macOS Write this application for big $$

[jeremy.king]

Good read, lots of action.

Moral of the story I took away: Yet another person (er kid) trivializing the art of software development.

 

[Thom_Edwards]

now that the mystery of what the application has been unshrouded, i think i'll chime in. i remember once thinking of a similar program, but nothing even close to the scope of what is being presented here. my idea (when i was about 15, if i remember correctly) was to construct a flowchart that would then become the actual code automatically. it would have drag-n-drop flowchart symbols, each having appropriate attributes, that could be connected to form the logic and flow.

when i thought of it, it sounded great. me and my buddy talked about it at great length. that was, however, before either of us knew what it really meant to program. sure, it *might* have been possible for the programs we were writing at the time (which were simple BASIC apps, nothing even closely resembling a modern application written with an oop language), but *anything* past that would be impossible. i think that once you learn to program, you will realize the magnitude of the project.

so, good thinking, virus. it's good to have ideas and have creative thoughts, even when they don't always work out. but it's definitely a no-go. just as others have said, it just wouldn't work, especially for a hobbyist to complete in a few months. also, if it were such a marketable and doable application, i feel someone would have done it by now. the idea has been around for at least 20 years that i'm aware of. 🙂

 

[jestershinra]

It's very hard to be young and want to do things. People automatically assume that you're immature and incapable of working hard. When I was 13, I took the initiative and got a job doing computer repair. I worked hard at work, and hard at home expanding my knowledge. While I wasn't the most knowledgeable guy at the office, I was certainly not the least. Now, 2+ years later, I'm making a good bit more in an office than I was when I started working, and I make good money doing freelance/independent computer repair/training, etc. When you're 15, $35-50 (depending on the customer) is pretty good money, seeing as I don't have a ton of overhead, aside from geek stuff. I get a nice tax refund too, because I don't work enough for it to be qualified as full time, year round.

The point of this story is that I feel for the OP, and I completely understand why he didn't originally post his age. Setting aside his business plan for a moment, how many of you would honestly think about doing a project for pay for a 13 year old? Had his posts and business plan been more together, he might have gotten a better response.

To the OP- in theory, and application like that would be a godsend for the masses; it would help people with little or no coding knowledge be extremely productive. In practice, though, it doesn't seem feasible. The sheer coding knowledge to do something like that would be rare. As other have said, you'd need to program for an extremely large number of actions. This has been tried by, and I mean no disrespect by this, people and companies with more resources and coding talent than you have at your disposal, and hasn't really caught on in the general population. Automator is looking to change that, but whether that will work remains to be seen.

I'll wrap this up now. virus1, don't get too discouraged. You had a good idea, but it just isn't feasible. Continue your learning and continue to further your knowledge, though. You never know what opportunities may present themselves if you are knowledgeable.

 

[jeremy.king]

... how many of you would honestly think about doing a project for pay for a 13 year old?

Well, pay is pay, so I am guessing had he offered money up front, his age would be irrelevant. Most people I know work for money.

Had his posts and business plan been more together, he might have gotten a better response...

This is true and his posts were indicative of his level of expertise and experience causing many to be cautious. A little more education, preparation, and experience will come with time.

 

[virus1]

It's very hard to be young and want to do things. People automatically assume that you're immature and incapable of working hard. When I was 13, I took the initiative and got a job doing computer repair. I worked hard at work, and hard at home expanding my knowledge. While I wasn't the most knowledgeable guy at the office, I was certainly not the least. Now, 2+ years later, I'm making a good bit more in an office than I was when I started working, and I make good money doing freelance/independent computer repair/training, etc. When you're 15, $35-50 (depending on the customer) is pretty good money, seeing as I don't have a ton of overhead, aside from geek stuff. I get a nice tax refund too, because I don't work enough for it to be qualified as full time, year round.

The point of this story is that I feel for the OP, and I completely understand why he didn't originally post his age. Setting aside his business plan for a moment, how many of you would honestly think about doing a project for pay for a 13 year old? Had his posts and business plan been more together, he might have gotten a better response.

To the OP- in theory, and application like that would be a godsend for the masses; it would help people with little or no coding knowledge be extremely productive. In practice, though, it doesn't seem feasible. The sheer coding knowledge to do something like that would be rare. As other have said, you'd need to program for an extremely large number of actions. This has been tried by, and I mean no disrespect by this, people and companies with more resources and coding talent than you have at your disposal, and hasn't really caught on in the general population. Automator is looking to change that, but whether that will work remains to be seen.

I'll wrap this up now. virus1, don't get too discouraged. You had a good idea, but it just isn't feasible. Continue your learning and continue to further your knowledge, though. You never know what opportunities may present themselves if you are knowledgeable.

you'd all be suprised what a bored teenager can do in a summer vacation. i can probably program the basics by august. and of course begin more explanations of why i can't do it.. listen people. I will have to learn this lesson solo people..

 

[jestershinra]

you'd all be suprised what a bored teenager can do in a summer vacation. i can probably program the basics by august. and of course begin more explanations of why i can't do it.. listen people. I will have to learn this lesson solo people..

*laughs*

Virus1, I think you misunderstand me. I know full well what someone can do in a summer, I gained a large amount of knowledge in one summer, and I'm sure you can too. Good luck with it.

 

[jsw]

you'd all be suprised what a bored teenager can do in a summer vacation. i can probably program the basics by august. and of course begin more explanations of why i can't do it.. listen people. I will have to learn this lesson solo people..

Best of luck. Really.

I hope it works out, and, if you spend the summer on this, you'll undoubtedly come out of it with something of value, in terms of experience and quite possibly in terms of an application.

 

[sigamy]

Yes, I talked to virus1 about this quite a bit. He's got a general concept to make programming easy with GUI and everything. However, since he's not a programmer he doesn't understand all the complexities involved.

You either need to go the route of Automator and have everything trimmed down and pre-programmed otherwise you are essentially just creating yet another IDE for programmers. In doing something like Automator it is almost required that you limit the functionality of the actions, you don't offer end-users to tweak all of the details that might be related to a particular action. If you did you would need to create a UI that had a tremendous amount of options. If you did this all with preprogrammed functions it would be daunting to provide a library vast enough to give you the tools you would really need to develop a fully-developed application. If you tried to make a generic GUI and have the system libraries programmaticly translated... well that would be one hell of a technical feat that would require some damn good programming. I'm from the Windows side of programming and there are TypeLibs and stuff available to describe your COM objects and such but converting that into a sensible GUI for the end user is an insane task, IMO.

Anything in between Automator and generic IDE and you end up with something like Visual Basic, which is fine but there are several technologies available like this already and you still need to know a lot more about programming than the average consumer which is the market virus1 is targeting.

Exactly.

I really don't see this as a huge groundbreaking app/tool. There are very few people who want to write their own app or develop their own software. Even if all it takes is simple point and click or drag and drop type stuff, regular people don't care. They run existing apps, which cover 95% of their needs.

If the OP was thinking this would be good for kids and hobbists I just don't know. We already have RealBasic, Automator, AppleScript and AppleScript Studio. You can build some really nice apps with these with an intermediate level of knowledge and training.

This type of app is more suited to web development where the list of potential needs is much smaller. Even here there are already plenty of these on the market in RapidWeaver, Freeway, even Dreamweaver.

virus1, I think you should take your idea and really change the focus to work with Automator. Automator is brand new and not many people have even played with it yet. There are a few resource sites online now. Maybe you can join one of those, or even start your own portal site.

You can try to build a community of people writting Automator Actions. I used Automator to grab my bank balance online, but I had to do more than half of it in AppleScript because of Automator's limitations. It would be great for people to start extending Automator. Build tons of MS Office Actions, Photoshop, iLife, etc. Things that will be useful to large user bases. If you site catches on you can become the #1 resource for one of Mac OS X's newest features. This could be big and benefit tons of users and maybe someday even profitable.

 

[gangst]

Good luck, you may be the next Bill Gates. lol.

 

[Omen88]

yeah, i did a research project, that i wrote my own language and grammar to create a 3D tree, that could be used to random generate a forrest. the parser was written in C++ using the opengl libraries. so yes, you can 'invent' a language using another language. you can also make libraries and extention for objective-c. my point is a programming language is open ended because it lets you have limitless possibilities on what you can create.

You can even make a programming language which interprets/compiles the same programming language. That's called meta-circular evaluation. Expressive languages, like Scheme have that.

 

[Omen88]

now that the mystery of what the application has been unshrouded, i think i'll chime in. i remember once thinking of a similar program, but nothing even close to the scope of what is being presented here. my idea (when i was about 15, if i remember correctly) was to construct a flowchart that would then become the actual code automatically. it would have drag-n-drop flowchart symbols, each having appropriate attributes, that could be connected to form the logic and flow.

when i thought of it, it sounded great. me and my buddy talked about it at great length. that was, however, before either of us knew what it really meant to program. sure, it *might* have been possible for the programs we were writing at the time (which were simple BASIC apps, nothing even closely resembling a modern application written with an oop language), but *anything* past that would be impossible. i think that once you learn to program, you will realize the magnitude of the project.

so, good thinking, virus. it's good to have ideas and have creative thoughts, even when they don't always work out. but it's definitely a no-go. just as others have said, it just wouldn't work, especially for a hobbyist to complete in a few months. also, if it were such a marketable and doable application, i feel someone would have done it by now. the idea has been around for at least 20 years that i'm aware of. 🙂

I remember when I was very young my father had a book of a program which did just that on the Mac. It was called VIP (can't remember what it stood for). It must been a program of somewhere around 1988. You drew flowcharts on it, and it executed your program.

 

[Omen88]

And something slightly more off-topic.

Does anyone remember Game Builder or World Builder. It allowed you to create your own adventure games without programming. It was also something from the late 80's on the mac in black and white.

God the fun I had with that...

My friends were never that impressed with my creations though.

 

[virus1]

And something slightly more off-topic.

Does anyone remember Game Builder or World Builder. It allowed you to create your own adventure games without programming. It was also something from the late 80's on the mac in black and white.

God the fun I had with that...

My friends were never that impressed with my creations though.

my friends are all really hyped up on two programs called game maker and fusion. they allow them to create games really easily. they were able to create a 2d fps in about 30 min.. and they are not programmers or anything..

 

[DavidLeblond]

my friends are all really hyped up on two programs called game maker and fusion. they allow them to create games really easily. they were able to create a 2d fps in about 30 min.. and they are not programmers or anything..

2d FPS? Is that like Doom in a very narrow hallway?

J/k I know what you're talking about. I remember the days of editing the sprites in Wolfenstein frame by frame. Making "ghost guards" by painting their faces purple. Ah, memories.

 

[mj_1903]

my friends are all really hyped up on two programs called game maker and fusion. they allow them to create games really easily. they were able to create a 2d fps in about 30 min.. and they are not programmers or anything..

Those applications are very rigid with regards to what you can create. Set rules, set objects, set motions and set game dynamics. You definitely can't create anything original with them except maybe with regards to graphics.

As for the idea, programming is too open-ended to create an application that can create 95% of other applications. That's why a programming environment like Cocoa is made up of thousands of little blocks that can be morphed into a big comprehensive block. Automator on the other hand is dozens of big blocks that can be roughly assembled into a chain but not into something useful to all. It might cover 50% of cases but that leaves the other 50% for true programs.

Oh, by the way, I started out programming at 14 (currently 20) and after spending 6 months developing Connoissuer (along with 2 employees) I can assure you that your project is not something that can be done by one person in a summer let alone one person who has still not grasped the fundamentals of Cocoa/OOP.

As an example, this function took 2 weeks of solid programming and bug testing to get to a 95% standard. It does basic language parsing to read in recipes in different formats pretty similar to what you will be doing with code except recipes all have a relatively standard format.

 

[virus1]

Those applications are very rigid with regards to what you can create. Set rules, set objects, set motions and set game dynamics. You definitely can't create anything original with them except maybe with regards to graphics.

As for the idea, programming is too open-ended to create an application that can create 95% of other applications. That's why a programming environment like Cocoa is made up of thousands of little blocks that can be morphed into a big comprehensive block. Automator on the other hand is dozens of big blocks that can be roughly assembled into a chain but not into something useful to all. It might cover 50% of cases but that leaves the other 50% for true programs.

Oh, by the way, I started out programming at 14 (currently 20) and after spending 6 months developing Connoissuer (along with 2 employees) I can assure you that your project is not something that can be done by one person in a summer let alone one person who has still not grasped the fundamentals of Cocoa/OOP.

As an example, this function took 2 weeks of solid programming and bug testing to get to a 95% standard. It does basic language parsing to read in recipes in different formats pretty similar to what you will be doing with code except recipes all have a relatively standard format.

listen guys.. i told you i am going to have to learn this by myself. parsing as i understand it is pretty complicated. i will not attempt to incorperate parsing in the first summer of work. guys if you remember, pm me at the end of the summer to see how it went. its not oop i have problems with, it is the more advanced concepts of cocoa. and i will tell you again, my app will be able to do everything xcode can, because it has cocoa built right into it.

 

[Wyrm]

Does anyone remember Game Builder or World Builder. It allowed you to create your own adventure games without programming. It was also something from the late 80's on the mac in black and white.
God the fun I had with that...
My friends were never that impressed with my creations though.

You can relive those memories: http://we.got.net/~mapman/wb/

Har har har. 😀
(well, for about 5 minutes anyways)

I remember seeing a visual programming tool from National Instruments where you dragged programming *points* (decisions, loops, etc) from a toolkit to make a program visually. It was for their data capture boards, so very domain specific, but pretty slick nonetheless.

Good luck virus1, just make sure it is Turing complete (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_complete) and you check BOTH the PowerPC and Intel targets for your universal binary. 🙄

-Wyrm

 

[Shaun.P]

don't forgot knows nothing about the software developement cycle.

I live in Scotland and have done Higher Computing. is this ADITDEM (Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Documentation, Evaluation and Maintenance?)

 

[superbovine]

I live in Scotland and have done Higher Computing. is this ADITDEM (Analysis, Design, Implementation, Testing, Documentation, Evaluation and Maintenance?)

yes

 

[mj_1903]

and i will tell you again, my app will be able to do everything xcode can, because it has cocoa built right into it.

Just like Preview can do everything Xcode can because it has Cocoa built in, right? What does having Cocoa built in mean anyway? :-/

 

[virus1]

Just like Preview can do everything Xcode can because it has Cocoa built in, right? What does having Cocoa built in mean anyway? :-/

i mean into the scripting environment..

 

[Flowbee]

So summer vacation is over... let's have an update.

 

[ham_man]

im sure you will buy it long before then. before i go to bed though, i would like to say a bunch of things:

-Sorry to all about being a bit cocky.
-it was all in good fun, i just got a little carried away
-I am going to reject the person who volunteered to write this app
-I am going to stop hiding behind the fact that i am 13 years old
-Instead, i will learn objective c myself and write the app myself
-i have reconsidered and will likely take more like a year to make

i didn't tell people that im 13 y.o. because people usually don't take me seriously, and i suppose i understand that.

thank you feakbeak for all your support

if anyone is willing to donate thier time to the app, the idea is an application that will allow people without coding experience to develop full featured applications harnessing the power of objective c and cocoa. The advantages:

-a coder only needs to do the basics, then i can finish it off with the basics

-if the application itself fails, i can easily develop applications in my spare time with it, and that is how the developer would be repaid

what makes this possible is it's ingenious ui.

there is a big hole in the market there, because a lot of people want to create their own applications for thier own intrests, but don't have enough knowledge to do so. our competitors are realbasic, where they still need to learn code, same with supercard, any form of basic even. and thats it.

now make with the apologies people!! jk jk

big post.. time for sleep

*muffled laughter*

So how did your coding go?

*muffled laughter*

Ahhh...who am I kidding?

*full blown gut busting laughter*

Programming an app like RealBasic for something as complicated as Cocoa and Obj-C is not a summer project. Hell, I studied C for 3 weeks and the best I could do was make a calculator...

 

[jestershinra]

Dude- don't be a dick. He got the message...

 

[jamdr]

I just finished reading the entire thread for the first time and I have to say I am quite astonished by how kind MR members were to this kid. Programmers are usually huge arrogant pricks (I was a former cs major 😎 ) but it seems like the ones on this board actually tried to provide a little guidance for this kid and didn't scorn him too badly.

I once had a similiar idea and tried to implement it in HyperCard back when I was only 13 or so. I actually ended up with a pretty cool program (as I remember it) but I never finished it 100% because I started to move on to real languages and the world suddenly got a lot more complicated 😀. I do hope he really did try to program it himself this summer, because that would provide a lot of valuable experience. Although I agree that a program that could do everything he wanted would be virtually impossible to create, even for a team of very talented programmers, and even harder to market. I think that's why HyperCard ultimately failed. However, it would be an interesting project to work on, nonetheless.