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Comment by mister_hn | Hacker News Reader

still, claiming to hacking a mobile app together in one hour is something strange as well. Does the "hour of code" includes setting up project in the IDE, setting a repo, testing it, making it AppStore-ready?

Options are:

a. you have already the code somewhere (own sources, StackOverflow, GitHub, etc.) b. you are bluffing

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I could believe it if you counted only the time taken to type just literal code. Probably discounted the time it would take to build the UI .xib, wire up all the event-handler delegates, and set all your layout constraints for the various screen sizes.

And doesn't this use the camera and/or photos API? Not hard, but somewhat time consuming to set up your boilerplate for these. Also handling permissions request, response, & error handling. Probably copy/pasted from another project so it wouldn't count?

Yeah I'm skeptical, but also sounds like a fun challenge.

Load xcode, create a project, setup a repo can take 10 seconds. I just did it. Testing it takes longer. You can create a blank app and install it on a phone in 30 seconds. It really is that quick.

Of course, writing it in 1 hour is a bit ridiculous. Did he have the icon images ready?

The article states that icons and other polish is excluded from that time and were done later.

Setting up a project in the IDE takes maybe a couple minuites at worst.

you wouldn't bother making a repo for something like this. Testing is done while programming, and the process of putting it on the app store presumably wasn't counted as 'programming'

Does it even? Last time I checked, it took <1 minute to launch xcode, use a template and deploy it to a device (assuming you're set up to develop already). Every IDE I've used in the last decade will detect "hey, you're starting a new project, would you like a git repo?"

My first app store submission was a challenge to go from idea to submitted app on one laptop battery charge (2-3 hours?) and was approved on the first try, so it’s definitely possible.

Sounds like you need a new laptop

> setting a repo

`git init`? Clicking create repo in GitHub?

> setting up project in the IDE

are you doing this stuff blindfolded or something?

you forgot the "git remote add" part. That takes a couple of minutes

I'm supposing that he naturally made the project appstore ready because he knew what the requirements for that were, as in he did not write what he needed and then fixed it, he instead did not write anything that went out of guidelines.

As far as the other stuff, this reminds me of recruiters who send you a coding project that they say will take 2-3 hours that generally takes 4-6 if there isn't some major problem. The extra time is of course setting everything up choosing what dependencies you need etc, because every project is slightly different and you are unlikely to have everything that is needed for that one project. The actual coding is probably 2-3 hours.

So perhaps he already had everything his system needed, if so I expect it might have taken 1 hour to code (because he was very comfortable and knew exactly what he would need to do) and some minutes to make git repo, push code. Then add another hour to time compiling and submitting to app store.

If he knew what he needed to do in the code of course that was probably from thinking about it for weeks beforehand.

There are many open source project which have drag and drop gesture and all the needed feature.

He just might have to combine two projects and some programming and replacement of icons.

I have no experience with iOS development but I do have in Android, and in Android it is quite possible and even uneventful to put together an application that allows users to navigate through half a dozen activities and fragments in about an hour of work.

Where do you draw the line?

Does the 1hr include the hour you spent driving to the shop and back for a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk?

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