How to Get Your Name into an IPhone / IPod Touch Application

You can skip the first part of this article and go straight to the "Dictionary HaHa" section at the end if you want to find our right away how to get your name into our iPhone / iPod Touch app - but why not read the brief summary of how this came about first!

Becoming an iPhone / iPod Touch developer

Unless you've been hiding under a rock recently you can't fail to have heard about the coolest smart phone around, and yes, it's the Apple iPhone.

If you've held one in your hands and played around with some of the free apps that you can download from the AppStore using an iTunes account you can't fail to be impressed.

It's incredibly tactile and who would have believed that something so small could do so much and be so much fun to use - certainly not me - until I had a go that is!

It's just so easy to use and once you've got past the outstanding Safari web browser (which I have to say is a joy to use) and download the obligatory free ball in a maze app (that will have you tilting your iPhone in all directions to guide the ball through the maze) you will find an incredible number of applications, or "apps" as they are known, are available.

To cut a long story short I was so impressed by the iPhone that I bought an iPod Touch - "huh - that's a bit strange" I can hear you saying!

Well, I'm a software developer and I had to buy an iMac as well as I really wanted to try my hand at writing an "app" for the iPhone, and an iPod Touch is basically the same excepting that you can't make phone calls or take photos.

Anyway, what better way to start than with something simple, but it had to be a bit fun too. I eventually decided to create an alternative dictionary with amusing definitions - having realized that to write a complicated 3D game with no previous iPhone OS experience was probably a bit on the ambitious side!

Dictionary HaHa

There were a lot of new things to learn but after 4 weeks the new app "Dictionary HaHa" was ready - while it took over a week to get approved by Apple it surprisingly did so first time.

Initially there were several hundred words which were categorized rather than just having a simple A to Z list, so if you want some funny medical definitions or definitions involving animals there are dedicated categories for these and more besides.

For example, "Rhinoplasty - a plastic credit or debit card that can be used at the zoo."

Putting together a dictionary can be a never ending task and to help with getting regular updates available (about every 2 weeks or so) with new words / definitions and even new categories there is a tab in the application interface that allows a user to enter their own definition and submit it to Utility Warrior for possible inclusion in a future version.

Not every submission makes it into the dictionary but for all those that do the person who submitted it gets their name added to the credits tab - the more submissions you enter the higher up the list your name is.

As you can see it is incredibly easy to get your name immortalized in our iPhone / iPod Touch app - lots of our users have already done so - so why not download "Dictionary HaHa" to your iPhone or iPod Touch today and submit a new definition to us and see your name added to the credits page.

Copyright © Adrian Nelson