I attended the August installment of Refresh Belfast, a regular but informal get-together for local developers and creatives, on Monday night. The evening was an introduction to Ecliptic Labs, a brand new user experience company based in Belfast who have been working extensively on projects for the iPhone.
Following a last minute change of venue from the usual Black Box, the largest Refresh crowd yet made it’s way to the Stiff Kitten instead where, a little later than planned, Chris McClelland and Philip Strain from Ecliptic kicked off a series of short talks on their experiences in developing iPhone applications. They talked through concept, development, design and distribution of their iPhone projects and illustrated their presentations by introducing two of these projects that had been kept under wraps until now.
The first was an iPhone application to order takeaway food from NiftyNosh. I haven’t used NiftyNosh, but I assume it’s popular as the announcement of this application elicited a spontaneous cheer from the audience! iPhone NiftyNosh is still a work in progress, but Ecliptic seem to be on the right track, using their UX experience to tame the complexity of ordering takeaway food online and squeez it in into the iPhone’s user interface.
Secondly, and I suspect more excitingly for Ecliptic than the Refresh audience, is an iPhone interface to the Media Lightbox digital asset management system. Widely used by design, media and marketing companies and departments around the world, an iPhone link to their Media Lightbox account will allow users to create, manage and share media files easily, wherever they are.
Ecliptic provided some interesting statistics (which are likely already out of date) that underlined the phenomenal success of the iPhone platform to date:
- 40,000,000 iPhone and iPod Touch units sold
- 60,000 applications on the App Store
- 100,000 new Apple developers since launch
Finally, there was a prize draw, sponsored by Ecliptic Labs and a likely culprit for the size of the sell-out crowd. One lucky winner walked away with an iPhone UI Design Template, while another, even luckier audience member got his hands on a brand new 16Mb iPhone 3GS. No such luck for me, unfortunately.
Having failed to win the prize draw, I still don’t have an iPhone (or indeed the Mac computer required to develop for it), so iPhone development is an impossibility for me at the moment. Even so it’s still a fascinating platform and it was both useful and interesting to get an insight into the development process, and potential market. Thanks to Ecliptic Labs and Refresh for an informative evening.
John Girvin is an experienced a software engineer and web developer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He draws on over 14 years of hard won, real world experience of different projects, clients and working environments.
John is currently working with the Art Technology Group (ATG), developing J2EE based, market leading e-commerce technology.
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