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Stanford Report, November 15, 2011

Stanford's latest iPhone and iPad apps course nowfree to the world on iTunes U

Stanford's popular iPhone and iPad app development course for Apple's iOS

5 is now available to the world through iTunes U.

By Sarah J ane Keller

Students may covet seats in Stanford's popular iPhone and iPad application development

course, but you don't need to be in the classroom to take the course.

Anyone with app dreams can follow along online.

Stanford has just released the iOS 5 incarnation ofiPhone Application Development on

iTunes U, where the public can download course lectures and slides for free. Some of the

most talked-about features of Apple's latest operating system include iCloud, streamlined

notifications and wireless syncing.

When Stanford's first iPhone apps course appeared online in 2009, it made iTunes history

by rocketing to a million downloads injust seven weeks.

Alberto Martn is an engineer and independent iOS developer in Salamanca, Spain. He has

been a diligent student of the online app development class since it first appeared.

He has created applications, now for sale in Apple's App Store, that organize your photos

and make navigating while driving less distracting. Or, for fitness fans, an app that counts

your pushups.

His apps provide him with extra income. "I hope some day I can live off this, because I love

doing it," he said.

"Although it's not impossible, I think it's hard to make a lot of money in the App Store,"

Martn said. "But I think it's a beautiful process because it gives you the opportunity to

develop your own ideas, sell them and fight for them."

Martn has been eagerly awaiting the release of the new course and says that he will follow

the classes for as long as they keep coming.

"You learn a lot by watching the lectures on iTunes U," he said. "If you want to have

success you need to keep on learning new things."

Online learners hear the same lectures as classroom students, but do not get Stanford

credit or access to instructors.

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L.A. Cicero

Students check the results of their coding on their iPhones in the

Developing Apps for iOS taught by Paul Hegarty

Instructor Paul Hegarty attributes the

course popularity to the appeal of Apple

products and the instant gratification of

creating apps for mobile devices.

"There's something about developing for

the iOS platform that's really exciting and

fun because it runs on devices that

everybody has in their purses or pockets,

" he said.

"There aren't a lot of courses you can

take that when you get to the end, to your

final project, you can take it out of your

pocket and show your friends."

Hegarty said that his students develop a wide array of applications for the iPhone and iPad,

including many that improve or automate their daily lives. Those include apps that managelaboratory experiments, keep track of food choices at campus eateries, or access the works

of Shakespeare. Games and social networking applications are also popular.

J ohn Cast, an electrical engineering student who is taking the class in a Stanford

classroom, said that he learned about the course by watching earlier versions on iTunes U.

Cast is working on applications that archive historical memorabilia and improve FM radio

tuning.

"One of the coolest things about teaching this class is just seeing the creativity that gets

applied," Hegarty said. "It's really quite amazing."

Developers unfamiliar with Apple's operating systems must learn a new programming

language, Objective-C, if they hope to master the apps course. Stanford students take a

year of computer science classes and learn the technique of object-oriented programming

before tackling the iOS development class.

Two Stanford prerequisite courses, Programming Methodology and Programming

Abstractions, are available on iTunes U.

Nikil Viswanathan, a computer science student, said that the class is "really, really, good" in

large part because Hegarty doesn't just teach students a new language, he teaches the

"philosophy of how we program in Objective-C" and "puts it into the context of entire

computer science program."

Most introductory computer science classes are abstract, but Objective-C is used to build

applications for mobile devices, so students learn the programming basics and apply them

right away. "I don't think that what I'm doing is just teaching them programming," Hegarty

said. "It's an opportunity to teach them some computing fundamentals in a real world

environment."

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