Apple’s new whiz kids

Grant Goodman sensed an opportunity when Apple Inc. removed the preloaded YouTube app from its iPhones last year. He quickly built an advertising-free app called Prodigus to play online videos ‘fast with no compromises,” Daisuke Wakabayashi reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Prodigus, ‘it means extravagant in Latin,’ Mr. Goodman explains, was his second iPhone app. He recently submitted a third, a game called ‘iTap That.’ He incorporated a company, Macster Software Inc. Next week, the 14-year-old Mr. Goodman will start high school in Glen Head, New York.”

“Software prodigies are highly prized by Apple and Google, which are courting ever-younger coders for their mobile-operating systems,” Wakabayashi reports. “Apple in 2012 lowered the minimum age to attend its developer conference to 13, from 18, and made the younger teens eligible for scholarships that waive the $1,600 registration fee. Minors claimed roughly half of the 200 scholarships at this year’s conference, where Apple introduced a new programming language, Swift, that streamlines the app-making process.”

Much more in the full article here.

12 Comments

  1. In the final future, ‘legacy apps’ will refer to spaghetti code written by prepubescent males. They don’t have sense enough to pick up their towels and underwear from the floor, and that carries over into their stinky programming style.

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