How long would a simple dictionary iPhone App take to build?

Question

I was scoping out an iPhone app project and wanted to know from some iPhone App veterans how long it might take a build a simple dictionary app.

It would contain the following views: search, definition and favorites. When the app loads, it would need to check for new words and definitions. The search view loads all the words, and on search the list would auto-search. Tapping the word goes to the definition view, from where you can tag the word as a favorite.

Just wanted to get an idea on the timeline so I can make sure I'm getting realistic estimates.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I could have it designed, implemented and tested in a week. This is the best type of answer you are going to get without specifics, mockups and a design plan.

Answer 2

Based on my short experience with iPhone apps, this is my answer.

An application like this is fairly simple to design, not a lot of code will be required IF the application uses an existing service such as a dictionary lookup to get all the data, a web service.

About a year ago I created an iPhone application, it is a language translation app and it took approximately about two weeks from design to final testing. I used the Google translate engine for this application, so I basically just created an interface for the Google translate engine and added some customization.

2 to 3 weeks will be a reasonable time assuming an existing "service" is going to be used as the data source.

Answer 3

It depends how close your data is to a presentable HTML format. I implemented several Oxford dictionary and thesaurus apps. In those apps probably 80% work went into scripts that could parse the source data format, convert it to markup that could be styled nicely with CSS, and convert the phonetic symbols into images and HTML entities corresponding to matching unicode characters.

An experienced iPhone developer could probably knock out the basic iPhone functionality in a week or so, once the definitions have been converted into valid HTML.