Student Story: Oliver Shi

Ever since the first iPhone came out when I was 6, I have been fascinated by its capabilities. I just had to get my hands on an iPhone. Of course, back then I was much too young to own an iPhone. Years passed, and on my 11th birthday I got an iPad. I was satisfied for the moment, but as more years passed my friends were all getting their own iPhones, so I just knew I had to get one. My dad refused to buy me one, since our family already owned three iPads, and I had a LG840G which was an extremely rudimentary phone.

Then, I heard about the iPhone 6 coming out in September of 2014 and I had to get it! So I asked my dad if he’d buy me one, and he replied that I had to prove that I deserved one.

Then it came to me, I’d make an app for the iPhone 6 and my dad would just have to get me one.

So, I asked my dad if that would earn me an iPhone, and of course he replied “yes”.
I quickly borrowed a couple of iOS 7 books from the library and started looking around on YouTube to find a few videos teaching iOS app development. I even sat through several online lessons taught in Stanford University. As soon as I tried to make my “Hello World” app, I stumbled on the iOS programming language ObjectiveC. To do a simple thing like printing out “Hello World”, one had to create two files – one “h” file and one “m” file. That was crazy. Creating an app should not be that hard. It was not a good start! My chance of getting an iPhone were rapidly diminishing … Luckily Apple announced their new Swift language very soon. As soon as I got this news, I requested for my dad to register for an Apple developer account on my behalf, since I am too young to own one myself. My dad complied, and I downloaded Xcode 6 beta.

This new Xcode contained Swift, and I found out immediately how much easier Swift was to use than ObjectiveC. I quickly learned the basics of the new programming language. My confidence level was growing fast. Using YouTube, I watched the videos with sample code for Flappy Bird, Shooting aliens, etc. Soon I was able to put together some simple apps on my own like Rock Paper Scissors and Tic-Tac-Toe. This wasn’t enough for me though, I felt the need to create a much more exciting game. So, I came up with the idea of Defend The Earth. In a matter of days, I had my first running prototype for my game. But, I had a lot of more problems to solve to turn my prototype turn into a real game. “How to store the highest score after a player quits the game”. “How to pass the highest score to the next scene”. “How to incorporate iAD into the game to allow me earn some money for my hard work”. These were just a few of my problems and the list grew longer every day. Although I found some answers and tips from stackoverflow.com, I was struggling to put together the code piece by piece.

One afternoon while I was surfing the internet desperately for the answers to fix my code, I came across the website udemy.com. The class “The complete IOS 8 and Swift Course: Learn by building 15 Real World Apps” immediately caught my attention. From “Hello World” to “Instagram clone” tutorials, I was impressed by the content of this amazing course. Mr. Rob Percival was fantastic at explaining the concepts loud and clear, and demonstrating how to build real world apps step by step so that I could easily follow them. Within just a few hours, I found most of the answers to solve my problems. Within a few days, I managed to turn the prototyping code into a real “Defend the Earth” game. I wished that I could have taken this course earlier. I’d learned how to do a multitude of things that would’ve taken me weeks to learn, in hours, thanks to Mr. Percival. On top all that, the course has also taught me how to set up my own web site, olivershi.com . Finally, I had everything setup. I created my own website which allowed me to promote my app. I was ready to show my app to the entire world!

I released the binary of Defend The Earth to Apple in September. And guess what, I got my iPhone 6 as soon as it was released on September 19th. Shortly after getting my iPhone, Apple approved my app and made it available for download. Within three days, my app has been downloaded in 23 different countries. But, this is not the end of my adventure. I have set up a more ambitious goal: I want “Defend the Earth” to exceed 1 million downloads.