You finally got around to asking her out. You landed a sitter for Saturday night. Your BFF is back in town for one night.

What are you going to do? Music concert? Dance performance? Gallery opening?

Check your iPhone.

A new iPhone calendar application developed for the local arts organization 40 North 88 West by OJC Technologies of Urbana lets users search for local arts events and then tweet, e-mail or post the information on Facebook.

Once the OJC team started working on the application, "it became obvious it would be something we'd use all the time," said Lori Patterson, president of the technology firm. While recently planning a get-together with a friend, she clicked on the app, chose a date and scrolled through events, found one that sounded interesting and sent her friend an e-mail with the info. No retyping required.

Out of the 140,000 apps available for download at Apple's iTunes store, it's hard to say how many have been made locally, but given Champaign-Urbana's tech community, it's likely the local arts calendar application is one of many phone apps made by local developers.

Creating apps and making them available to users on the iTunes apps store is a win, "especially for small businesses like us," said Brandon Bowersox, vice president of technology at OJC. "It's a way to reach consumers directly," he said.

When Riverwatcher Studios of Champaign released the app Elephant Rescue, a sliding puzzle game based on the Chinese puzzle Hua Rong Dao, last month, president Tron Fu said he expected a few friends and family members to download the game because the company did "zero" advertising.

In the first week, about 1,000 people downloaded the game. Even more downloads followed the second week.

"It's been pretty exciting for us," Fu said.

Elephant Rescue was the first app for the company, which has developed Web sites for the UI. About a year ago, Fu and his colleagues were engaged in conversations about the history of computing and discussing what the next big thing would be.

"Looking back on the history of computing, in the '80s the goal was to have a computer on every desk, and by the early '90s that pretty much happened. Next it was about connecting these computers. And by the mid-2000s the Internet was so pervasive. We wondered, what will be the next natural step?

"The way I looked at it, it would be how do you take that computer power with you?"

Because there are so many apps available, Fu said they decided to create smaller, utility-type apps and games that could offer, like a cup of coffee or a book, "good entertainment value."

"Our focus is easy-to-play games that are easy to pick up and hard to put down," Fu said.

For Lawrence Angrave, a University of Illinois computer science lecturer who with fellow lecturer Eric Shaffer is developing apps for the Android mobile operating system, creating and selling apps is not a hobby, nor is it an attempt to rake in millions and retire early.

"It's professional creativity," Angrave said.

The self-described "recovering physicist," who has been involved with other technology-related startups, said he and Shaffer, who teach hundreds of UI students studying computer science, want to keep on top of the latest technology and inspire the next generation of students.

"I want to stay current and show that students, in small teams, can change the world, hopefully for the better," Angrave said.

Plus, he joked, "it's the cheapest midlife crisis we can find that may actually make some money. It's also a low-risk venture."

Angrave and Shaffer's first app, released at the end of 2009, was a moral compass.

"It's a toy. We wanted something small and simple," Angrave said. "We were interested in creating simple graphical applications. ... And we felt the world could do with one more moral compass."

They chose to develop apps for Google's open-source Android system, which runs on phones such as Motorola's DROID, because "the number of Android devices is set to explode," Angrave said.

What does it take to create an app? In theory, you could develop one in an afternoon, and a teenager with $25 and his or her own laptop could create one, Angrave said.

But more complex ones will take some time. And a development team can include code writers, graphic designers, sound engineers and testers.

In October of last year, about five months after Wolfram Research of Champaign launched Wolfram Alpha, a "computational knowledge tool," the company released the iPhone application.

"We had been interested in and were looking at the iPhone as a possible platform from fairly early on," said Schoeller Porter of Wolfram Alpha Developer Relations.

There are elements of the iPhone application that are similar to the Wolfram Alpha Web site, such as an input field where you enter the query related to physics, chemistry, weather or any other number of topics. But for the app, iPhone app developer Rob Raguet-Shofield said they optimized the formatting for the smaller screen size and worked on simplifying some special keys such as an integral symbol.

Wolfram Alpha is currently available as an iPhone app, but the company is looking at making it available on other major smartphones including the DROID, Palm and BlackBerry, Porter said.

The 40 North 88 West application is free, as is Elephant Rescue. And the price tag for the moral compass is 99 cents. The Wolfram Alpha application costs $50.

"Most (apps) are between $1 and $4 so there was some controversy," about the price, Porter said. But Porter said the company felt the Wolfram Alpha app offered users "a premium experience" – the ability to access Wolfram Alpha's power while being mobile.

As staff members of OJC Technologies grew comfortable using their iPhones in the last year and became more involved in developing the calendar app, it became "clear this was an app we could utilize and bring to multiple clients for multiple different purposes," said Lori Patterson, who added that "mobile technology is a key part of any project we take on."

OJC is working with the UI School of Music on developing a calendar application. It would include details about the school's events, such as faculty performances, visiting musicians and more. The company is hoping to release it this spring.

Looking to the future, Patterson said she would like to see calendar apps utilized in school districts, individual schools or park districts.

As for the next app planned to be released for Working Cod, the LLC formed by Angrave and Shaffer, Angrave (who admits to a bit of an arachnophobe) described it as an application that allows the user to have "a low-intensity interaction with spiders."

And sometime this month, Riverwatcher will release their second app for iPhones. It will be a geography game for kids and adults.

"We're trying to combine learning and entertainment," Fu said.