Part of the annual Trans festival in Belfast is the Urban Arts Academy. This is a series of sponsored courses from Parkour to Games Development. This year, Phil from Infurious is teaching 15 folk how to start programming for iPhone.

You’re not going to turn into an iPhone developer overnight with this 2-day course for £25 but it should dispel some of the fear, uncertainty and doubt and show people that the Mac, as well as the iPhone, is a great computer and many of the skills they will develop will apply to both platforms.

Infurious is committed to participating in the recent initiative spearheaded by the Digital Circle and the University of Ulster to develop a real expertise in iPhone development in Ireland. We’ve been helped in this by XCake, the local branch of Cocoaheads as well as Barnabas Ventures, a local property development firm which is progressive in it’s business outlook. Through a network of friends and contacts, we’ve taken part in Apple’s WWDC conference, run this course and will be working hard to help developers get to grips with this new and exciting platform.

Things may have been looking pretty quiet here at infurious but we’ve been busy on a top secret project, which has, finally launched.

Infurious are proud to be the developers of the Heroes Comic Reader (available on the app store) for NBC Universal. The Heroes comic strips are available from the NBC website, but the app allows you to download and read them while on the go.

The Heroes Comic Reader combines a pretty cool iPhone comic reader, allowing full sized comic book content to be displayed and read, along with an easy to use web based interface allowing NBC to upload content which is then published to the comic reader.

Listing all comics for download

The reader downloads a list of available comics from NBC’s servers, displaying each title in a simple chapter list, allowing the user to click a single button to download the comic content. Once downloaded the user can rate the comic, read it or remove it from the phone (if storage becomes a problem!)

Comics are displayed in landscape mode, using the full width of the phone - a surprisingly readable format. Of course, if you need to see the lettering larger there’s also a simple zoom mode; double tapping will zoom you in to the comic - making the text much larger. Using a fixed zoom keeps the emphasis on the reading experience rather than using a pinch and zoom which is more appropriate for looking for detail in photos.

NBC upload comic book content to their web backend, this is sent to a staging area - allowing them to test the comic content with a special ’stage’ version of the comic reader. Once everything is checked, the content is then moved into a ‘live’ area.

Reading using the full width

Zoom Mode (note the rounded border "magnifying glass")

Infurious is the only Northern Ireland company attending SXSWi and we’re doing it out of our pocket and without any support from our local economic development agencies. Phil has been partying with the other revelers and marvelling at some of the technologies he’s seeing - real cutting edge stuff

…you should see the great stuff being done in HTML 5.0 and CSS. The amount of people doing web apps are unreal, even Photoshop style applications in HTML and only HTML.
…
All so nice and fluid, and best about it, there all using Macs.

On top of that, he was interviewed by the BBC and has a feature on their web site

Infurious developed a Comic Reader application that uses the iPhone’s familiar touch interface to navigate between different panes of a comic.
The Comics Engine can also layer audio on to comic pages, embed movies and links to YouTube.
The reader also features multi-layered content pages so readers can find bonus artwork, footnotes and explainers.

Here’s a BBC pic of the man himself out in Austin.

Phil at SXSWi

As we speak, a dozen or more bands and musicians are heading out to SXSW for the week of music supported by Belfast City Council, the Creative Industries Innovation Fund and Invest Northern Ireland.

As we draw into March, we’re coming to the end of a particularly exciting deadline that has Phil pulling very long hours into perfecting. Phil is by far the most dedicated perfectionist I’ve met in a long time. And on Wednesday he’s heading West to Austin to SXSWi to talk, network and generally get involved.

As he’s stepping onto the plane I’m stepping off, arriving back in Northern Ireland. I leave tomorrow for a very quick trip to San Francisco for some iPhone-related stuff which will be very compelling for anyone in Northern Ireland and Ireland who recognises that the iPhone heralds a sea change in the way we interact with our computers. It’s the first but won’t be the last by far of these potentially intelligent mobile devices which we carry everywhere. I’ve a couple of really cool meetings to attend - including one in Cupertino so we’ll see what comes of them.

Infurious has always been about trying stuff that no-one else is doing. PJ is working hard with Stuart to perfect a new product that will knock your socks off as well. We’ve got some other stuff in the pipeline which, surprisingly, isn’t all about the code. It’s about art, education, health - the future. More later!

If you’re in SF and want to say Hi, I’m hitting the tarmac in SFO on Monday about 1 pm and skedaddling out again Wednesday around 3 pm.

We’re insanely busy but life has to go on. PJ is off to NYCC from 6-8th February and Phil is off on holiday this week and then off to SXSW from 13-17th March.

We’ve been working on EyeCandy #3 and #4 while, at the same time, beavering away at the TOP SECRET PROJECT which we’re hoping to announce very soon. NDAs are incredibly frustrating

Chinwag have announced the list of companies they are taking on the Digital Mission to SXSWi in March (I say “taking” but you have to realise that the Digital Mission costs £500 in addition to your flights and accommodation so it’s not a funded trip by any means.). As far as I can tell, only one Northern Ireland company is represented here.

They write:

Congratulations to the companies selected by the advisory board to attend the Digital Mission to SXSWi and listed amongst the 35 hottest digital SMEs in the UK.

It’s a shame that other companies were not included in the trade mission as we have some extremely compelling companies starting out here in the province.

Hurrah! We’d like to thank the Academy, and all of the people involved. Especially the little iPhone elves who do all the coding for us.

We’ve had some questions about how content can be submitted and what we’re looking for:

There are two ways to handle it:

1. Keep art as is and use pinch & zoom - and double finger swipe to reveal each layer - this would be cool, but not a great reading experience - as the pinching / zooming experience is great for examining things but not great for reading.
2. Edit the art to make it readable on the small screen. This is our preference to maximise the storytelling.

In terms of editing, we can do that; our feeling is that the right number of screens is what ever the story fits in, so you’re probably looking, for a 22 page comic, around 80-150 screens. We can add chapter markers where appropriate to make the reading experience much smoother, as well as backup material (for example, we can maybe add some of the big splash pages as full images on the reader)

The editing would be done by PJ Holden, a professional comic artist who’s worked for 2000AD, Image comics and fantagraphics.

We’d need large images in order to maximise the quality of the editing experience (around 1000pixels wide).

If you have an idea, send us some email, links to samples and let’s get talking!

Firstly, we’re pleased to say that EyeCandy #2, “Beatnik High” is available on the App Store for the bargain price of 59p ($0.99) and features an all new toy which should tickle you pink with it’s features. Our focus group of children found it to be incredibly engaging - when they could wrest the comic from their parents! It’s addictive to all ages.

Other than that we’ve been working like ants in order to bring you the latest and greatest comic technology. EyeCandy #2 will knock our socks off (daddio!) and what we’ve planned for EyeCandy #3 will amuse, inspire and delight! We promise!

As well as that, the busy beavers at Infurious Towers HQ have been working on something so super, so secret and so fabulous that we’re bursting at the seams to talk about it! Add to that some upcoming content deals that will make you gape in wonder and we’ve got a fabulous quarter ahead of us.

So…watch this space. (and buy EyeCandy #2!)

Matt Johnston, one of the infurious three (FREE the infurious THREE!) gets interview by www.touchtip.com, you can read it here.