Good news! Today the new Pirata London website finally went live! Check out over at http://www.piratalondon.com.

Yeah, finally we finished translating the whole content of our Seasons app to English. We also added seasonal data support for UK with 1.2 and US and France in 1.3 which became available this week.

There is still quite a lot stuff we want to integrate into the application. The French localisation is almost there as well and some great features are about go into the app very soon.

After working as a freelancer for a couple of years I’m very happy to join Pirata as a Creative Technologist over at London. I’m looking forward to work on great projects as it’s supposed to be very varying stuff including web and mobile apps.

After more than a month since we released Seasons (Erntefrisch) 1.0 we are proud to announce the next Release. Version 1.1 comes with an improved user interface, a larger number of entries in the database and some bugfixes.

The new revised ‘Today’ screen makes it a lot easier to get to know which fruits are currently in season. So you will be able to know immediatly what to buy at the market. More improvements address the search screen and the presentation of the entries list.

The new release is currently beeing reviewed by Apple available at the App Store. Check out the Seasons website to have a look at the new release.

Btw.: the next update will bring support for the US and will be fully translated to English. So, watch out for 1.2 :)

I’m really happy to see Erntefrisch / Seasons finally on the App Store. Check it out at iTunes.

After two months spending my spare time for developing my first iPhone app I finally submitted  Seasons (Erntefrisch in German) to the iPhone App Store.

Seasons/Erntefrisch is a tool giving you advice when buying fresh fruits and vegetables. The application comes with more than 130 fruits and vegetables and includes season data for local seasons as well as for import seasons. Photos of each entry and a short descriptive text are included as well.

The data is accessible via different screens. The “Now” screen shows fruits that currently do have a starting, ending or permanent season. Furthermore there is the monthly overview, list by category and search view.

Currently the season data is only available for Germany/Central Europe. But we are working hard on getting everything localized including different regions. We will provide the localized data with an update of the application.

It was a lot of work but also a lot of fun developing the app. Actually the main task was not the software development itself. In fact, getting all the information about fruits and vegetables was a lot more work. We have to thank all the traders at Markthalle Kassel which were kind enough to allow us to take pictures of there products and telling us a lot of interesting things about fruits, vegetables and agriculture.

For now we are waiting for Apple approving Seasons/Erntefrisch.

After weeks of iPhone development I had to switch back to Flash development. The new media department at School of Arts and Design Kassel asked me for giving some lectures on Flash development. So we discussed what could be interesting. Teaching ActionScript didn’t sound like lots of fun. It should be more fun to the students. So we decided to focus on using Flash in combination with web applications. You may call this mashup. Anyway, starting a (interactive) project will always raise the question of using something existing to make you focus on your main target and of course save a lot of time. The class basically is about using existing technologies in conjunction with Flash.

To give some introduction there is the presentation available online (German only):

Next monday Apple will stop at the Freie Universität Berlin for its iPhone Tech Talk World Tour. I’ll be there and I’m really looking forward what Apple will come up with. Hopefully there will be some in depth discussions. I also will take the chance to meet the guys over at Moccu as well as visiting some friends.

See you there!

A couple of months ago I joined the Google Android developer talk in Munich. At this time no device were available at all. (Sidenote: at this time Apple had not released it’s iPhone SDK). Now that the G1 from T-Mobile of America is available it’s time to think about supporting a new mobile platform.

So, we need to learn the SDKs to create amazing apps. But whenever I think about mobile development my experience in J2ME comes to my mind. Which means 10% idea, 30% development, 60% testing and debugging. Incredible buggy implementations of J2ME on different devices finally stopped me from developing further Java apps for mobiles.

After hearing from Android and the iPhone SDK I wanted to give mobile app development a new chance. The Android SDK is based on Eclipse which is fine. I already had some experience using this IDE. Furthermore Android is Java programming. So, many Java developers should be aware of this new platform.

To create iPhone Apps you have to use Xcode. Which was fine for me too because I did all my ActionScript 2.0 development on Xcode. If you don’t have any experience in Xcode it takes some time to get used to it (setting the Layout setting in Xcode preferences to “All in One” is definitely the best advice I can give for Xcode starters and Eclipse developers). Maybe the major difficulty is learning Objective-C. From what I can say. After a few days with lots of question marks flowing around your head you will see that it’s not that far from other objective programming languages you might already know. Just having the message syntax

[object methodWithParam:param];

instead of the well known dot syntax

object.method(param);

But well, you might want to chose one SDK for now. So maybe it’s not worth learning Objective-C. Looking at the features, Android might be better. It offers background processes and stuff like that.

Coming from a designers background I often create apps that don’t need to run in background. It’ll be more about apps that could turn into some advertising campaign or something. So there have to be a smart idea or even a funny game idea and the app development will start. That’s being said a lot of work will go into user interface and interaction design.

In J2ME almost everything was done via programming. Creating user interfaces for Android and iPhone is lot easier using an Editor in Eclipse (Android) or the Interface Builder (iPhone). Well, and that’s definitly the victory for Apple. The Android Editor does help a lot … in comparison to J2ME. But Interface Builder does a really great job. Sometimes I think it’s even easier to get something to work than using Flash.

So for now Apple has won this round. But as you may know. The first iPhone SDK Beta Release had almost no Interace Builder support. Google will hopefully strengthen the development on this part. For my perspective they have to.

G1. That’s the name of the device that will be officially announced next week by T-Mobile USA … just to remind myself checkin the news on tuesday