At long last, I am very excited to announce the launch of the Sun Boxes Mobile App in both the iOS (iTunes) store and the Android store!    You may recall from an earlier post that I built the Sun Boxes website last year.  Sun Boxes is a sound installation by Craig Colorusso that uses solar power to play a series of guitar drone notes out of single speakers.  Sounds mundane, perhaps, but it is one of the most humbly powerful pieces of art I’ve seen recently.  I feel lucky to be a part of its momentum!

Our aim with the mobile app was not only to give users an easy way to interact with the piece by themselves, but also to encourage them to stage their own installation of the piece by turning their and their friend’s devices into individual Sun Boxes.

For this project, I was user experience designer, graphic designer, as well as front-end developer. Back-end development was handled expertly by my long-time collaborator and all around kind person, Mark Henderson. He created an API for the project, so you can expect more interfaces to join the fray soon.

Having never built an app myself (I’ve only designed them in the past), I have many, many resources to thank in making this possible.  First and foremost, we leveraged the Phonegap platform in order to develop for both iOS and Android simultaneously, using the web technologies we already know and love.  Steven Levithan‘s Date Format plug-in made handling times much easier than it would have otherwise been.  Jason Job’s epic blog post about archiving and distributing iOS builds saved me from utter failure more than once.

And, as always, I would never get past “hello” without the amazing community that is Stack Overflow.