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")

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

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.

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

We LOVE reviews. Phil Barnett, has written a great review of our first comic (number 2 is coming!) and here it is: 

Review of Eye Candy: Masked Marshal #1 “Mah Pony Must Be Punished”
By Phil Barnett, aged 12 (writer of Finland, Finland, Finland)

 So the Masked Marshal. It’s a very good and funny comic. The artwork is amazing and very well designed for theiPhone. (My dad’s iPhone 3G anyway.)

 

 The software via which you read the comic is amazing, especially that with a flick of the finger up and down, you can change the panels between pencils, inks, and full colours. This would help children who are artistic, children who like drawing ‘sausage people’ can copy it off the screen and see how the characters and the panels develop from rough planning to full coloured panels. I’d love to see even more stages shown between blank page and finished panel.

 The extras are as brilliant as the main comic. The idea of being allowed to recolour the comic is genius! (But it would be nice to be able to save the drawings you create [a fix is coming! - PJH].)  How could I not mention one of the greatest extras (I feel): the ability to make the pony’s eyes go wibble wobble just by shaking the iPhone. [Shake it harder - it'll neigh! - PJH]

 That’s all the good things.

 Now all the bad… honestly, I couldn’t find any! The comic is better than I could have thought of.  In all the hoopla of how good the software and format are, please remember that it’s a very funny comic.

 For future updates I wouldn’t mind seeing a animated version of it. Or under the extras could be a quiz about the story. Also a little bio of the creators and characters.  Or even a link to the creators’ websites.

With the painting, it’s very easy to go over the ink lines and an option for younger children to keep the colours inside the ink lines would probably make it more enjoyable for them (and for adults who can’t do it without that option. No names mentioned, of course, eh Dad?).

 To finish my review of this brilliant comic, I think it’s a very good app and is perfect for younger children.

Yeah! Thanks Phil - we’re all happy you like it - if anyone else wants to send us a review (and there’s some crackers on the iTunes website) we’ll be more than happy to print them. Not only that, but if you see anything you think could be better - we’ll do our darn-tooten’ist best to try and make it better!

-pj 

So, the BICS (Birmingham International Comic Show) was this weekend. It’s taken me a couple of days to claw back the sleep that I had to forgo to really enjoy the event. 

In lieu of an actual report on what I did, here’s a couple of links:

Paul Cornell (writer of Dr Who, Captain Britain and MI:13 and more…)

Said this: 

But most importantly, and I really think this is some sort of breakthrough, and something that kept making people go ooh and ahh all through the convention, if you have an IPhone or an IPod Touch, I’d like to direct your attention to this on ITunes:

http://tinyurl.com/4qjr4p

This being P.J.Holden’s [..] comic for children, on the IPhone, for 99c a go, or the British equivalent. The oohs and ahhs (and P.J. got serious people from various serious organisations I shall not name coming over to have a look at his phone as word of mouth spread) were because this is the first comic project that I’ve seen that really takes advantage of the mobile form. 

 

John Reppion and Leah Moore said this:

The main buzz at the table, and the con in general was the Eyecandy iphone application created by PJ Holden and written by Al Ewing which is so innovative, and cool and fun to use, it made everyone at the con immediately start thinking of things to do for them. Download the first issue for 99c (0r 50p)here, and watch them like a hawk in case you miss a second of their meteoric rise to fame and stardom!

I’ll be one of the guests at BICS this year. I’m sure I’ll be wearing one of the patented Murderome T-Shirts (though maybe not the same one for the entire con…)

I’ll be getting in at 9:00pm on the Friday (not ideal, but the bloody airline decided to change my time to this later time) so you’ll all be getting drunk by then. But don’t be afraid to say hello and ask if you can see ‘Murderdrome’…

See you there…

In answer to this and this

The handing out of t-shirts were NOT a protest (silent or otherwise) - we just thought it’d be kinda neat to hang out with everyone queuing at the opening of the new Apple Store in Belfast and to give out some free t-shirts (and, heck, we’re Apple nerds too - we wanted to see the new place). A jolly time was had by all, we passed out t-shirts, we showed off EyeCandy and we had, generally, a good laugh. 

Now back to your regularly scheduled stuff.

Oh: re the t-shirts, we have no more, but we’re looking at getting some new ones printed up, we’ll get them up asap…