There are a lot of people with good ideas for iPhone apps, but who aren’t yet familiar enough with iPhone programming to develop them. So we’ve decided to run a competition to give away a free place at the next App School (starts on Monday) to someone with a really good idea. (Standard cost: €1500.)

App School is an intensive, hands-on, week-long course. During it, we’ll teach you the essentials of iPhone programming, and get you started on your app. If you decide to charge for it, you’ll get to keep all the revenues. Basically, there are no strings attached.

To enter, you just have to describe an iPhone app you’d like to develop. You can do so by leaving a comment on the blog here or send a tweet with the hashtag #iphoneappschool. If you’d rather keep your idea private, you can enter via DM on Twitter or email kim@appschool.ie. And if you do decide to keep the idea private, we won’t reveal it until you launch your app.

Ideas should be anywhere up to 300 words in length. You don’t need to describe everything; just enough to convince us that it’d be cool to build.

To enter, you have to be able to attend App School in Dublin next week. Other than that, there are no restrictions.

We’ll pick the winner at midnight (Irish time) on Friday, and (if it’s public) announce the idea on the blog. We might also highlight some of the other interesting (public) ideas we receive.

If you want to see what some previous attendees thought of App School, have a read of the blog posts from Cathal Garvey and John Long.

Questions? Let us know in the comments.

Our Encyclopedia app is now available in 27 languages, and as a result, we needed a good way of tracking both overall sales and the break-down by individual app. Many people have pointed out that iTunes Connect’s analytics capabilities are sorely lacking, so we decided to go ahead and roll our own. As usual, Mathematica came fairly quickly to the rescue:

The code is available as a gist here.

It generates charts that look like this:

(Normally, total sales (in USD) are displayed on the Y axis.)

The script has EYSalesLastMonthPlot and EYSalesByWeekPlot built-in. If anyone cares to add more functionality, we’d be happy to turn this into a proper GitHub project.

We just released Ciclipéid, the App Store’s first Irish app. It’s basically the Irish version of Encyclopedia, and like its English counterpart, stores a complete copy of Wikipedia on an iPhone/iPod Touch.

Will be interesting to see what uptake of Irish apps is like. We’ll let you know!

Update (Sep 16): Over 16 days, 3 copies have been sold. App School recommends sticking to English apps…

The first week of App School is over and it really was an enjoyable week. Of course the real measure of success will be when apps start selling on the App Store, but based on the feedback from the App Students, everyone had a really great learning experience and they’re ready to start building their apps! (Actually, some of them are finishing up apps they started in class right now!)

Being the first week for App School, I wasn’t sure how far our pioneers would get through the material I had prepared but it ended up being just right: by the end of the week a few of the students had Twitter clients working—profile picture support and all! Others spent time working on other projects: FYPs and company apps.

The class was made up of people from all over. From Dublin to Sligo, from academia to high-profile tech companies, there was an amazing mix of people and everyone really worked well together. It was a great experience to be surrounded by such interesting people for the whole week. Everyone really brought a lot to the course. The interaction we all had together, be it during lunch or while coding together, was always a valuable time—there honestly was a constant stream of great ideas flowing every day! The first time we tried coding in pairs, the creativity bouncing around the room couldn’t be missed, and one pair made a basic 2D physics simulation! I turned my back for a minute and they had a button rolling around the screen as they moved their iPhone around… and bouncing realistically off the edges of the screen too!

If you want to see some of the feedback from the pioneer class, check out Twitter. Also, one of the students has also written about his experience in his blog.

Here’s where I would love to have a photo of the group, but I must instead apologise for forgetting to grab one before the last day ended. There will be plenty more opportunity for photos though, as we’re going ahead with a second week in Limerick from August 10th. If there are any questions about it please email Kim, or feel free to comment below and either I or somebody else will get back to you!

Yes, we may have a cupcake addiction…

Pictured above are Alison from it@Cork, Daniel from App School, Des from Contrast and Keith from Marino Software at the it@Cork iPhone event. Feedback from it@Cork members was excellent and while obviously biased, I think all three speakers will be called on again to do future events, they were of an exceedingly high calibre. The next event App School will attend is at the Irish Computer Society’s iPhone talk on July 14th. Do come along if you’re in Dublin.

And here are the App School cupcakes at the it@Cork event before they were scoffed

John was an early test victim of App School, and after some intense hands-on tuition, was ready to put something together. He was also doing his Leaving Cert at the time, and basically unable to think about anything else.

Leaving Cert Papers was the resulting app, and it’s now available in the App Store for €8.99. After the training, it took John about 8 hours to put the app together. Description and screenshots below:

The first Leaving Cert application for iPhone and iPod touch helps you study for the Leaving Cert exam! Our application stores exam papers and marking schemes for 32 subjects for access any time, even without internet access. Boost your grades by correcting your work without the hassle of going to a computer. Take advantage of those brief periods of free time to test yourself on some short questions. Or just save money and time compared to buying expensive paper editions.

Key features:

• All 32 Leaving Cert subjects (listed below).
• Both Higher and Ordinary levels.
• Papers available from 2008 to as far back as 1996 (depending on subject).
• Works without internet access – stores all the information on your iPhone or iPod touch.
• A fraction of the price of buying all the papers individually.

Subjects:

• Accounting
• Agricultural Economics
• Agricultural Science
• Applied Mathematics
• Arabic
• Art
• Biology
• Business
• Chemistry
• Classical Studies
• Construction Studies
• Economic History
• Economics
• Engineering
• English
• French
• Geography
• German
• Hebrew Studies
• History
• Home Economics – S & S
• Irish
• Italian
• Latin
• Link Modules (LCVP)
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Physics & Chemistry
• Religious Education
• Russian
• Spanish
• Technical Drawing