Hudson High Freshman's iPhone App Nears 10,000 Downloads

Here’s how you talk online to Hank Brekke, the freshman whose flashcard studying iPhone app will soon have been downloaded 10,000 times:

1. Navigate your browser to his website, z43studio.com. Tagline: “Design is simple.  z43 Studio makes it even simpler.”
2. Click on the “Contact” hyperlink and find yourself at a streamlined messaging web page Brekke designed because he feels email is a thing of the past. (“ I needed something like Facebook chat, subject-less and more informal,” he says. “I hardly ever email, and most of my emails are Facebook, iTunes—I don’t really email people.”)
3. Enter your name, a message, a conversation password. Mind meet blown.

Brekke started dabbling in web design the summer after he graduated from elementary school.

“I first made some really cheesy, bad photo gallery websites,” he said, blushing for his prepubescent immaturity. “But I started to get annoyed because you couldn’t edit the code in iWeb.”

So he taught himself HTML and CSS using tutorials he found through Google.

“I’m not self-taught, I’m Google-taught,” Brekke said.

In middle school, Brekke designed a band showcase page for a friend, learned the programming language “C” to teach a robot to navigate a maze and started designing iPhone apps.

His first app was extremely simple. The Hudson School District has different class schedules on different days of the week. Brekke’s app could be programmed to display the current day’s schedule.

Brekke didn’t find the app that useful for himself, but a friend in St. Paul told him she used it every day. And Brekke found technological satisfaction in the design process.

“I really like the way the language works for creating iPhone apps: The name of a button is just ‘button,’” he said. “I don’t know why it’s so enjoyable to me, but I’ll spend my weekends designing apps, and sometimes I’ll spend a few hours at it and lose track of time.”

An original idea

In September, Brekke’s English class was assigned a vocabulary list to learn, and Brekke decided to make a flashcard app.

“I thought it was a good idea because I searched the app store and couldn’t find it, and I thought it must not work as an idea, or nobody’s thought of it,” he said.

So he set to work designing an application where users could input term-cards and definition-cards and quiz themselves.

He submitted a free version and a paid version to Apple, and they were both quickly approved.

Soon afterward, Brekke remembers sitting in his English class when the new vocabulary lists were handed out and watched six or seven of his classmates enter the terms into his app.

He’s watched his Apple statistics as the number of downloads has climbed from 40 a day, to 80, to 250. His app has been downloaded between 6,000 and 10,000 times so far.

The paid version of his app has been downloaded about 500 times, Brekke said, netting him more than $700, which he is saving to buy a MacBook.