Creating an app

[FairytalesAreBullshit]

Has anyone created an app or thought about creating an app? Did you have to know about programming?

I've been on Amazon which said about ploughing money into them, I thought it was something you could do grassroots style, by yourself for free.

Do you have any advice at all please? Or any good websites for advice?

I've got the Adobe CS6 Design Suite, so I thought that would be a big help.

I'm wondering now if I'm being a bit too adventurous, even though it's a totally unique idea.

Its been a few years since I've done much to do with making apps, and the tech involved continues to change (software developers are particularly good at making their own tools, and so often people and companies decide to make tools to do difficult Development tasks more easily or faster), but generally the free and by yourself route takes quite a bit of time (months not weeks) as well as a bit of programming skill and some graphic design skills. Those skills can be learnt on the job, by basically researching bits and trying it out- lots of reading, googling, watching tutorials, typing code and seeing what it does, making logically sound guesses, retrying guesses when at first it doesn't work.

The Adobe Design Suite is mostly known for designing great graphics, in particular Photoshop of course, which I personally think is amazing, and definitely a suitable tool for making icon sprites (icons are the images people tap or click on, sprites are a way of avoiding having lots of small image files that would be slower to load by having a single image file that contains multiple images in a grid that an app or game will display specified section of at different times) although I've not used any of the other tools in the adobe suite, so there might be an even better choice. I'm not sure if cs6 contains any tools for programming, but the official Android Developer Toolkit is a free download from the android developer website anyway and thats pretty good, apple may well have a free IDE (application used for programming - they usually exist on desktops/laptops) for making apps for iOS /mac too -beware this used to be only available to run on Mac, Microsofts main IDE is Visual Studio which the pro version is £££ but there certainly used to be a free version for students if you happen to be one, they might have a cheap one now.

There are apps to help people learn programming languages - I've recently done a Python course on sololearn which taught me the basics of that language in a few days (and you can dip in for a few min at a time of you want)- enough for me to feel ok learning on my own from there but thats with experience from other languages (also Python isn't the standard language for any of the main platforms, so not very easy to make apps with - if you just want to make an app on one platform, learn Java and go for Android, if you want to make for everything, learn HTML5 cross platform development with whichever framework has a tutorial that sounds easy to you, if it must be an iPhone/iPad/Mac app learn swift, if just Windows then theres lots of competition and Java is a good choice). Codeacademy is one of the most well known online courses for learning programming.

Make sure you keep regular backups of work, and try out Version Control as soon as you can to help with experimenting without worry - github.com is a good freebie

Android developer website: developer.android.com
Apple platforms developer website: developer.apple.com
One of the most well known HTML5 cross platform frameworks (phonegap - now owned by Adobe, so maybe this was what you where already looking at)
jQuery mobile is another cross platform framework built on html5 and jQuery: jquerymobile.com
Some more good suggestions at: stackoverflow.com/questions/9045355/how-to-create-an-android-app-using-html-5