LIVERPOOL, N.S. - Christian Selig spends his days working on Apollo, but the Liverpool Regional High School graduate isn’t studying Greek mythology or aeronautics.
Apollo is an iOS app Selig created for Reddit - a “source for what’s new and popular on the Internet,” according to the Reddit help site - that was released Oct. 23.
“I wanted to create the best experience for consuming that content on your iPhone,” Selig explained about his recently launched app.
Selig said he’s been reading Reddit for a long time. While it worked well on laptop and desktop computers, the user experience wasn’t great on phones, he said. Walking home from class one day, he thought it might not be difficult to create something that would work well on a phone.
“Design work is probably the hardest part, and it’s what I would say what separates a good app from a mediocre one,” said Selig from his parents’ house in Liverpool.
Creating an app takes a lot of prep work, said the Halifax resident. Apollo took about three years of work before it was released. Selig started that work after returning from Cupertino, California, where he’d done an internship with Apple.
“I had created an app the previous summer that did OK, and I kind of wanted to take another swing at something else,” he said.
The app Selig initially created is called Syllable and is a speed-reading app for iPhone. The app’s website describes it as being built to “make it really simple to learn to read faster.”
Selig also realized if he was interested in using an app like Apollo, there would probably be others interested as well.
The start
“I got an iPhone early in high school, and I was just really enamored by the device. I thought it was pretty cool, and then they made it so you could develop apps for it,” said Selig about how he began to develop an interest in computer science.
He wanted to see how difficult it would be to create an app, and in Grade 10 he bought a book about Objective-C. That’s the programming language for iOS development, explained Selig.
He hoped the subject would interest him, and it did. Following high school, Selig studied computer science at Dalhousie University. He graduated in 2015.
What’s next?
Selig’s job with Apollo is far from over.
He said people have provided lots of feedback on how the app could be improved, so that’s what Selig will be doing next. He’ll be focusing on continuing to develop and work with Apollo.
Selig recommends the field of computer science to anyone interested in computers.
“If there’s anything I’ve learned in the few years, it’s that there’s a lot of advantage in doing something you love,” he said.
