I was intrigued by developed processing power in mobile devices, especially when I got my first smartphone. I played around with the iOS simulator through XCode just for fun, but when I got an iPhone 5, I was more motivated to try app development. The app idea came from the fact that our calculators could not solve equations easily, something that I valued in my math classes. Because of this, I wanted to make a simple equation solver. At the time there were a few solver on the App Store, but regardless I wanted the experience of writing and publishing an app.

I spent a winter break learning Objective-C in order to throw together this app idea and was able to get an efficient solver. I would later add another tab that calculates basic statistical data given an input data set. At the time writing the app functionality was half the battle. I did not only want this app to run on the iOS simulator but also wanted to publish it. Getting it to be compatible with the App Store’s security and basic standards took half the time. At publish time it took a while to get the final app through as there were always some errors in the setup and package configurations. When I did get it published, it was a cool achievement to have my work in the App Store, where anyone could get it.