App development. Having this coding experience has helped me develop a much deeper understanding of the complexities of the app world. At the end of the class, my teammates and I collaborated to create our first app.”


Oli Griffiths blogs about the Intro to iOS SDK Development class here – Excerpt below:

“So, whilst out in Silicon Valley on vacation, I decided I would sign up for an iOS SDK Class for Beginners in Mountain View at the geekily named Hacker Dojo. The workshop was taught by Bess Ho, a Mobile Architect and Instructor. I turned up (after the sat nav did its best to try and make me late), grabbed a seat, opened my laptop and was ready to go. In what can only be described as a warehouse come geek frat house, with desks everywhere, sofas, more power extension cables than I’ve ever seen and a strange house with a roof terrace inside the building, I was ready to go.

Bess started by introducing herself and got under way going through some of the basics. It was like being back at University, but I was actually paying attention. There were about 40 other people in the workshop, ranging from programmers to product managers, all in a similar position to me.

Each hour we had a break and had a chance to chat with our fellow iOS’ers about how they were getting on and what they do etc, then it was back to coding. We moved onto audio and built a basic fruit machine application (I say fruit machine app, bit it was basically an image with 4 buttons on it that played some sounds, no animation involved) but it gave us the basics to add sound to our applications, a very important part of making a well rounded app. We also looked at how to animate a video sequence using a set of images (like a flip book), and didn’t quite have time to get onto loading a web page within your app, but the notes are in the excellent course materials.

At the end of the lesson, we had about 45 mins to produce our own app and demo it to the class. The app could be anything we liked and used the basic principles that we learned in the lesson. The course materials were supplied with a bunch of assets (images, sounds, backgrounds) that we could use to create our app.”

“I decided to create the addictive Bubble Wrap game as it seemed pretty simple and used some of the basic principles that we learned (buttons and sounds). I also added a counter and have since added a timer (also included in course materials) and popped states that are chosen randomly from a set of 3 images. I was pretty pleased with my app and demoed it to the class who also seemed rather impressed. Not bad for a first attempt. In all, I learned a lot in the 5 hour lesson, enough to get started with some basic applications and am looking forward to the intimidate class next weekend!

So my advice to anyone wishing to learn mobile programming is learn the basics of the language in your own time, try out some examples and tutorials, but try and find a hands on workshop as I learned much more from the workshop than I’ve learned from any books or blogs.” — Excerpt from Mobile App Development: How Hard Can It Be?


Mike Sawyer is a product and marketing guy at hi-tech startups, working with software engineers. As the founder of a business with a consumer mobile focus, “I wanted to learn how to more directly help build and enhance my native iPhone App. Bess’s class was a perfect fast-paced introduction to native iPhone app development.” Watch the demo of Mike’s project here.


The next class on iOS SDK Development is happening:

Saturday, May 28, 2011, 1pm – 4pm (Mountain View, CA)
iOS SDK Class for Intermediate – Design Patterns
For more info and to register, click here. (Save $10 with discount code “women20”)
Read reviews on Yelp

About the guest blogger: Bess Ho is Mobile Architect and Instructor. She has helped and advised many early stage startups on iPhone, iPad, Cross-Platform mobile/web apps. She has received awards and honorable mentions from iPhone & iPad Dev Camps. She has guest-lectured at Stanford, spoke at mobile sessions at Web20 Expo SF, Where20, Mobile Play, Silicon Valley Code Camp. Bess is a contributing author on new book release “Sams Teach Yourself Twitter API in 24 Hours”. Follow her on Twitter at @bess.

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