Drake, Kanye, and My First App I admit Ive more recently been in awe of designers, architects, musicians, and

directorsthe people who take an idea and creatively develop it from start to finish. I know Im grossly oversimplifying the processes of the above professionals, and there are plenty of other professionals that work creativelytake teachers, for examplebut Ive always thought it would be cool to have a creative, useful product to show for my work. Enter December 2013. With one month left to prove myself to myself, I started following Treehouses Amit Bijlanis Build a Simple iPhone App (iOS7) tutorial, the product of which was a Crystal Ball app that seemingly predicts the future. The number of new words and concepts I had to learn was startlingUIView, String, UIButton, property, frame, CGRect, AppDelegate.h, AppDelegate.m, nonatomic, etc.* Slow down! I can only handle so many new words in one video! But, I pulled through. Here is a screenshot of my product:

Armed with some basic knowledge of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) and Objective-C, an oversupply of confidence that comes from creating an application in one night, and the Crystal Ball apps insistence that it was decidedly so, I decided I was ready to try creating an app on my own. Drake Shake, popular among tweens, teens, and me, allows you to add the singer Drake to any of your photos. I had downloaded it the week before and it had been a hit among family and friends.

*Update: At the time this article was written, I still did not know half of these concepts.

Above: My mom and Drake

While Drake Shake had enhanced the quality of life of many, there was still a glaringly underserved market. With the recent Bound 2 from Kanye West receiving over 25 million YouTube views, James Francos and Seth Rogans Bound 3 scene-by-scene parody receiving over 11 million hits, and Kanye making it into Barbara Walters Most Fascinating People for 2013, an app in which you could manipulate Kanye West seemed to hold the potential to appeal to good number of people. The app I aimed to create would essentially allow you to add the man you love or hate to your photos.

Say Cheese!
Before, when I was following the tutorial, I had been going through the motions, trying my best to understand and remember what I could. It wasnt until I had to fill in the gaps of knowledge left by the tutorial that I really started to learn the function of different elements. Crystal Ball was a nice prototype for the Kanye app, as it randomly displayed text much like I wanted to randomly display pictures of Kanye; I figured I could easily substitute photos for text in the NSArray. I still needed to ascertain how to add the ability to take a photo, to resize the Kanye image, and to rotate the image. The first problem I solved through Google, which led me to the amazing site Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is basically a forum in which very generous

programmers spend their time helping fellow programmers (or noobs like me) crack figurative coding brick walls (obviously, my browser history is filled with visits to this site, as I experienced many of those little stop-sign notifications). Although the last two problems seem small now, they felt enormous when I was encountering them. As someone who picks up a book from Barnes & Noble every time she wants to learn some new subject, it was frustrating to not be able to consult some official Object Oriented Programming or Objective-C dictionary. Apples iOS App Programming Guide was helpful in understanding how different elements worked together, but wasnt wholly accessible to a beginner. Eventually, I gleaned that the base class I was looking for was UIGestureRecognizer, the subclasses of which allow the user to perform actions through taps, pinches, swipes, and more. How did I find what I was looking for? By looking at the code of someone elses project.

Above: My justification. And thats what much of beginning to learn programming came down to for me looking at example code and adapting it for my own purposes. I adjusted and added onto the code of Crystal Ball, I took the skeleton of the UIImagePicker from a project on Stack Overflow, and found the UIGestureRecognizer on a blog. Each time I found something, I tinkered until the element fit in the project and the errors disappeared. In doing so, I realized how certain code pieces operated. I was in territory unknown to me, but with a community that was incredibly willing to collaborate and assist. The willingness of people to collaborate to solve a problem within code, to freely give their ideas and suggestions, has more than surprised and impressed meits inspired me. Ive started planning many other app ideas, but in the meantime, I need to decide what to name my app: YeezusHearUs, YeezyBooth, YeezyPleazy? The jury is still out.