Starting from scratch/Here goes nothing!

Happy New Year and welcome to my iOS app dev blog. Let’s see, how to start my first blog post…well, might as well jump right in and give you a little background about myself and how I got here. A few years ago, I was a graduate student at Lincoln Christian University in Illinois, a part-time worship minister at a Christian church in Springfield, IL and a huge Apple fan. Even though I had never personally owned an Apple computer, I’d used plenty of them. I had a free PC from my job, but I talked my wife into buying a Mac for school and I got the free first generation iPod touch that came with it in the Back-to-School promotion. This was the fall just after the release of iPhone OS 2.0 and the grand opening of the App Store, and what a time that was for developers and users alike! It was so amazing to have so much power and so many apps on that small, thin little device, and just as amazing to hear about the crazy amounts of money some devs were making selling anything from high quality 3D games to fart apps. Ever since I was a high schooler noodling around with the programming capabilities of my TI-83 graphing calculator, I had been interested in software development, and here was my chance to put my skills to work! Only one small problem – a didn’t actually know anything. And I mean nothing. For whatever reason, I never delved any deeper into programming than writing a few unit conversion utilities for that calculator. I listened eagerly to the Stevenotes talking about the new App Store, but I didn’t know an SDK from an API and couldn’t tell you what UIKit was or recognize an Objective-C method call if my life depended on it. At this point, the idea of actually making an app was far from a reality, just a faint idea in the back of my mind that I quickly put aside.
Fast forward about 8 months, and the story was quite different: