Last year when we were producing Nkyea Twi Primer, we always had it in our minds to produce a mobile version to run on Apple’s iPhone. We are fortune to have two iMac 20″ that we use for our work and those were what we used to produce Nkyea Twi Primer. This has not been easy at all. Being in Africa made it a challenging and frustrating but very exciting ride. Below are some of the challenges we had to face during the production process.

• Electricity is not a stable and reliable commodity here in Ghana. Some days we had to go without electricity for more than 10 hours.

• Internet speed is nothing to write home about (during development our download rate was 25 kB/s tops) so you can imagine how long it took to download the 2.5 Gigabytes iPhone SDK.

• It’s very difficult to get an iPhone in Ghana and when you do, it is about US$1200, so we had to borrow a friend’s for testing and debugging.

• Apple’s extremely cumbersome and ultra confusing uploading process to the Apple Store.

We used a month to get up to scratch with Objective-C, the iPhone SDK and Xcode. Ike wrote all the program code and recorded all the audio (It is his voice on the app). I wrote all the contents, designed the look and feel of the application and recorded and edited the sound files. From start to finish we took one and a half months.
We paid $99 to Apple to get access to test on the iPhone, through Ike’s Zenith Bank debit card account. Testing the application took a week and a half, as we had to make a lot of changes before it went on sale. When all this was done, we uploaded the 30 Megabytes Nkyea Twi Phrasebook to the Apple Store, taking about one hour due to very slow upload rates. We now had to wait for Apple to approve the product. Nkyea Twi Phrasebook took only four days to get approved. It was victory for us.
So this is the story of Nkyea Twi Phrasebook, now go over to the Apple Store and download it for your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch and starting learning the Twi language today!
You can try the Lite version, which has about 150 phrases. In the full version you get more than 950 Twi words and phrases with voice narration done by Ike. You can record and compare with Ike to improve your accent or you can just listen along. The full version also allows you to save your favourite phrases. You can also copy a phrase and use it in another application.