New App: Cullen’s Abc’s – Children’s Videos & Songs
Today a new iPhone app that I helped to create became available on the iTunes App Store: Cullen’s Abc’s – Children’s Videos and Songs.
The app contains five videos aimed at toddlers and preschoolers. They were taken from the Cullen’s Abc’s video collection which contains several hundred videos. There are some additional features but playing videos is the app’s main job.
The project started in March this year. I wanted to get into freelance iPhone development but had no idea where to look for work. I had heard about Elance, so I signed up there and bid on a few jobs. The Cullen’s Abc’s job looked like a good first job for someone starting out freelancing — not too complicated, fairly short development cycle — and fun. And so they became my first client.
The app is a fairly straightforward video player. However, a requirement of the app was that it did not use the standard video player controls but more kid-friendly buttons. Unfortunately, the iPhone movie player on OS 3.x and earlier is not a very well behaved component and is hard to customize. My main challenge was to make it easier to use and I had to tweak it quite a bit to make this happen.
Now, it didn’t take 8 months to write this app… The client decided to postpone its publication for a while and then hired me again to make some changes. But now it is finally in the App Store! 
For more information, see: www.cullensabcs.com
