For the past couple months I had decided to take a break from Flash development and try something completely foreign to me; iPhone App development. The language is completely different than Actionscript, however it comes Model-View-Controller based, so that was my only comfort.

My brother and I came up with an idea to put coupons on the iPhone, something that hadn’t been done yet, or at least hadn’t been done very well yet. The idea, I would develop it, he would design it and get the coupons in it.

We had to make sure it was doable first. So we put some images of bar codes onto my iPhone and went into several stores to see if they would scan or if the coupons would be accepted. Low-and-behold they were. Half the time the coupons did scan and the other half the time when they didn’t scan, the sales person just typed in the bar code and the coupon was accepted. We did some research into bar code scanners and found out that laser scanners won’t scan off of an lcd screen but optical scanners will. Optical scanners are a newer technology and most stores that buy scanners these days end up getting optical scanners.

So we were off and running. I ended up buying a few iPhone development books trying to figure out Objective-C (The language used to develop iPhone apps). At first it seemed like an archaic language and so foreign to anything I had used in the past. There were issues with releasing memory at the proper time and a whole lot of new api’s that I had to learn in order to interact with different aspects of the phone’s hardware. Google also came in quite handy as it usually does.

Xcode is the developing environment and it comes with a graphical program for laying out objects and interacting with them but I soon learned to toss it aside and just do strictly development. That was a huge time saver and I would compare it to using the timeline in flash, something that most flash developers try to avoid due to its limitations.

About 5 or 6 weeks later Luke and I had something we were happy with, coupons were coming in as they should, they were searchable, you could bring them up by category and even save different stores to your favorites list and we even had a name for it… Coupon Sherpa. Some coupons have bar codes others only have a simple checkout code. I also setup a PHP/mySQL based back-end for us to input all the stores and coupons, it even keeps track of how many users we have and how many times people are using our application, which should help us in adding the right updates in the future.

Throughout the process we found it difficult to get the app on multiple iPhones in testing due to Apples Provisioning process but ended up getting it to work with 2 heated indian leg matches, 3 smoothie runs and a little determination. We had a final product to send to Apple and after reading some horror stories about their approval process were expecting it to get denied but after a little more than a week we got the nod and its now live in the app store.

Right now all the coupons are American coupons but as we add more, we are going to make it so only coupons for your area will show up and canadian and European coupons should eventually come on-line as well.

If you haven’t downloaded Coupon Sherpa yet, you can get it here… Download Link!