Monocle, “a briefing on global affairs, business, culture and design”, is a website and magazine that offers content both digitally on the web and in print. Following the success of its iPhone app, Monocle wanted to bring its unique presence onto Windows Phone, choosing Matchbox Mobile to make this happen.

The central focus of the app is the Monocle24 radio project, which offers live streaming, programme archives, downloadable shows and archival streams. Other features of the app include the Monocolumn, an exclusive series of editorial pieces, and guides for 25 cities and 25 resorts, integrating map views, directions and editorial content.

Two key challenges with the project were to convey the elegance, style and identity of the Monocle brand, as well as to reflect the broad range of content and make it personal for each Windows Phone user.

Using standard Windows Phone user conventions we translated the Monocle look-and-feel to suit the portrait form factor and screen resolution, combining typography, colour and spacing to encourage discovery and boost visual appeal. We used deep pinning and multiple tiles, a unique Windows Phone feature, to give users shortcuts to their favourite radio shows, guides and content directly from the start page. This means that each user’s experience of the app is personal and relevant, while still reinforcing the associations with quality and sophistication that are integral to Monocle’s brand.

“Matchbox Mobile were a pleasure to work with,” said Paul Regan, Web & Broadcast Manager at Monocle. “Their deep knowledge of Windows Phone development made light work of delivering a good-looking, intuitive and highly usable extension to the Monocle brand.”

WeeMee is a popular and successful avatar creation system, with tens of millions of users enjoying representing themselves in cartoon form. After appearing on the web and on desktop clients, WeeWorld (the company behind WeeMee) wanted to bring the avatar experience to mobile phones, and so WeeMee has landed on iPod, iPhone and Android. When targeting Windows Phone, WeeWorld chose Matchbox Mobile to create the software.

Our main challenge in creating the app was to bring the fun, attractive feel of WeeMee to Windows Phone using the platform’s design vocabulary.

To do this, we used backgrounds from the WeeMee characters in the panorama to set the scene. The background images change each time you open the app, giving an added element of interest. The gallery displays your last saved WeeMee as an extra-large tile for an added personalised feel.

The result is a useful and fun app which gives users quick access to WeeMee creation and makes each app feel different, unique, and personalised.

As Steve Young, Creative Director at WeeWorld, said: “We are very pleased with how Matchbox Mobile managed to bring our unique and fun experience onto a new platform. WeeMee for Windows Phone is a good example of how brand identity, core experience and platform features can be brought together to make a high-quality app. We wish Windows Phone users lots of fun in creating their own custom avatars.”

Amongst his many interactive art projects, was Composite, an app for iPad 2 that uses the device camera view as a seed for finger-painted collages. Composite aims for a visual effect inspired by the collages of Robert Rauschenberg, and invites users to ‘remix their environment to create artistic compositions.’

Having previously worked with Matchbox Mobile on a Kinect-based art installation called Cell, James, in partnership with Microsoft UK, engaged us to port Composite onto Windows Phone.

The Mango update to Windows Phone opened up the ability to work with the live camera feed, which allowed us to focus on translating the experience to Windows Phone.

Although the app already existed on iPad, we had to re-design it entirely to fit the Windows Phone paradigms and form factor. We needed to give fast access to the many image effects and painting options without impinging on the screen painting area. In order to do this we identified the most important use cases and created custom controls that mimicked the Metro look-and-feel.

The result is a lightweight, elegant and responsive app that allows full immersion in the Composite painting experience.

“It was a pleasure to work with Matchbox Mobile again,” said James Alliban, the artist and visionary behind Composite, “it was great to see Composite adapted for the Metro design language”. We look forward to seeing your creations, and you can send your work to submissions@composite-app.com to be featured in the Composite gallery on Flickr.

CELL | 3 | technology from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Microsoft provided the hardware, while Matchbox Mobile — a Brighton-based app and mobile specialist — assisted Matsuda and Alliban in writing the code. Using the Microsoft Kinect software development kit (SDK) and openFrameworks, Matchbox mobile worked with the openFrameworks community to incorporate features like auto-tracking…

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Commissioned by Alpha-ville for the 2011 festival, this interactive installation plays with and proposes alternative landscapes in the technological ether surrounding our everyday movements.

“Microsoft have supported the project from the early stages, working with Brighton based company Matchbox Mobile and the openFrameworks community to build a new code library (or addon) specifically for cell that supports the Kinect For Windows SDK.”

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Yell, as part of their new strategy emphasizing greater digital experiences, and in partnership with Microsoft, wanted to bring the unique Yell customer value to Windows Phone. Seeking a development partner for this project, Yell found an experienced and reputable vendor in Matchbox Mobile, a pioneering mobile software vendor based in Brighton, UK.

Three main goals for the app were: to give users all the features they’d expect from a Yell product; to offer excellent integration with social networks; harmonizing the look-and-feel with the Windows Phone style guide. Hence, balancing features and performance were as critical as fine-tuning appearance and experience for a connected, personal and relevant app.

Yell and Matchbox used a Scrum approach for fast iterations with clear and achievable targets. Throughout the process, Yell engaged in usability testing between builds and made changes to the design accordingly. Our chosen approach meant we could work these optimizations into each new build.

The design team provided pixel-perfect layouts and font descriptions, removing any scope for ambiguity. At the same time, the use of Expression Blend to create and proof the screen layouts meant nothing was lost in translation when it came to wiring in the code.

The design, development and QA teams worked together with Yell in fast iterations to create a high-performance, good-looking app. In less than six weeks we were able to take the initial concepts through rapid development to a finished product ready for submission to the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Through close collaboration between Matchbox Mobile and Yell, along with the tool-set and guidelines provided by Microsoft, Yell for Windows Phone proved to be an outstanding example of rapid mobile application development to exacting standards. The outstanding application design earned a much-coveted Featured slot in the Windows Phone Marketplace app hub for the UK. Yell users can now enjoy a high-quality experience that highlights the beauty and utility of the Windows Phone platform.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Designed and developed by Matchbox Mobile for Windows Phone, Get Me There! is a London navigation application that uses Windows Phone location data plus Bing map-based technology in conjunction with live information from Transport for London, to notify users of any line closures or delays.

The application lets users choose a destination and then, using live timetable information, suggests an optimal London Underground route to ‘get you there’. A walking alternative is also proposed, and displayed on a live map, along with an estimated journey time. The application stores favourite journeys, such as the daily commute, and shows automatic notifications of any real-time changes on the transport network.

The Bing team asked Matchbox Mobile to create a Windows Phone  application that would put Bing’s sophisticated mapping functionalities in mobile users’ hands, allowing them to navigate end-to-end London journeys. With a timescale of just six weeks, the finished application had to look great and be simple to use while processing live route information quickly and effectively. Matchbox Mobile was ideally placed to develop the application, which connects to Windows Azure-based services, given its pioneering achievements with Windows Azure, including the Family Room social networking app for T-Mobile in the USA.

Outstanding design and ease of use were of fundamental importance to Bing, and Matchbox proposed a design that was not only simple to use, but looked incredibly stylish on the Windows Phone handsets. Throughout the design, development and QA, Matchbox and the Bing team collaborated closely, using live issue tracking and status updates to ensure that the project stayed on schedule and that everyone was kept informed of progress.

Twenty Microsoft staff volunteered to beta test the development and fed their findings direct into Matchbox’s issue tracking system to help accelerate development and ensure the finished product excelled. Now that the application is live, metrics from the TFL Windows Azure system are fed back directly to the Bing team to help continue the work of empowering Bing users to make faster, better-informed decisions.

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Zune HD is a touch-screen digital media player from Microsoft that features an OLED display for crisp video, HD radio and wireless sync capabilities. As the creator of Zune’s official Facebook and Twitter applications, Matchbox Mobile was the natural choice when Microsoft decided to develop an email client for Zune HD.

“What was originally conceived primarily as a media consumption device has, in response to our customers, evolved into something far bigger,” explains Dave McLauchlan, Senior Business Development Manager, Microsoft Zune. Unlike traditional mobile device application development, creating software for Zune HD is significantly more complex. The email client, with its lists, pages and user controls, had to be built using Zune’s XNA SDK – which is designed for making games rather than standard applications.

The XNA platform differs considerably from event-based app platforms like Silverlight: XNA games are constructed as continuous loops that run 60 times a second. There are no standard controls – such as lists, buttons or text entry fields – which could be dragged onto a form designer. Instead there is a blank canvas and everything must be created from scratch. For a UI-intensive app like an email client, with its many complex lists and structured views on data, this presents an obvious challenge. Further limitations existed in the storage required for the ActiveSync Over The Air specifications needed for an email client.

Matchbox discovered that only a limited HTTP and HTTPS programming interface was available, yet the email client needed to support not only Microsoft Hotmail, but also Exchange and Gmail. At a minimum, users needed to be able to read and respond to their email on the device for all these services.

Matchbox approached the design challenge by referencing the Windows Phone 7 user interface, and mapped this back to the Zune HD version of Metro (which was itself the precursor of Windows Phone’s design language). By doing so, we were able to develop the email client in just four months, including 6 weeks of preliminary beta testing, before the application was launched in March, 2011.

The project was kept on track with weekly update reports to Microsoft, along with regular team conference calls. Matchbox’s interactive development process harnessed feedback from Microsoft and integrated this real-time into the ongoing development. Microsoft was also given access to Matchbox’s online bug tracking system, from where any required actions were triaged by the team in Matchbox’s daily scrum meetings.

“This was a unique development challenge,” said Dave McLauchlan, Senior Business Development Manager Microsoft Zune. “We knew we needed an expert team whose experience and technical abilities were world class, if we were to succeed in giving Zune HD users email functionality. Matchbox’s past development efforts for Zune HD and Windows Phone indicated that they were the right team for the job, and the resulting application proved that we made the right choice in asking them to deliver what was an extremely complex project.”