So I want to make an iPhone app. With my limited coding skills, I always knew that the likelyhood of this happening wasn’t very high. I could, of course, get hip deep in code and piece my way though. I’ve done it before with wordpress themes, wikimedia preferences, and integrating different sets of software together. I learned the basics of javascript, PHP, and how to structure a mySQL database.
But if you look carefully, you’ll see that I cheated. It wasn’t just me and a hello world script all the way to a blog, wiki and forum online. I took existing open source programs and templates and modified them to meet my needs. Now I want to work the other way around. I want to create the idea and the interface and put it out to be built upon by coders much more talented than myself. According to Clay Shirky in his book Here Comes Everybody, “Open source software has been one of the great successes of the digital age” (240). He then compares it to a Wikipedia article where someone starts an article and an army of people come along and finish it.
I don’t know if I’ll find an army, but a few good coders will do. For now though, I’m going to see how far I can get.
