The iPhone Apps

These are the pride and joy, and purpose for Goonbee's existence.

These are the stories behind the apps. I believe the building process is just as beautiful as the finished product.

Translizzle

The first app Goonbee ever released. This was way back in 2010. It's no longer available on the store but we like to remember it as the one that started it all.

Moodlight was a simple test app that was built without the intention of being released onto the app store. It was an exercise in creating a universal app binary for both the iPhone and iPad user paradigms. Plus, who doesn't like moodlights?

iWake

After having been through two app builds so far, I wanted something more involving... For iWake I built a custom table view controller, implemented some good old BSD sockets and tried to design a beautiful and elegant, yet simple and intuitive UI; that is the hardest part of app development in my opinion, to do good anyways. On one day it was downloaded 1,449 times. This tapered off to about 50 downloads/day. At the time of writing, 12,986 people have downloaded the app since it was released on 16 December 2010; it's been out for just over 8 months. Not bad for a practice app.

Wifi Scanner

By now I started feeling confident with the entire build process, starting with the idea, then on to the sketches, UI skeletons, UI mockups, UI specs, implementation strategy (because "there's more than one way to do it", hello Perl), implementation, together with its testing and debugging cycle, performance testing and code optimisation, UI design refinement, UX testing, and its UX tweaking cycle, usability testing, and its tweaking cycle, icon design and promo art design. Now that the skills were there, and the experience had started building up, it was time to shift focus away from making "practice apps" with certain technical requirements, and re-focus on the initial idea. I asked myself, now that I'm comfortable with iOS, what's something cool I can make? And so Wifi Scanner came to be. Wifi Scanner was published along with iWake on 16 December 2010, and it is consistently in the top 3 for its relevant search queries.

iCook Pro

This was a personal problem that I wanted to solve. It isn't easy to synchronise the cooking of different ingredients, that all take different times to cook, to all finish at the same time--not for me anyways. So I built an app to do it for me. It also doubles as a recipe book. And this way I can step out the kitchen without fear of a disaster (because a little bell will warn me that it's time to get back in, and not the fire alarm--you think I'm joking).

...the future

If you're interested to hear what we're working on next, if you have any feedback, suggestions or even just want to share your opinion about one of our apps, feel free to send us an email. If you are thinking of working with us on your next project, then get in touch because we'd love to hear from you.