Tan E-Liang with his family in Suzhou, China. He is second from left.
Kids these days, I tell you. All they do is sit in front of the computer and play games all day. Well, most kids anyway. Some kids actually do much more than play World of Warcraft for 10 straight hours.
Meet 14-year-old Tan E-Liang. E-Liang is a Secondary 2 student at St Joseph's Institution. While most of his classmates were busy playing games on their Xboxes, E-Liang spent his free time developing a Twitter client for the iPhone. E-Liang, together with two other teenagers, are the guys behind Fluttr for Twitter, a stylish Twitter client for the iPhone. E-Liang is the coding guru while Branden Flasch, 13, handles the PR and John Costa, 17, does the finances for IntelligentMonkey, the name of their group. Of the three, E-Liang is the only one in Singapore. The other two are in the US.
The remarkable thing about E-Liang is not that he was 13 when he started work on Fluttr; it's that he is completely self-taught.
He was introduced to the iPhone in December 2007 when he was in Primary 5. An uncle from San Francisco was visiting and showed E-Liang his iPhone. "I was totally awed by the ease of use of that device. I was 11 at that time, and not into tech. I learnt how to use and switch between the camera, and the photo library in just a few short minutes. I then told my father that I wanted an iPhone (well who wouldn't? Ha! Ha!)." After his PSLE the next year, his dad got him an iPod Touch.
E-Liang started programming last year (2009). Initially, he tried picking up programming on his own but gave up. It was only after Stanford came out with their free lectures on iPhone development on iTunes U that he really managed to get his teeth into it. Fluttr is the first real app he's built from scratch.
Overcoming challenges
According to E-Liang, the big challenges in making Fluttr were not technical ones. One major problem was time management. "I was under pressure to study and I also had to program this at the same time."
It didn't help that the other team members were in a different time zone. They could only talk during school holidays because of the time difference. During the school term, there was no overlap of free time and so all communication had to be done via email.
However the team managed to overcome their obstacles and seven months after they embarked on development, they had a product that was ready for the public. Fluttr for Twitter hit the App Store on December 23, a nice early Christmas present.
The Singapore school term has started again so E-Liang's iPhone development will probably have to slow down. (His father is supportive of his work but his mother believes he should spend more time studying instead. Mothers. What do they know?). However, work will not grind to a standstill. The group is planning to release an update to Fluttr soon. A little further down the line, the group is thinking of a Mac version of Fluttr as well as a to do app with geo-location support.
If this is what these kids are capable of as teenagers, I can't wait to see what they can do when they get more experience.
Fluttr for Twitter is available in the App Store for US$3.99. You can follow E-Liang on Twitter as well.
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