Need a strawberry recipe on the fly? There’s an app for that. How about a piece of psychedelic pop art from legendary artist Peter Max to email to a friend? There’s an app for that one too.

Just as everyone at one point needed a website, now it seems everyone needs an app, creating new avenues not only for businesses reaching out to customers, but also for burgeoning developers.

One of those developers is Chris Stocker.

After a 20-year career in high-tech sales, including a 10-year stint in business development roles at Apple Inc., Stocker is making apps for people and organizations normally more attuned to the brick-and-mortar world than the digital world. Stocker said his company, MobileAppWorks of San Jose, is on track to do between $800,000 and $1 million in revenue this coming year.

The rise of apps from untraditional sources is no surprise considering that International Data Group predicts that 2010 will be a watershed year for mobile devices. The IDC report, issued in December, predicts the number of apps in the iTunes store to grow from 100,000 last year to at least 300,000 apps by the end of 2010. That equates to a 900 percent growth explosion from the development of a mere 10,000 apps just a year ago.

The report predicts that many of the new apps will come from well-known Global 2000 businesses and consumer brands and attract more consumers and businesspeople to mobile platforms as their most commonly used clients.

For 72-year-old Peter Max, MobileAppWorks developed two applications. The $1.99 Peter Max eCard, a selection of 20 of Max’s colorful and iconic works, can be emailed with a personal greeting and signature. The other app is the $4.99 Peter Max Birthdays, a selection of 365 individual works Max completed at his Manhattan studio as a way of celebrating everyone’s birthday.

Stocker’s company employs a local programmer as well as a few overseas programmers. The company charges between $2,500 and $25,000 to develop an app and has revenue-share arrangements with its clients.

The Max apps, released just before Christmas, have been downloaded several thousand times.

“The key part of developing apps is to get people coming back and to drive traffic through to that person,” said Stocker, who has known Max since the early 1980s when they met at an art show in New York. Stocker said he talked to 40 potential clients at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and every single one was considering developing an app.

For Max, it is a new entry point into marketing his work.

“I am not very computer-savvy, and I envy the people who are,” said Max, who counts Steve Jobs as a longtime friend and was one of a group of about 20 artists and musicians Apple gifted with a Macintosh computer when they first rolled off the assembly line. “But I so enjoyed the medium, and having done these apps, now I’m thinking about doing more. I just have to come up with some good ideas. I have a dozen hearts ready to go, it’s just what will come next.”

Art-centric apps are a relatively new thing for the iTunes store, the beautiful graphics that some apps feature aside. A search of famed artists on the site leads to about a half-dozen “gallery” applications, most of which were released in the last quarter of 2009.