“This is going to sound a little odd,” Ari Weinstein says, “but when I was a kid coding…was a lot harder.”
Ari Weinstein is just 19. He’s about to start as a freshman at MIT after deferring for a year to do a little fooling around. And he’s been playing in Apple’s ecosystem — in one form or another — since he was 11. That was when he took an interest in the iPod Linux project and created an easier way to install the open-source operating system on Apple’s music player.
Weinstein is just one of a growing group of young developers that are choosing Apple’s iOS platform, and specifically the iPhone, as the place where they cut their teeth. These young coders and designers use the iPhone from a young age and — when they get the urge — begin hacking and noodling on them. Eventually, they graduate to publishing apps, some garnering attention and awards from Apple.
Young developers are already working on the apps that will end up on our home screens. And those apps aren’t simple student projects, they’re award winners that are well designed, well executed and well received. This is what the next generation of top developers who will be building the apps for everything in your life looks like — and they’re building for iOS.
Android has long had a reputation for being difficult to design and develop for, but Google has done a lot to change that reputation over the last couple of years. It continues to introduce better tools for developers and its market-share is becoming a draw that many feel they can’t ignore. And there has been a surge of developers and designers like Paul Stamatiou who are ‘discovering’ the platform and beginning to evangelize it.
But the fact remains that some of the best young developers in the world prefer iOS and if Google wants to capture the hearts and minds of the coming generation of touch-interface craftspeople, then it needs to start young.
HACKER TO HYPED
The interest in hacking and extending Apple’s hardware set Weinstein up nicely to get involved with the iPhone when it popped onto the scene in 2007. With no native SDK or App Store, it was up to those with the desire and skills to crack the iPhone’s system partition to give everyone the ability to play in its normally off-limits playground.
After developing the extremely popular iJailbreak tool out of his efforts to open up his iPod touch, Weinstein eventually became a part of the Chronic Dev Team — one of the major forces in the iPhone jailbreak community. That’s when Weinstein and the other members of the team released a jailbreak for the iPhone 3GS, a little under a month after its release. Millions of people visited the site within the first couple of days.
Now, four years later, Weinstein has released an app on the App Store called DeskConnect. It’s a way for you to transfer items from your iPhone to your Mac and vice versa.
And, though I have reason to believe that Apple knows exactly who Weinstein is and where he got his start, it has featured the app on the Mac store and placed it in the ‘new and noteworthy’ section of the iOS store. Why? One reason is that it’s a genuinely useful app that has already made its way into my daily workflow.
DeskConnect came out of a LinkedIn Intern hackathon after Weinstein found himself frustrated about how hard it was to move files and URLs between his phone and computer. He built the app and partnered with frequent collaborator Ben Feldman and designer Jay Moon — a freshman at Stanford — to release it on the store.
The app is basic, but reliable, with a quick and clever system that sends your file to an intermediary server and then transfers it post-haste to any other instance of DeskConnect. That includes an iPhone app and a Mac menu bar icon. After experiencing some transfer delays initially — which Weinstein says are largely due to the servers being crushed by initial attention — it’s been cruising along quite well for me.
Source : TechCrunch
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