I have a minute that I can slip in a quick post before going in to the dentist’s office (not my favorite thing). I thought I’d use it to describe the process of getting our first two apps made.

DHS App#1: Kidskalc: I have to admit that this was a breeze. I conceived of kidskalc from my memory of a small plastic device that my mother used to let me keep track of our grocery bill with when I was probably about four years old. I wrote up a quick description of how it should work and drew out the device as modular pieces in powerpoint.

I spent about an hour working with Xcode before I realized that it was going to be a lot of work to learn programming and this new programming environment. My background in programming ended with half a year programming in COBOL and half a year programming in Pascal back in high school (around 1988). So, object oriented programming languages are quite foreign to me – to be honest, I still don’t know what that really means even.

My solution was to turn to oDesk, a contracting interface. There are good things to say about oDesk and bad: on the positive side, you can get bids for a contract very quickly after posting. Once you settle on a bid, everything runs very smoothly and it’s easy to pay contractors using paypal or a bank account and all the legal tax stuff is organized for you.

The bad is that there’s a reason why contractors are up at all hours combing through people’s job descriptions – most of them are not the ‘A Team.’

That said, I have met a lot of very nice people who have competently put together some material for me – and our first app, Kidskalc, cost only $60 to have done beginning to end.

OK – dentist time.

back later.