I have been given the task of designing the website which is going to launch alongside our new iPhone app. To give you a little background, ukphonebook.com is an online directory enquiries service which Simunix developed 12 years ago. Owing to the success of this service, it has long been our intention to create an iPhone app version of it as we felt it would be perfectly suited to that platform, and so came iPhoneBook.

Before beginning a project like this, I always turn to Google to track down some inspiration. I started off by Googling, “best iPhone app website designs” and a long stream of best of and most beautiful lists appeared in my browser. Here are a few of the examples of good design that I picked out as my inspiration for the iPhoneBook app website:

Amble

Nice, muted colour scheme. It’s not cluttered but there is more information as you scroll down the page. I especially like the map shape at the bottom of the screen – a very clever and subtle touch. It’s not obvious how you purchase the app from the App Store though.

Attic

I love this. It’s so striking and immediately you are presented with the app icon so you know what you’re looking for on the app store. Hardly any text, just a few screenshots and a clear link to the App Store. Stylish, bold and simple – perfect!

edovia

My favourite combination of colours: grey, black, white and blue (very in keeping with ukpb/iPB). The stripes of colour are eye-catching, it’s not overloaded with effects, it’s neatly laid out and there are plenty of screenshots.

Dig Deep Fitness

Clean and simple.

ShakeItPhoto

Apart from the logo and tagline, there is virtually no text. It doesn’t need it, just a QuickTime Movie of the app being used. Very cool B-)

NotifyMe

Fresh and clean but the tabs at the top seem a bit out of place.

TrackDebt

Vertical and horizontal stripes! Wouldn’t have thought this would work but coupled with the vivid green it looks really fun. Hardly any effects used which seems to balance out the bright colour scheme and bold patterns.

Convertbot

This is where I got most of my inspiration from. The black bar frames the image of the iPhone nicely, this was an idea I borrowed for my design. Colour scheme is soothing and elegant, just the effect I was trying for!

Read Me Stories

Super colourful, not too much information – just a brief description, a demo and a link to purchase it on the App Store. The texture of the background looks effective too (I also borrowed that idea for the iPhoneBook website background – did it using the noise filter in Fireworks).

The iPhoneBook website isn’t live yet so don’t judge my design skills on what’s there now! We will be launching the app and website in the new year.

We have been selected to exhibit in the Innovation Showcase at Venturefest Yorkshire 2012.

36 of the best science, technology and most innovative companies in the region are selected each year from a large number of applicants. They are each awarded heavily subsidised exhibition space in order to promote their new ideas.

The Exhibition will take place at York Racecourse on the 8^th February 2010

We will be exhibiting ZoneSearch, our visual tool for extracting people, place and business information. We’re going to take our HUGE flat screen TV to give a live demonstration to anyone who’ll listen. We might even let some of the delegates have a go themselves!

Cloud 2 won the Innovation Showcase last year so cross your fingers for Simunix this year.

T2A has arrived! The API which can be used for finding, validating and verifying data has been launched along with its own developer forum, plus Twitter and Facebook pages in order to encourage interaction amongst users.

T2A logo

We’ve made the full range of Simunix data available to developers via this API which can be incorporated into any system to build professional websites and business applications. There are a large range of services that we provide, each of which fall under one of the following five headings: Location Services, Find People, Telephone Numbers, Address Information and Data Validation.

We have provided code examples and created extensive documentation to help with the implementation of T2A. We are also hoping that users will make use of the Developer Forum to share ideas and get help from an active community of developers.

The newly designed T2A website makes for easy navigation through the various search options and also allows users to have a go with an online demo of each service.

We are priding ourselves on the fact that we provide the most competitive pricing for this kind of service. The pricing page details the different credits packages available with information on the number of credits you get, package price and price per credit (we offer volume discounts). There is also information about how many credits each service uses.

Visit www.t2a.co to have a look for yourselves. We are always open to any thought or suggestions you may have about T2A so please don’t hesitate to share!

…hopefully. So fingers crossed, people will be able to search for our blog or posts by way of the tags we have associated with our Simunix “blog claim”.

We’re really hoping this will get more people reading our blog and encourage more interaction amongst us and users of our services especially since launching our newest development, T2A.

P.S. If you’re wondering what the random string of letters and numbers is at the bottom of this blog, it’s a super, high-tech method of verifying for Technorati that I am the real author of these blog posts…

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Our Managing Director, John Lewis, was a guest speaker at a conference last week; ‘Through The Cloud With Intelecom’.

Cloud computing is the buzz thing for businesses and consumers alike just now, but we at ukphonebook.com have been providing ‘cloud’ based services since our launch in 2000. For those that don’t know what cloud means, it describes the way in which software, data, services etc. are delivered to your computer.

It used to be that companies (and people) would have all their software installed on their own servers, PC or Mac and the data would also be hosted locally. This meant huge IT departments were necessary to manage the hardware and network infrastructure. Cloud changes this and the concept of Software as a Service or SaaS as it’s known becomes the norm. What this means is that, as Internet browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari become more powerful, very sophisticated programs can be delivered to your computer desktop via the Internet.

Taking it a stage further, thanks to high-speed broadband, your data (photographs, music, films, spreadsheets, databases etc) can also be stored and accessed remotely. There are massive advantages to this, perhaps the most important being that your data is completely secure and you can access it from anywhere in the world that has a good Internet connection.

At the conference, John spoke about the paradigm shift needed in the minds of Directory Enquiry (DQ) operators like BT and The Number to move away from the traditional call-centre based service delivery of 118xxx services to the concept of home-workers delivering the service using Simunix Ltd’s 118-Express solution.

118-Express works in tandem with Intelecom’s telephony platform to provide a full featured DQ solution that will work from any location. The potential cost-savings for DQ providers are significant as they can focus on service quality and value for money issues rather than managing huge call-centres and the associated hardware installations.

The average cost of a 118xxx call is now almost £2 compared to 50p before the service was opened up to competition in 2003.

I realise I may be starting to sound a little obsessed with how expensive it is to ring directory enquiries these days, but I feel it is important that people are made aware of where their money is going.

I conducted a little study recently to see just how much it can cost a consumer to ring a 118 number. Through previous research, I already knew how much it cost to ring two of the biggest directory enquiries providers (118 118 and 118 500) from a BT landline – £1.68 and £1.65 respectively. However, I had heard horror stories of people being charged even more extortionate amounts to ring from a mobile phone so that is where I focused my investigation.

This is what I found:

This table shows how much it costs to make a one minute call to each of these three directory enquiries numbers from the various mobile networks.

So the 3 network emerged as the most expensive for calling 118 118 and 118 500, charging £2.55 and £3.58 respectively for a one minute call. O2 has emerged as the cheapest charging £1.53 for a one minute call to either of these numbers (this is actually cheaper than dialling from a BT landline!!).

You will fare a little better ringing our cheaper than cheap 118 365 with one minute calls from a mobile averaging out at £1.15 across all networks. The cheapest networks to call 118 365 from are Orange and O2 costing 57p and 66p respectively for a one minute call.

Remember though folks, the cheapest way to find address and telephone information is by using online services such as www.ukphonebook.com which gives you 5 free search credits daily. We now even have a mobile version of the site so there’s no excuse to be paying the price for directory enquiries!

We installed the latest version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer yesterday, after it had seen official realease on Tuesday. After noticing a host of problems it was causing on our website (http://www.simunix.com) with whole blocks of content completely vanishing, we narrowed the problem down to the following CSS declaration:


h2 {
font-family:helvetica,arial,sans-serif;
}


If applied to body, or html then the entire page vanishes as can be seen at http://validator.w3.org – Massive bug!

Changing the CSS declaration to put arial before helvetica in the font stack solves the problem, which seems to only occur on machines that have Helvetica installed. We are not sure whether it is a specific version of this font causing this problem or whether all machines with Helvetica installed are affected.

I’ve let the Microsoft team know on Twitter but no response yet… You can view a test page at:

http://simunix.com/helvetica_bug.html