Filed under: Education, iPhone, SDK
Stanford to offer iPhone programming course
Precious little information is available just now, but Stanford appears to be offering a course in the Autumn entitled "iPhone Application Programming."
Award-winning iPhone app developer Craig Hockenberry wonders aloud if Apple will even allow such a course to be taught, presumably thanks to the ongoing NDA mummalum that Erica wrote about earlier today.
If anyone has any more information about the course and its instructor, we're all ears: please feel free to tip us.
Update: Tipsters Quinn and Dave helpfully inform us that the course will likely be taught by one (or more) of the same Apple employees that teach a Cocoa Programming course on campus. Apple and Stanford have shared a close relationship: Whether or not that gets them around the NDA restrictions probably will require a lawyer to understand and explain. Thanks, guys!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Michael said 6:23PM on 7-23-2008
Get school credit for working on an app, get an A, get app listed in the app store, use proceeds to pay your toution...win win win win. Plus I'd imagine the apps would be pretty good.
Two thumbs up!
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Isaac said 6:53PM on 7-23-2008
Not to mention some Iphone app developers need to learn how to make a good app (*cough* aol *cough cough*
moo083 said 6:23PM on 7-23-2008
Here's hoping they post the lectures on iTunes U.
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Jeremy said 6:24PM on 7-23-2008
Damn you Stanford you have bested WSU once again.
Too bad you still suck at football.
Go Cougs.
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Alan said 6:29PM on 7-23-2008
Can somebody explain what this whole NDA thing is?
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Robert Palmer said 6:36PM on 7-23-2008
Basically, it's like Fight Club. Once you enroll in the iPhone developer program, you're not allowed to talk about the developer program, the SDK, or pretty much anything until Apple says it's OK.
So, in theory, if everyone's still under NDA, then this class would be a breach of that, unless they either have some kind of special dispensation _or_ Apple is planning on scrapping the NDA before the Fall term starts. :)
Chris P. said 6:44PM on 7-23-2008
I assume the ad-hoc programme would be in effect here to facilitate the use of the SDK for the course?
As with recent cases with Apple, their legal disclosures don't run parallel to the company's bullet train innovation and product deployments. I would not be surprised if their legal team had no clue about this entire issue until after Tom Yager at Infoworld posted about it. Assuming that, and based off of the Safari for Windows incident, Apple will most likely revise their TOS for the SDK and make it as flexible as their ADC programme.
This happens alot in large companies - the right hand doesn't always know what the left hand is doing.
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Chris said 6:58PM on 7-23-2008
how exactly arent they all still under nda???
... www.Fuckingnda.com
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Danny Goodman said 7:26PM on 7-23-2008
You can take the course, but any credits you earn toward graduation cannot be disclosed in your transcript.
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drewgaren said 9:50PM on 7-23-2008
The SDK is free to download to anybody therefore teaching how to code it an application is perfectly legal. However if a student in this class wanted their application iPhone developer and pay the $99 fee. I think it's a great idea I have been having major issues trying to code for the iPhone and Apples documentations just don't help enough. The fact that there are no book out there on creating iPhone apps yet either doesn't really help either. Standford could help create these books and other unique tools and hopefully post their classes on iTunes U so the rest of us can learn with.
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Dan T. said 8:44AM on 7-24-2008
I'm on a Mac mailing list hosted by my university and roughly a month ago, an Apple representative (who is generally an active member of the list) put out a query to the teaching community asking if iPhone programming was going to be taught. So I would think that they know about it and are in some way sponsoring it:
"I'm looking for examples of courses being taught at your university that have (or will soon have) iPhone application programming integrated into the curriculum. Please reply off-list directly to ____________@apple.com using the following template:
Course name/number:
Department:
Professor name:
Description of iPhone application programming in curriculum:
"
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wildbomb said 8:51AM on 7-24-2008
In Munich (Germany) we even started planing the course in February before the official SDK and the course started one month after the SDK announcement.
http://wwwbruegge.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/twiki/bin/view/Lehrstuhl/PrakCocoaSoSe2008
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Arnan de Gans said 2:25PM on 7-24-2008
Isn't it more likely this course isn't 100% iphone specific but more obj-c and cocoa oriented. *also* covering iphone dev is a logical step but might not even be the main topic.
Also the guys from Automattic (Wordpress) have released the source of their Wordpress app publicly, i think the NDA is not as strict as everyone thinks.
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