Picture the scene, it's 9pm, I'm in my caravan (yes I know, I've heard all the jokes!) with my family and I'm trying to tune the tv by moving the aerial, retuning, moving the aerial again, retuning... 45 mins and much cursing later I succeed. Surely there must be an easier way than this?

Aha, an app; there must be an app for that? So I search in the AppStore for such an app, but curiously drew a blank. Then the seeds of the idea started to grow. I can code, I work in a software house with lots of very clever people, surely I can make an app that points to the nearest digital tv transmitter!

Not having looked into app development before, I investigated how one goes about making an iPhone app and was quickly greeted by a now familiar answer "Buy a mac!". That was not an option for many reasons, mostly wife related! My dreams were starting to fade until one of my colleagues pointed out that within Red Gate, the very company I work for, there was on-going development on a piece of software that would allow me to write an app using Visual Studio on a Windows machine, Nomad!

Once I signed up for the beta program I got to work learning the Jquery mobile / Phonegap framework. Within a couple of hours I had written (in Visual Studio), built in the cloud (using Nomad) and published (via TestFlight) my first iPhone app onto my iPhone ! It didn't do much, but it was a step in the right direction.

To be continued...