So Easy a Nine-Year-Old Can Do it!

[Vincent Ferrari]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://tech.yahoo.com/news/macworld/20090205/tc_macworld/nineyearoldboywritespopulariphoneapp_1' target='_blank'>http://tech.yahoo.com/news/macworld...ulariphoneapp_1</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"Lim&rsquo;s creation is a pretty nifty little iPhone app, called Doodle Kids. According to Reuters, the program &ldquo;lets iPhone users draw with their fingers by touching the iPhone&rsquo;s touchscreen and then clear the screen by shaking the phone.&rdquo; (It&rsquo;s also compatible with the iPod touch, incidentally.) Lim told Reuters that he &ldquo;wrote the program for my younger sisters [3 and 5], who like to draw,&rdquo; Lim said."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/at/auto/1233926276.usr18053.jpg" style="border: 1px solid #d2d2bb;" /></p><p>That's more than I've coded for the iPhone!&nbsp; Not to sound like a crotchety old man or anything, but that's way more than nine year olds were doing when I was a kid.</p>

[ptyork]

I remember one of the very first things I did with my Atari 800 as a 10 or 11 year old was to create a little drawing program that moved a cursor using the joystick and drew when you pressed the joystick button. I added keyboard commands for plopping in a filled in square or circle (SLOW since I was using a crazy pi-r-squared vector drawing algorithm to create the circle). Essentially a clone of a turtle graphics application than I had downloaded from some bulletin board service at 300 baud (though I remember being frustrated at how much faster their circles appeared). Version 0.0.0.0.0.0.1 of Draw or Paint, I suppose, but at "high-res," it only supported a blue background with a white foreground as I recall. Anyway, glad to see the geeks getting younger and spanning sexes.