Talk about your early adopter.
Recently, Ethan Bratton asked his father Alex if he could learn how to build an iPhone app… just like Dad does everyday at his company, Lextech. Alex, who had downloaded Appcelerator Titanium, decided to take his son up on the request.
“I thought that building an app with my son would be a great way to teach him a great new skill in a field that’s just exploding with opportunity,” noted Alex. Now the question was, what to build. Ethan had that nailed down – “Stick Pro Wrestling.” The concept is simple: develop a game that’s an advanced version of rock-paper-scissors that any kid could easily pick up and play.
“We went through a lightweight development process, starting with storyboards that were 100% Ethan’s creation”. These sketches provided Father and Son a way to talk about how the game should play. Next, Ethan drew some stick figure sketches that were scanned into their Mac and edited for game art using Photoshop. Finally, they added sound. Here, Ethan enlisted his music teacher, Mrs. Shaina, to help him compose a music score and sound effects.
Putting it all together into an app was easy, thanks to Titanium. With his son by his side, Alex coded the javascript, HTML, and CSS to build the app. No objective-C required. “It was so simple to rapidly prototype the app and then have Ethan make changes, in real-time, to how the app was put together.” It took only a few hours to put all the pieces together, which Alex and Ethan then packaged to submit to the app store.
Stick Pro Wrestling is now available in the app store and has been downloaded several thousand times. It’s in the top 100 kids game list in 10 countries as well.. Father and son are looking to add multiplayer options and other fun features in their pending update. Alex hopes that his story will provide inspiration to other parents looking to engage their kids early on with technology that makes it easy to get into software development. As well, Alex is now looking to Titanium for ways to quickly build iPhone apps for Lextech’s clients.
Interested in learning more? Check out Stick Pro Wrestling on the Apple App Store today.
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Just a friendly note, but all the links in your blog post are broken and are 404′ing.
Thanks, Dirk – all fixed now.
Scott
That’s an awesome story, and one I can relate to as a non-programmer. Titanium’s given me a way to quickly turn ideas into professional looking applications and I think this story proves just how accessible it is.