Igoshi for the iPhone
One of the nice things about being a small company is that it’s possible to experiment with new ideas and technologies. We decided to look at the iPhone platform and see what we could do. The result is the travel application Igoshi.
The brief
Researching the platform and sales of applications made us aware that whatever we decided to build should be simple and have a wide reach. We fully expect that sales will be very modest but we’ve given ourselves the widest reach by taking a language neutral stance. Igoshi is a pictogram application and the bundle doesn’t contain any language profiles. So theoretically it could be as popular in Japan or Taiwan as it is in Turkey or the USA. The important message is that it’s not locked into a market limited by the cost of multi-lingual support.
Development
The bulk of the application leverages our existing knowledge of web standards programming. To this end the concept design and build were familiar. The big hurdles were getting enough knowledge of the development environment and its quirks.
We found we had most issues getting the appropriate certificates for development and distribution to work correctly. I like the general Apple approach to technology: it’s very simple. But the hoop jumping required to make sure that your application has the correct certificates on the test machine and for the distribution binary was really difficult. I tweeted my frustrations but we got there in the end.
Release
Igoshi is currently being reviewed by Apple. All being well it should be released in the next few weeks and will go on sale in the Appstore. We’ve written the application in such a way we should be able to port the concept to other platforms as other proposed stores come into operation by other manufacturers and networks.
In the meantime here’s a demo at Youtube.
Can you make me an iPhone app?
Well maybe. We might be able to offer this as service to our clients and we’re always open to suggestions. Our friends at Graphico have taken this route for a recent Bacardi promotion so there may be demand. We’ll have to wait and see.
Tags: iPhone, Japan, Taiwan, travel application, Turkey, United States, web standards programming, youtube
