All websites persuade a visitor to do something. All websites call a user to perform a certain action. Some websites try to persuade a user to buy poop. (Unfortunately not joking.) Some more dignified websites encourage a user to read about philosophy. (http://plato.stanford.edu) Every single website exists to influence a user’s actions. Websites either do this actively with an explicit call to action (Send your friends poop!) or more passively (like just by plainly offering philosophy articles.)

Speaking of philosophy, famous Greek thinker Aristotle stated 2000 years ago that the there are three pillars of persuasion, or tenets that the…

One tap messaging apps are awesome. They’re fast, free, and fun. I built one of these apps. The app I created, called Bruh, shows a list of friends, and if you tap one of them, their phone says “Bruh!” Despite its simplicity and stupidity, it is drawing rave reviews, being called “hilarious”, and “better than texting.” Anyway, I want to share with you a blueprint of how this app works, and how apps like this can be created.

The User Interface

For Bruh, I utilize a basic table to show a list of all the users friends. In fact, the table is the…

I built an iPhone app. Yep. I learned a lot through the process, and wanted to share some of the takeaways with other developers, and aspiring app builders, offering encouragement and advice. I developed the app in Swift, Apple’s new language. Swift is clean, functional, and a whole lot simpler than Objective-C. The process was hectic at times, but extremely rewarding at others. It was arduous, but fulfilling. I share what I learned below.

1. Swift is Easy, iOS Development is Not

When Swift was first announced at WWDC, I eagerly digitally flipped through Apple’s developer iBook. The language looked so easy. Variables were easy to declare, classes…