I arrived in Turkey in September 2009, with a strong desire to learn Turkish (I'm French), so I just signed up for Turkish lessons, approximately 2 hours a week.
However since I was really a beginner, but had relatively good level in English, all my Turkish colleagues were talking to me in English. Plus I didn't have the time to study during the day, between work and family life.
But one conclusion though
After considering the fact that I was not improving as fast as I would have wanted, but didn't want to "sacrifice" my private life, I ended up with the conclusion that the only place I could revise my Turkish was:
1) either when driving to go to work (I live 30 minutes away from the place a work in)
2) or when spending some time in front of TV, relaxed with my wife for instance,
Needless to say that for both situations, it's not trivial to find the tool that will it possible to achieve this improbable target. Actually I couldn't find any portable solution.
Besides, I've received my iphone 3GS almost 1 year ago, and have always been amazed by the quantity of simply "good apps" (nothing revolutionary) with very basic principles, but that fit so well some of your needs that when you bumped 1 day into them, you simply cannot live without them after them.
Then one decision
In June 2009, the idea that I should design my own App really grew up in my mind. After a little investigation about the tools to be used for the the development of an iphone App (Inteface Builder/Xcode) and related programming language (Objective C), I concluded that even if I was totally starting from scratch, should be:
- Achievable, because when I still had some basics about programmaing dating back to my 3 years in engineering school,
- Interesting because it would be a good way to get an insight about what Apple was offering its developers + get to understand the real power of iPhone,
- Fun, because I was actually looking for a personal project to devote some time and excitation to,
- With no stakes: if I was to be fed up during the process, no big deal: the cost of it would just have been some personal time and 90 bucks for the developer licence => no stakes but no risks also
- Opportunities: of course, when seing that the idea I developped looked like new (maybe you'll soon tell me that such an App actually exist...) and interesting, so the idea to make money out of it is quite appealing!
A first beta version that worked on my iPhone, with awesome results!
The first time I could test a beta version of my App to my iPhone was in mid-september. Just after my turkish lesson of that week, and the results were fantastic for me!
- It took me only 5 minutes to record the 90 new words/expressions/grammar rules I had to remember after this lesson,
- After only 1 day (meaning totally around 50 minutes of car), the list of words I had to focus on was limited to ... only 8!
- Needless to say that after 2 days (approximately 1h30), I was ok for the 90 items.
... and then first waypoint with Appstore
Tonight, just after 1 episode of NCIS, I've just uploaded the Lite version of iVocAudio to the AppStore, at 22h45 I received the e-mail from Apple saying that the status of my App has changed to Waiting for review!!!
I'm pretty excited...!
