The blog of Matthijs Hollemans, indie app maker and author of The iOS Apprentice

PocketSLP Minimal Pairs, a new app that I helped to develop, just became available on the App Store. It already has a 5-star review, so it must be good.

“Minimal pairs” is a type of speech therapy that helps with phonological processes. If you don’t know what that is, then you probably don’t need this app. But at half the price of traditional card decks, it’s a no-brainer for speech therapists.

At heart, this is a flashcards app. For each pair of words, students have to guess the correct word (in “receptive” mode) or say the correct word (in “expressive” mode). The app has a clever algorithm that encourages students to repeat the words they already know often, which in turn will help them improve the words they don’t know well yet.

The app keeps extensive track of the session results and lets therapists create different types of reports (spreadsheet, report card, or color-coded line graph). These reports can be emailed from within the app and, on OS 4.2 or newer, you can even print the reports directly from the app.

Minimal Pairs works on both iPhone and iPad.

Watch the demo video

iTunes App Store Link

For more information: http://pocketslp.com

I just received word that Perfect A is now available from the iTunes App Store.

Perfect A is a tuning fork application that I wrote for a client a few weeks ago. It is a very basic app that uses real-time sound synthesis to produce a reference tone for tuning musical instruments.

Even though it is possible to create a tuning fork app that does not use real-time sound synthesis, using it allows you to change the pitch in 0.01 Hz increments as the sound is playing. You can also choose between two waveforms suitable for tuning.

(If you are interested in audio, I will soon publish a blog post with in-depth information about how to do sound synthesis on the iPhone.)

Perfect A is a universal app, which means it can run on both the iPhone and the iPad. Even with an app that is as simple as this one, there are differences in the user interface between these two devices.

When you press the “i” icon on the iPhone, the screen flips to reveal an options menu. On the iPad the options are shown in a popover instead. Little things like that make it necessary to re-think the user interface when you develop for the iPad. In the case of Perfect A these differences are only small, however, I’m working on another app at the moment where the disparity is much greater.

One interesting thing about the Perfect A project is that I did not do this for money. The client could not meet my asking price but offered an enticing alternative: in exchange for developing this app for him, the client would give me a database that I could use in my own Reverse Chord Finder app. Now, I don’t intend to make a habit out of getting paid by bartering, but it shows that with some creativity it is possible to get an app developed for little or no money.

iTunes App Store link for Perfect A

For more information: perfecta.mennigmann.com

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!

iTunes App Store link

For more information, see: www.cullensabcs.com