Describe your first iOS app. What inspired you to make it?

Kevin Tan’s “The Swag Button”

Kevin Tan

The Swag Button is a “how fast can you tap” game geared towards kids and pre-teens. Admittedly, the latter half of that sentence is an attempt to make my app seem more sophisticated than it really is. You essentially tap a button that says “Swag” every time you press it which fills a bar. Your goal is to fill the bar as fast as possible. Depending on your time, various meme soundtracks (like the sad violin) will play at the end. The app also features a soundboard consisting of four sound effects typically found in MLG meme-type videos on Youtube. Fun fact: I had the “Smoke weed everyday” jingle by Snoop Dogg as one of the SFX originally but Apple told me to remove it :(

I was really inspired by games like Flappy Bird and Pop The Lock: games that took a relatively short time to code but that still managed to captivate a global audience. Again, as someone who loves video games I really wanted to build something that (hopefully) entertains people.

Bibek Ghimire

Bibek Ghimire’s “Project Cube Time”

Record and save your solve times for speedcubing (solving the Rubik’s cube as fast as you can). In high school, I was pretty addicted to the Rubik’s cube and even got my fastest solve time down to about 26 seconds. There weren’t any great apps on the App Store for saving solve times and generating statistics from them so I made my own!

Ritam Sarmah

The first iOS app that I completely built on my own was a simple timer app with a basic animation. It was inspired by Apple’s timer app for iPad.

Ritam Sarmah’s Timer

I was kind of bored and decided I wanted to learn how to build something useful by myself. I’ve always been interested in learning iOS development, as it seemed to be a great way to transform creative ideas into something concrete. I taught myself iOS development using Stanford’s free CS 193P course on iTunes U, Udacity videos, RayWenderlich.com, and the Apple docs. The timer app was my first attempt to apply all these new concepts that I was learning about on my own.

Nathan Smith

My first iOS app was called Mirror++. As far as I know, it’s the only non-reversing mirror app for iOS!

Nathan Smith’s “Mirror++”

It was actually inspired after listening to an episode of Radiolab about how what you see in the mirror is actually flipped as opposed to what everyone else saw. I had recently gotten a new haircut and wanted to know which way I should part my hair, so I made an app for that (which I realize is now the most nerdy way to solve this problem).

Shannon Phu

My first app is called Bounce and it’s a game where basically the user can move this pad at the bottom of the screen to catch and bounce as many falling bubbles as possible.

Shannon Phu’s first app “Bounce”

I wanted to just see what I could make without following a tutorial as I had been doing for some time while learning. Bounce was a random idea, and I just decided to build it to test and challenge myself for a first app.

Matthew Lin

My first iOS app was a game called Keepy-Uppy where the goal was to keep the ball in the air as long as possible to score points. It was basically a clone of the Neopets game Zurroball.

Matthew Lin’s “Keepy-Uppy”

I had always wanted to make games when I was younger, and that was actually what initially drew me towards Computer Science. I also wanted to learn iOS development for fun and also to broaden my technical knowledge, so I started watching the Stanford 193P course as well as looking up tutorials online to figure out how to make Keepy-Uppy.

Jahan Kuruvilla Cherian

Jahan Cherian’s “Future Without Borders”

The very first iOS application I ever worked on was Future Without Borders — a application that aimed to connect Syrian Refugees immigrating to the host citizens of the countries they were moving to.

The app’s ideology came during the increased awareness of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in 2015. Having come from the Middle East, I saw this entire event affect people that I knew and the region I came from. At the time I had never done anything practical with the CS knowledge I was gaining at UCLA, and so I decided to try and combine my want to help refugees with the want to utilize my CS skills.