Campfire Apps

Our 360iDev Pals – Ray & Vicki Wenderlich and Brandon Trebitowski

On Sepetember 8th, the Campfire Apps team jumped on a plane and headed to Denver! We were there from the 8th through the 13th for the 360iDev conference. This conference is a place where iOS developers from all over the United States (& World) can come together for one week to learn new things, meet new people, and have a great time. We did a lot throughout the week, we even took a trip to the top of  the mountain, Pikes Peak, which is over 14,000 feet high.

Steph, Shawn, & Courtney – The Campfire Apps Team – at the top of Pike’s Peak

On Tuesday night, we participated in the 360iDev Game Jam. This was an awesome event hosted by some of the attendees of the conference. During the day on Tuesday we received a theme for the Game Jam – “Growth” – and after dinner settled in for an evening of programming, design, and all around fun. The Game Jam started around 7:00 pm and participants had until 9:00 am Wednesday to create at least a prototype of a game to share with the group Wednesday afternoon.

Our Game Jam table: Brandon, Shawn, & Courtney

Our game was (tentatively) called “Present Drop” and the goal of the game is to ‘grow’ a tower of gifts as tall as possible without knocking it over or losing too many gifts along the way. As you might have guessed, our game is also holiday-themed, which was a lot of fun. Here is a peek at what the title screen looks like for our game:

360iDev is an awesome opportunity for iOS developers to get together, talk shop and experience this amazing community. We have really been impressed the last two years that we have attended and have made a lot of new friends through this conference. We left the conference with so much inspiration, and so many new ideas! The Campfire Apps team has been brainstorming, so be on the look out for new goodies soon!

Senior year is a very important year, however it can be very stressful for students. Here are a few apps that might help to make a students senior year a little easier.

MyMajors

MyMajors is an app that’s available for iPhone and iPad for free. This app allows you to search through various college majors to help you choose which one is the best fit for you. After you’ve chosen a major, the app generates a list of schools that offer that major and fit any criteria that you’ve set. This app is perfect for students who aren’t sure what they want to study, or where they want to go to school.

ACT College Search

This free app is perfect for students who are looking for a college to attend. With this app you can narrow down your school choices based on state, major, size, and more. When you find a school that stands out to you or a school that you like, you can add it to your “favorites” so that you can remember to research more about that school. This app is sure to help you find a college that’s a good fit for you!

College FAFSA Finder

This iPad app is available for free in the iTunes store, and it’s sure to be a big help to a lot of students! FAFSA is the way that students are able to get financial aid for college, this app helps you to not only search for colleges, but also FAFSA opportunities. This is definitely something that will help all high school seniors!

Do you have any other apps that you think would be good for high school seniors? Let us know!

FlashCards++

This app is perfect for studying, for all ages! It’s available for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch for just $3.99. With this app you’re able to create cards on your device by using text and images from various files and websites. There are a lot of cool features within the app, one of them being Text-to-speech, which allows you to listen to vocabulary and learn correct pronunciation. This app is sure to come in handy for students throughout the school year.

Evernote Peek

This app is available for free for the iPad.  This app was designed for the iPad 2 Smart Cover. And no worries, if you don’t have a Smart Cover, there are virtual covers available within the app. In order to study, you choose a note from your Evernote pad, and the app tests you based on the information within that note. To see the clue, you peek under the Smart Cover, and then you lift the entire cover to view the whole answer. This app is perfect for studying, no matter what age! Be sure to check this one out!

Study Tracker

Having trouble getting your kids to study? This is sure to help solve your problem! With Study Tracker, your student is able to track the amount of time that they study for each subject, and they’re able to compete with other kids to see who studies the most and gets the best grades. And as their study habits improve, there are badges they can unlock. This app is a fun and interesting way to keep track of studying, and I’m sure your kids will love it!

Do you or your kids have any apps that you use to study? Let us know!

Here’s a few suggestions of iPad apps that are great for families!

Scorekeeper XL

Forget using a piece of paper and a pen, this scorekeeper app is perfect for a family game night! It’s simple, easy to use, and appealing. It’s great to use while playing board games or party games with family and friends. This app not only keeps score for you, but it also shows which player is in first place. This app is available for free, but only for a limited time. So make sure you go to the App Store to check it out!

THE GAME OF LIFE™ for iPad

The old-fashioned board game, The Game Of Life, is now available for play on the iPad! This classic game has always been a family favorite, and with this revamped version, it’s sure to stay that way! It’s even more fun to play the game with it’s new, clear HD graphics. This game is available for $6.99 in the iTunes App Store.

Pictureka! for iPad

Pictureka for iPad is great game for all ages! For just $4.99, you and your family are provided with hours of fun. You could play alone, or work together as a team to find the hidden objects mixed in with the crazy cartoons. This game is great for all ages and it’s fun for the whole family. You won’t regret downloading this app!

Shot & Found

Shot & Found is very similar to the popular game Draw Something. However, instead of drawing a picture for your opponent to guess, you take the photo yourself. This game is great for all ages, and it’s perfect for families. This is a game you and your family could play at home, or on the go.

Do you and your family have any iPad apps that you love? Let us know in the comments!

Here’s a few summer themed games/apps that would be great for your kids this summer!

Ice Cream Matching Game Lite

This free game is great for kids of all ages to play all summer long! This basic matching game includes three difficulty levels (easy, medium, and hard), and it also allows you to challenge other players using Game Center. The Lite version is just a basic sample of the game, for more fun you can buy the full version for .99 cents in the App Store.

Tie Dye Doodle

This  game is available for .99 cents in the App Store and is fun for all! It gives you the chance to make your own tie dye shirt, complete with many different designs, shirts, colors, and decorations. The reviews for this game are great, and it seems to get a lot of attention. Check this out for some summer fun for you and your kids!

Color Me !!! Summer

This free app is available for both iPhone and iPad, and it’s great for kids! It supplies endless hours of fun with multiple pictures that kids can choose from. They can color it however they want, and then shake the device to erase it when they’re finished. This app would be great to help pass time while spending a hot day in the house with your kids.

Are there anymore apps or games that your kids like to play in the summer months? Let us know in the comments!

I’ve been working for Campfire Apps since December, and the experience has been great. It’s taught me so much about deadlines, scheduling, etc., many things that I’ll need when I get out to the real world.

Working at the Campfire Apps Studio

Working for Campfire Apps has been a lot of fun! It’s a very laid-back environment and everyone on the team works together to finish whatever needs to be done. We’ve spent a lot of time together, working on apps, testing apps, writing blog posts, and much more.

The work must never stop! Working while on vacation in Ocean City.

Throughout this experience, and my APPlied Club experience, I’ve learned a lot about technology, and about myself. I’ve learned that technology can be the key to anything. It can help lead to careers, friendships, and much more.

As a team, we’ve done a lot together. We’ve taken a few trips together to test apps and work on our latest projects. We’ve also participated in a lot of community outreach, such as the Insquared Conference.

Shawn and I waiting to get into the Insquared Conference

And last, but certainly not least, we always make time for fun. Whether we’re out testing Caddy2Go for hours at a time, or having a friendly competition at the go kart track, we always find time to fit fun into our busy schedule.

Riding go karts in Ocean City

The Campfire Apps team has been doing quite a lot recently! The most recent app we’ve released is the Caddy2Go - a miniature golf score keeping app, just in time for summertime family fun. Make sure to check that out! It’s free for a limited time!

The PHS APPlied Club came to a close at the end of the school year. We finished of the year with a launch party of our second app, Patriot Dash. The students were so excited that they were able to release two apps in a year’s time, however they were very upset for the year to end. They’re all looking forward to next year, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store!

Our summer began with a week long APPlied Club Summer Institute. We worked with 25 Baltimore County teachers to teach each of them how to start their own APPlied Club at their school. We hope that they will take all of this information back to their schools and do great things with it! To learn more, click here.

We hope that your summer is off to a great start! Keep an eye out for more posts from Campfire Apps coming soon!

This past Saturday Shawn, Stephanie, and I attended the “Insquared: Inclusive Innovation Unconference” at MICA in Baltimore. It was the first “unconference” that any of us had ever attended, and we had a great time! Each of us took away so much from the conference, and we’ve all been talking about it since we left!

We had the opportunity to listen and discuss multiple topics, including youth entrepreneurship and technology in the Baltimore area school systems. Shawn and Stephanie also presented their own session, “An Introduction to Mobile App Development.” They both did a great job presenting, and there were many people interested in the topic.

One of the best parts of the day was hearing from two great keynote speakers. In the morning we heard a talk from Tara Hunt about her own life experiences and how she has never given up to make it to where she is today. In the afternoon we heard from New York Times Bestseller, Baratunde Thurston, about his bestselling book, “How To Be Black“, and a general overview of his life and accomplishments. Both speakers were phenomenal and totally inspiring!

Overall, we were all able to learn a lot from this conference and we can’t wait to experience other conferences like this one!

ETA (from Stephanie): Shawn and I were very honored to be asked to present at this conference. It was an awesome event put on by the Greater Baltimore Tech Council (gbtc) and MICA. Perhaps the most rewarding element was seeing how many students attended the event. We had students from KIPP, Digital Harbor High, and our own Courtney and all of them were well-spoken, involved in the conversations, and inspiring. I know that it would have been difficult for me as a high school student to attend an event such as this and participate in the ways that the students did this past weekend.

We very much look forward to similar events in the future, as Courtney said, we had a great time and took away so many nuggets on knowledge, thought, and inspiration.

For anyone who is interested, Shawn posted the slides from our talk “An Intro to Mobile App Development” on his website, ShawnsBits.com. Please check them out, there are a TON of links to good resources and information contained in the presentation.

As many of you may know from reading our blog, Campfire Apps has been sponsoring a local high school app development club, APPlied Club at Patapsco High School, since October. This project has been so rewarding for us and we have enjoyed every minute of this experience with the teens, the school, and the community.

We are happy to announce that APPlied Club will now have it’s own space on the web, separate from Campfire Apps. This project looks to be growing into something bigger than we anticipated when we started at Patapsco almost six months ago. In the future, we are hoping to spread APPlied Club to more schools, offer some sort of training program for leaders, and offer a summer camp for teens. These are just goals at this point and we aren’t exactly sure what form these ideas will take, but we do know that this has become a project we are interested in investing more into.

For those of you who are interested in APPlied Club news and information, you can find all of that and more at this new site:

www.APPliedClub.org

If you are interested only in Patapsco High’s APPlied Club, you can get all the information about that club on their site:

www.PHS.APPliedClub.org

You may see an update about APPlied Club here on Campfire Apps from time to time, but the majority of information will be shared on those two sites. We don’t want to bombard our customers and friends with information about a club they may not even be interested in, so we decided to separate the two. We hope that some of you have enjoyed the information we have shared about this club and the program and will continue to visit those two new sites to check in on new happenings and information.

While searching through the inter-webs I came across this post and I thought it was very interesting. According to a survey conducted by the Federal Trade Commission apps geared towards children do not fully disclose certain types of data. The consumer protection agency has scrutinized privacy policies and they have  suggested that app developers go back into their apps to make sure that they have disclosers of the data in their app. Young people, teens, and children are the vast majority of people using smart devices such as iPhone and Android. And many of the apps in the App Store are geared for these age groups. However, they’re not always as safe as they seem to be. As a parent, make sure that you’re monitoring what apps your child is downloading and make sure that they’re age appropriate and don’t include or suggest anything that you wouldn’t want your child to see. To read more about this, you can follow the link here to view the whole article.