Tap Tap Photo
My first iPhone App
Have you ever had that urgent need of having to develop some software? Yes, that itchy feeling in your fingers that appears when you’ve been far from your keyboard for too long…
OK, so that happened to me last fall. After way too long without a cool project to work at home (due, mostly because I really wanted to go hiking and camping around the country), I decided I had to develop something for the iPhone the very first day I saw it. Android was not there yet, and the iPhone was so cool… At the moment all together seemed like a logical move for me. I just needed to have some real fun!
But, what kind of App could I do? I started doing some openGL code, then decided to try to re-create The Globe, and then decided I wanted to be able to spin it around. I guess Google Earth had left a big impression on me. 
Anyway, after a while spinning an empty world, I realized that I could add some content… (yes, sometimes I’m a bit too slow), Pictures!. I found out that Panoramio (originally a Spanish start-up, isn’t that cool?) had a nice API toolkit (OK, one API function is not a too big of a toolkit, but it really works at what it does) to search their user’s photos, it was freely (as in beer) available to everybody, and I could query the pictures using Latitude and Longitude coordinates… Cool!
Tap Tap Photo 2.0
After some (lots of) fun, around October’08 Tap Tap Photo was born. My very first iPhone App. My very first home-based software project in a very long time. Not the most successful App on the iPhone App Store, I must say, but I did it myself.
Oh, yes, I forgot! It lets you spin the world around (it’s soo cool!) and check the images Panoramio’s users (and that could be you!) upload to the company image database. Like those little dots on Google’s Earth. The most funny thing is that Google Earth for the iPhone was released about a week after my App… Hey, I was first!
I’ve done a couple of updates since October, and I have, at least two more on the works. I just need some free time to make sure my keyboard does not feel too lonely again. I have a Tap Tap Photo Blog too, but I still have to add a new video showing the features of the v2.0 (it shows a thumbnail of the images over the Earth surface instead the original little yellow dots, just like the screenshot on the left). I’ll do it soon, just need to find a bit of free time between races.
it is, of course, available on the iPhone App Store:
