I’m pleased to announce the release of Poem Flow, an app I worked on in the Fall for TextTelevision.  Poem Flow is an iPhone poetry e-reader, but it’s no ordinary reader.  Lines of poetry are rendered as animations of movement and transitions.

The image to the left really doesn’t really capture the dynamic experience or reading the flow.  At first I was a little skeptical of the concept, but I soon found myself more immersed in what I was reading, and thus had a more meaningful experience.

I was responsible for architecting the flow rendering engine.  The dancing words and lines of each poem are meticulously choreographed beforehand with scripts, which in turn are translated into motion.  I expect this platform to continue to evolve, and as you know with my work with Iyeoka, poetry has a special place in my heart.

This is totally awesome. I sent an ad-hoc beta version of the Young Twinn iPhone app to Young Twinn’s management, and Twinn is already raving about it on Twitter, which can be viewed on the Young Twinn iPhone app! Given how long the application approval can take, can you say an-ti-ci-pa-tion?

I first met Young Twinn four years ago for some mix work I did for him and his management company Undertaker Entertainment.  This kid is a real talent and has definite cross over appeal.  He’s based in Houston and he’s definitely worth checking out.  When Undertaker was looking to do an iPhone app, I of course seized on the opportunity.  I had other music market apps in the works and I’ve had a good on going relationship with the company.  Plus what made the project desirable was that Young Twinn’s management has done a great job with his marketing and branding, so there was plenty of content for me to pull from.

Some of the cool features in this app that don’t seem to be present in other music marketing apps are support for RSS feeds for YouTube and Twitter.  The great thing about this is that I didn’t have to do any server side development.  Soon, I hope to have Picasa and FlickR support as well.  The only reason this app is not released yet is that I have to make sure it’s iPhone OS 3.0 beta compatible, which is now a requirement for submission to the iTunes store.  The video above are screenshots of the app.  I couldn’t do motion capture of the iPhone sumulator because the simulator doesn’t support audio playback and YouTube embeds in WebKit.

This video reel demonstrates Adobe Flex application projects I was invovled with when I was at Allurent. This reel features applications for Borders Books and Alltel Wireless. What you see here is a result of hard work by teams of people that include product/project managers, graphic designers, software developers and QA engineers.

Borders Books wanted a home page application that would feature timely merchandised product items such as books and DVDs arranged in categories. So exactly what was I responsible for? For Borders, I was the principal graphic user interface developer. Anything that you can see and interact with is a result of programmatic action, in this case developing in ActionScript3 within the Adobe Flex framework.

The application development begins it’s life as a visual design mocked up by a graphic designer. She also described the “vibe” of how the application should behave from the drag motion inertia of the books to the transition effects when various visual elements appear or disappear. These behaviors need to be programmed. Then there’s the motion implementation of shelves and the items within them. For this I must acknowledge the guidance of my Flex mentor Joe Berkovitz!

The Alltel Phone Selector is similar to Borders in which merchandised products are featured, but in the form of a motion carousel in which motion of the items appear to be traveling in a circular path. For this project, I was part of a larger team of developers that handled user interface development. I did have a specific role as the “skinner” where I was responsible for ensuring that the application was “pixel perfect” to the graphic designer’s specifications.