Stanford Offers Free Online Course on iPhone Apps

The Apple iPhone has been a raging success, largely because it functions as a platform enabling third parties to create and sell (sometimes give away) applications, and users to customize their experience and utilize their phone as a mini-computer. Over 800 million applications have been downloaded from the App Store, according to Apple.

Stanford University has become famous for offering courses on developing Facebook applications, and now is venturing into the iPhone application world with free classes for the public. From their announcement:

Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.

The 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, is a hot ticket. It begins today and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting (http://itunes.stanford.edu). Copies of the slides shown in class will be available there as well…

Online viewers of the Stanford course will see the same lectures as the on-campus students, but will not receive credit for the course (http://cs193p.stanford.edu). Some of the student-developed apps from the fall-quarter class, such as the Chinese-English dictionary Qingwen, are available at the iTunes store.

Have you developed an iPhone app, or have an idea? Share it with us! What’s your favorite iPhone app and why?