FWAPhoto goes mobile

A few weeks ago theFWA released their brand new FWAPhoto concept. An online gallery showcasing the worlds most beautiful artwork. Together with Group94, they released an AIR-based screensaver called ‘lightboxer’ which brings FWAPhoto to the desktop. It visualizes the photo of the day, but that’s not all. In order to personalize the photostream, people are able to add their favourite pictures in the lightboxer. This is perfectly manageble on fwaphoto.com, the beautiful homepage of this initiative.

A nice interaction between multiple platforms, but living in 2009 this interactive experience should be manageble via your mobile phone, right? And that’s where Boulevart came in.

FWAPhoto on the iPhone

We have an exclusive gallery showcasing the greatest photo-graphical art and we want to access this from a mobile device. Which one suits this initiative better than the iPhone? Group94 contacted us with this question and we could not agree more. We started talking about what the iPhone application should have to offer, how users should use it and how to implement the sexy iPhone features like auto rotation, sms bubbles and touchscreen-swiping. Thomas gathered all the brainstorm results and started working on a first rough sketchpaper.

Thomas

Working with Group94 & theFWA is very exciting because you know that the focus will be on quality and experience. From the moment we started talking with them I felt that we were on the same level. Let’s bring FWAPhoto to the iPhone and create the perfect finishing touch. It was quite obvious from the start: this application needed to be clean, sexy, easy to use and capable of managing your lightboxer without any effort. In order to straighten out everything that should and could be happening in the application, I started writing down every possible user story. Together with my colleagues Wim Vanhenden & Andy Jacobs we finalized and fine-tuned the whole bunch. After that, I started using our sketchpaper in order to visualize the entire application flow. I’m a big fan of this type of approach, it adds a lot of value for all parties involved in a mobile project. First of all it offers a great overview of all the user stories that need to be developed. A dream for developers and project managers in order to stay on top of their games. For our clients it is a nice way of communicating as well because there is almost no room for misunderstandings and last-minute change requests. Before we begin everything is clearly communicated and visualized so they can update us with questions or requests before it’s to late. After creating the sketchapers we went over them together with Group94 & theFWA. Despite a few changes here and there we already had a clear view of how the application should function and look like. The minute we received an official go from theFWA it was time for Andy Jacobs to come in and play.

Andy

I had already done quite a lot of iPhone development research but I must admit this FWAPhoto application was my first-timer. Developing a real iPhone application was a challenge but definitely one I was happy to face. It was not always easy as I was the only in-house developer with objective-c experience. I was on my own for this one but I had the internet on my side. I had lot’s of questions but most of them were solved thanks to the active community at stackoverflow.com. Because we prepared ourselves well, I had enough time to consider different approaches on certain features. For example: we wanted to visualize the photo comments in a typical iPhone ’sms bubbles’ style, but it turned out a bit more difficult then expected. Together with Thomas I started looking for the best way to create this look. We tried it with CSS but the result could not compete with the one we achieved via a uitableview. It’s amazing to see how much I’ve learned after 10 days of active iPhone development. Because I wanted to give something back to the community, I decided to spice up my blog with Quick Tips on iPhone development from an Actionscript point of view. Having several positive comments daily from people who were facing the same problems I had, I think I can say it helped out other developers too. This even resulted in several requests from organisations who are willing to book me for one day iPhone development workshops, especially for Actionscript developers who are eager to discover new opportunities.