- Posts tagged immedia
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View from my balcony at Amanzingwe Lodge
Our Android dev phone arrived today - the Nexus One
- Posted from Umhlanga, South Africa
Beatles Rock Band, check. 5.1 Surround, check. 55" Samsung LED TV, check. immedia read to party? OH YEAH!
Introducing Smeets - a social experiment that lets you SMS your tweets in SA
I have the greatest friends!
It gets better and better!
I'm really excited at how well our apps are doing in the South African iPhone app store. RadioPod and RugbyZone are still #1 in their respective categories (Entertainment, Sport) and RadioPod has reached a new high in the overall paid store - Number 2 baby!
Enter to win a copy of RadioPod!
Introducing.... Radiopod!
iPhone app: ZATV Guide
Being the avid TV show-loving geeks we are at immedia, we realised that a guide shouldn't just be a damn guide. We wanted more from it. ZATV Guide is the premier South African TV Guide for the iPhone. It lets you favourite your favourite TV shows and channels for quick one-touch access. More than just that, it also tells you when repeats of your favourite shows are airing. And the icing on the cake? Search. Yeah, a simple thing like search makes a world of difference in a TV Guide. No more hunting around to find your shows, just search for it. If you have an iPhone and love TV like we do - enjoy ZATV Guide - another proudly South African free app with love from immedia. Approved apps in the iPhone App Store: two. And counting.
ZATV Guide
Last month I submitted another iPhone app that I'd been working on for a few weeks. And two weeks after I'd submitted it, Apple approved it in it's first submission, ie. without any rejections. Yeah, you read right. I submitted an app that got accepted first time round. Legendary, I know. The app, ZATV Guide (link opens iTunes), is the best South African TV guide for the iPhone. And I'm not just saying that because I'm the developer. It's true. The others are painful. One only shows you the SABC channels, and the official one is just a guide and nothing more. Which I guess is what was expected it should be. But you know, I work for immedia. And we just don't do mediocre. We started the app well before the official one was accepted into the store, and finished it before we left for WWDC (San Francisco) in June. I didn't submit it until 23 June because Apple themselves had a bug in SDK 3.0 (which I pointed out to them in one of the iPhone labs at WWDC).
My first iPhone app
One such email that I merely click-glanced at was from Apple. Yes, Apple - the computer and phone manufacturer. Now, this wasn't much of a big deal at first because I had thought it was one of their usual promotional emails. For those of you that don't know (and that's all of you since this was kept hush-hush for a while) I had submitted my first iPhone application for review in the Apple iTunes App Store on 23 January 2009. Since then, Apple has been mailing me alerting me to bugs and fixes, etc, for my app.
Those emails were in a pretty boring serif font. I was expecting my approval letter from Apple to be in the same style. Oh no. No no no. Being Apple, they sent me a very nicely styled email letting me know that my first app was finally in the magnificent App Store.
And what a moment it was.
A flood of emotion touched me as I had just realised the feat I had accomplished (or rather, we had accomplished - I couldn't have done it without our the amazing designs our brilliant designers Basil Percimoney and Nirissa Govender had churned out over and over again). An immedia app was finally in the App Store, and I was a published iPhone App Store developer. Wow. I felt like an author that had just gotten his book published. So amazing and liberating. The app, by the way, is called YFM MobiYze. It's for GP's Hottest Frequency, YFM 99.2. YFM is a hot, trendsetting radio station based in Rosebank, Joburg. From the description in the app store:
The first South African Radio Station to provide iPhone and iPod Touch technology to enhance its users' radio experience on the fly. Catch up on the latest weather, station events, blog postings and even the current song that's being played live on air... or you could just listen to it LIVE straight from your iPhone or iPod Touch! So go ahead and be one of the firsts to experience GP's Hottest Frequency courtesy of YFM 99.2
After this whole approval process, I finally understand and get why there is a need for it. And am very thankful for it. The whole process ensures that the quality and stability of an app is something worthy of an iPhone user using it. So, if you have an iPhone, you can find YFM MobiYze by downloading it in iTunes on your computer, or using the App Store on your iPhone or iPod Touch (check the Entertainment category or search for "YFM"). Try it out, and let me know your feedback so I can push out an awesome 1.1 release soon!
Finally, I'd like to thank Basil Percimoney and Nirissa Govender for their earth-shattering designs and time, Anice Hassim (Head Strategist of immedia), Shashi Pillay (Digital Agency Manager) and Kanthan Pillay (CEO of YFM 99.2) for their groundbreaking ideas and innovation, and to everyone who tested the app while in beta.
