How hard is it to write a Twitter app?

[agkm800]

I have an idea for social networking app similar to those third party Twitter apps. It's for a specific group of people so I won't be doing it to make money off it.

Since I won't be able to write it myself, I'd have to hire someone else to write it for me. I have written out a detailed blueprint on how the app should look and how the engine should work, etc.

So, to make the question simple, say, if I hire someone to make an app just like Tweetie (meaning high quality), what should I expect in terms of cost and time?

 

[jaseone]

Err it would be a lot different than just writing a Twitter app, writing an app similar to Tweetie would be quite the undertaking as a ballpark I'd put the development timeframe in months just for the client but from the sound of it you also want to have a separate server backend, which would take even longer especially if it needs to scale.

I think a lot of people don't understand the effort involved in making high quality applications and hence why people complain if an app isn't 99 cents.

 

[Jeremy1026]

To make a basic twitter app, that posts tweets and receives your timeline could be done in under a week. It wouldn't be pretty nor feature filled though. But, that is because Twitter has VERY powerful APIs in place to make that easily done.

For what you want, it would take MUCH longer. As the developer won't have all the APIs to interact with.

 

[chenks]

has anyone seen (or made) a tutorial that shows how to create a basic twitter app for the iphone ?

 

[Clete2]

has anyone seen (or made) a tutorial that shows how to create a basic twitter app for the iphone ?

No, because it's basically this:
1) Learn how to develop on the iPhone (which is a long process in and of itself). (check apple.com)
2) Learn to polish apps for use (check apple.com)
3) Learn Twitter API. (check twitter.com)

 

[chenks]

thanks for your "input" (if you can call it that).

i have already created some basic apps on the iphone.
the tutorial was not how to create an iphone app, but how to create a twitter iphone app.

 

[Clete2]

If you know how to make basic apps, then it shouldn't be too hard to interact with an API.

Edit: I wasn't trying to be rude. Didn't mean for you to take it that way. Also, I didn't know if you had produced apps before or not.

I personally have not written any apps for iPhone, mostly because I don't want to shell out $100 AND I don't own a Mac.

 

[lee.anderson]

If you have Xcode installed, go to here:

http://code.google.com/p/tweetero/source/checkout

Its the source code of an open source iPhone twitter app. If you look through the files, you can visually see how much code goes into making even simple apps.