Medieval Dublin

Appy Days

Dublin hipsters beware, we have jumped on the iPhone/iPad bandwagon and finished our first app! It’s available now in the iTunes store and you’ll find a thorough description here.

We were commissioned by Dublin City Council to create this app, re-purposing content we had created for the Medieval Dublin Project. As it’s our first iPhone app project we took our time at it, but we’re happy with how it turned out. It looks pretty cool so far, and we’ll make some improvements to it over time. The below video gives you a quick look at the main features. We’d love to hear your feedback.

 

 

Developing the App

John set about developing the application based on some wireframe sketches rattled out on a long journey to China. Dara worked away on the design with Niall interfering here and there. We design and create content for a wide range of different media so making a switch to iPhone wasn’t a major leap. In fact, our experience in both video and interactive design gave us the skills to get some working models done quite quickly. From a design point of view, we had to ease off on the ‘ye-olde’ look of the Medieval Dublin Project, yet not go too cold or clinical as we needed to be in line with City Council signage strategy. We also found that clarity at such a small scale is an issue, creating problems to be figured out in terms of scale and use. 

image

Video and file-size was also an issue. The app is quite large (85mbs) and we agreed early on that the video should be contained within the app so that users are not streaming video, particularly if they’re a visitor at the mercy of roaming rates. So it’s a little heavy on the initial download. 

We’ve been doing location-based historical ‘Before-and-After’ video clips for many years on the Medieval Dublin Project and have always wanted to find a way to show these videos in the actual location. The iPhone’s video and GPS functionality enabled us to do this in a nice little interface. From a usability point of view, this was a little tricky because users need to stand in a specific point, often in a differentplace to the hotspot itself. We solved this by creating a new icon on the GPS interface specifically for the Before-and-After’ sequences. 

Another feature of the app shows a high resolution image of Dublin in 1500. The image is packed full of historical detail taken from our work with experts on the Medieval Project and is a great way of exploring the medieval city (and if that whets your appetite, check out the real thing at Dublinia). So, go and buy it, its only €3 and if you have time, give us some feedback or even better, give it a good review and tell your friends.  

Comments

Name:

Email:

Add a Comment:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

Please enter the word you see in the image below:


AboutContactLinks