Chicago (IL) - Lim Ding Wen, nine-year-old Malaysian from Singapore, is probably the youngest registered iPhone developer thus far. The fourth grader is fluent in six programming languages and has just finished working on his first iPhone application. It's a drawing program called Doodle Kids, and it's been approved by Apple for App Store distribution. The application has already seen over 4,000 downloads in its first two weeks, a figure most adults iPhone programmers find desirable. For this ambitious whiz kid though, it's just the beginning. He's already working on another project - an iPhone game called Invader Wars. In case you were wondering, little Ding Wen started using computers at the age of 2 and has almost twenty finished programming projects in his portfolio to date. What were you doing when you were nine?
Really, what were you doing when you were nine years old? Depending on your current age, you might have had blast of fun with your Nintendo or playing horizontal-scrolling platform games that ruled during the age of Amiga. If you're a bit older than that, your first encounter with videogames might have been one of those LCD-based games or even pinball machines in an amusement park. And those unfortunate souls now in their forties didn't even known such things when they were nine years old. They may have been building towers in the sand instead. Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure most of our readers (including this author) weren't creating and distributing games for the hottest gaming gadget around.
Well, that's exactly what nine year old Malaysian Lim Ding Wen - who lives in Singapore - has been doing these days. Dubbed Doodle Kids, his application is a painting program that Ding Wen specifically designed for his younger sisters - aged 3 and 5 - who like to draw and "all the kids in the world." It's a pretty straightforward application and lets you draw shapes with your finger. To add a little bit of twist to drawing, Ding Wen designed the program in such a way that it draws random shapes and colors with random sizes as you move your fingers across the touch-screen. Drag two fingers across the screen and you get a random gradient in the background. Shake the device and the screen clears. You know, it's not bad for a fourth grader, not bad at all.
And what's even more remarkable, Ding Wen initially wrote Doodle Kids for the Apple IIGS computer. The program was created as a result of Ding Wen's desire to learn event driven programming. The young wizard wrote the main program logic in Pascal and used QuickDraw APIs to draw shapes on the screen. Similarly to his iPhone version, the Apple IIGS Doodle Kids lets them draw shapes in full screen and animate using an old-school "trick" called color rotation.
He then later decided to port the program to the iPhone and iPod touch. To help him push the program, Ding Wen's father promoted Doodle Kids on a popular RetroMacCast blog dedicated to people who are nostalgic about retro-Mac models. In case you're interested, you can even download the source code or test the program in your browser (here), although you will first need to install ActiveGS plugin for Firefox that emulates the Apple IIGS environment in the browser.
According to Ding Wen's personal website set up by his father Lim Thye Chean, he's fluent in six programming languages. Besides Javascript and Actionscript, Ding Wen also understands Applesoft BASIC, GSoft BASIC, Complete Pascal, Orca/Pascal and a little Objective-C. For your information, Ding Wen started using computers while he was barely two years old and has nearly twenty finished programming projects to date. Man, that's a far cry from what I was doing at his age.
Ding Wen's father works as a technology officer for a Singapore tech company. By his own accord, he and his clever boy like to compare the number of downloads for their respective applications to see which one fares better. "Every evening we check the statistics emailed to us (by iTunes) to see who has more downloads," his father told Reuters. His son's program has seen over 4,000 downloads on the App Store in two weeks. But that doesn't bother Ding Wen anymore as he's now embarked on his second iPhone project - a science fiction game dubbed Invader Wars.
Really, what were you doing when you were nine years old? Depending on your current age, you might have had blast of fun with your Nintendo or playing horizontal-scrolling platform games that ruled during the age of Amiga. If you're a bit older than that, your first encounter with videogames might have been one of those LCD-based games or even pinball machines in an amusement park. And those unfortunate souls now in their forties didn't even known such things when they were nine years old. They may have been building towers in the sand instead. Whatever the case, I'm pretty sure most of our readers (including this author) weren't creating and distributing games for the hottest gaming gadget around.
Well, that's exactly what nine year old Malaysian Lim Ding Wen - who lives in Singapore - has been doing these days. Dubbed Doodle Kids, his application is a painting program that Ding Wen specifically designed for his younger sisters - aged 3 and 5 - who like to draw and "all the kids in the world." It's a pretty straightforward application and lets you draw shapes with your finger. To add a little bit of twist to drawing, Ding Wen designed the program in such a way that it draws random shapes and colors with random sizes as you move your fingers across the touch-screen. Drag two fingers across the screen and you get a random gradient in the background. Shake the device and the screen clears. You know, it's not bad for a fourth grader, not bad at all.
And what's even more remarkable, Ding Wen initially wrote Doodle Kids for the Apple IIGS computer. The program was created as a result of Ding Wen's desire to learn event driven programming. The young wizard wrote the main program logic in Pascal and used QuickDraw APIs to draw shapes on the screen. Similarly to his iPhone version, the Apple IIGS Doodle Kids lets them draw shapes in full screen and animate using an old-school "trick" called color rotation.
He then later decided to port the program to the iPhone and iPod touch. To help him push the program, Ding Wen's father promoted Doodle Kids on a popular RetroMacCast blog dedicated to people who are nostalgic about retro-Mac models. In case you're interested, you can even download the source code or test the program in your browser (here), although you will first need to install ActiveGS plugin for Firefox that emulates the Apple IIGS environment in the browser.
According to Ding Wen's personal website set up by his father Lim Thye Chean, he's fluent in six programming languages. Besides Javascript and Actionscript, Ding Wen also understands Applesoft BASIC, GSoft BASIC, Complete Pascal, Orca/Pascal and a little Objective-C. For your information, Ding Wen started using computers while he was barely two years old and has nearly twenty finished programming projects to date. Man, that's a far cry from what I was doing at his age.
Ding Wen's father works as a technology officer for a Singapore tech company. By his own accord, he and his clever boy like to compare the number of downloads for their respective applications to see which one fares better. "Every evening we check the statistics emailed to us (by iTunes) to see who has more downloads," his father told Reuters. His son's program has seen over 4,000 downloads on the App Store in two weeks. But that doesn't bother Ding Wen anymore as he's now embarked on his second iPhone project - a science fiction game dubbed Invader Wars.
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