Building Mobile Apps for Fun and Profit

Check out Meme Smasher by my student, Dan McWilliams, in the App Store!

Wow! I’ve got 62 students in two sections of Mobile App Development this semester at UNG, the most popular computer science elective we’ve ever offered! We’re programming apps in Android and iOS, and having a blast! It’s so popular, we’ve added a new Minor in Mobile App Development that starts this Fall 2014 – CSCI 1301/1302 (Java I/II) plus CSCI 3660 (Mobile App Dev), CSCI 3000 (Web Programming), and any CS 3000/4000 elective course, and you’ve got a Minor in Mobile App Development!

I’ve even had students submit their apps to the App Store and Google Play, while the semester’s still going – check out Dan McWilliams’ RNGuess (a random number guessing game we built as a project in CSCI 3660) for Android in Google Play at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danielmcwilliams.rnguess and his THREE awesome apps, RNGuess, Slippy Car, and Meme Smasher for iOS in the App Store at https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/daniel-mcwilliams/id812807320 , and I’ll post updates as other students submit their apps.

This semester, we’re programming native apps in both Java, using Eclipse with Android ADT [http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html], on the Android platform, and in Objective-C using Xcode 5 [https://developer.apple.com/] on the iOS platform. Both are free to download, install and use (although you have to have a Mac to use Xcode), have a wealth of online tutorials, and are the tools that professionals use to develop apps every day.

I can’t wait to see everything these 60+ students will create as we go through their term projects – updates to come!

Update: William Stowers is updating the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests app – click here for the Android version