Ivan Mackintosh hails from Christchurch and is the author of apps such as Dynamate, WhatBirdNZ and more. As part of our ongoing Spotlight series, I caught up with the man with the best surname for an Apple developer ever to find out more.

How did you come to be involved in iPhone development? What’s your background?

My interest in programming started back in the mid 80s on my Atari 800. My first published game was called Crumble’s Crisis by Red Rat software back in 1986. I had a string of releases on the Atari 800 and then I went quiet for a few years until handhelds started coming out. First the Neo Geo Pocket Colour and then on to the Gameboy Advance. I’ve always been in to gadgets so when the iPhone 3G was released (all of the gadgets that you could want rolled into one) and you could program it I just had to have one.

Is this just a hobby for you or are you planning on turning it into a full-time career? (Perhaps it already is?)

This sort of thing has always been just a hobby for me. I’ll catch a few hours at a weekend…

Next up in our Spotlight series we’re turning our attention to Christchurch-based developers Smudge Apps. As we all know, New Zealand has some pretty talented developers and Reuben Bijl and Toby Vincent are no exception. They have created a myriad of their own apps under the company but are now moving (and very successfully) into the world of developing for third parties.

Although they had already released a number of apps Smudge first got our attention when Yellow was released, the extremely successful app for Yellow Pages.  It became a number one hit on the App Store very quickly but they didn’t rest there. Hot on the heels of Yellow came Flicks, a movie timetable app, and Smudge Apps cemented their place as serious iPhone developers in New Zealand.

But who are Reuben Bijl and Toby Vincent and where do they come from? What were the drivers for developing for iPhone and what are their plans going forward? I sat down with Reuben over a coffee to find out more…

Could you tell me a little about yourself, the company and how you came to code iPhone apps?…

As part of our continuing Spotlight series, we recently caught up with Nick Parfene of Tmro, creator of popular Wellington bus schedule app WelliBUS, and learned how it only came about (like many things, I suspect) after a jolly good nagging from the missus.

Could you tell me a little about yourself and how you came to code  WelliBUS.  What were the drivers behind developing it?

My name is Nick Parfene, I am 29 years old, I was born in Romania and I emigrated to New Zealand in 2005.

WelliBUS was never supposed to make it to the App Store. The real reason why I wrote this app is because my partner kept asking me to build it! We both have iPhones and I had been doing iPhone development for almost a year at that point so we both knew it could be done. One day I got tired of the nagging and decided to spend some time to build this application. I believe I started working on it on a Friday evening and it was ready by Sunday. That’s when I thought that I had finally found my…

Continuing our spotlight series I have been talking to David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software and creator of iPhone Apps Chopper, DuckDuckDuck and coming soon Chopper 2

So David, tell us little about yourself and how you came to code Chopper, DuckDuckDuck and more recently Chopper2. What were the drivers behind developing them?

“Chopper was one of the first games I created (for the Mac) back in 2003 when I first learnt to program. At the time I was a self employed artist, but after the release of Chopper for the Mac I picked up a job programming and have been in the industry ever since. I decided to work on Chopper for the iPhone soon after the iPhone SDK was announced. It seemed like a great opportunity so I went for it.

After the success of iPhone Chopper I was looking for other projects to play with before starting on Chopper 2, so I completed DuckDuckDuck during that time. However I had always planned on doing a sequel to Chopper, and that’s where the past few months of my life have been focused. I’m not sure yet…

Photographer Mike Clare is just like the rest of us: he’s a complete iPhone addict. But what makes Mike’s iPhone addiction so special is that he’s actually managed to find genuine business uses for his favourite device, giving him free license to spend just about his entire day tapping away on it. Jealous much? Yeah, thought so. Mike is a photographer who uses the iPhone in almost every aspect of his business, including the photographs themselves. In his own words, Mike shares with us his love for iPhone and gives us some tips for apps that can make the most of your snaps as well as organise your busy lives.

“OK, I’ll admit it, I like gadgets… but with a qualifying – ‘only when they are useful’. There was always a certain excited anticipation when Q handed James Bond something cool and said “now, James, this could be useful out in the field” – you knew that there was certainly going to be an event that could only be circumvented by that gadget.

As a freelance commercial photographer I was immediately taken by the iPod Touch as a portable photo viewer – portfolios on the go! The fact that…

In the second of our series on spotlighting local iPhone developers, I spoke to Nick Feisst of newcomer Inklen. Nick is a software developer as well as a professional DJ and his company bridges the gap between vinyl and digital.

As a complete know-nothing in the world of DJing (is that even a word?), Nick’s app “Tonetable” sounds both amazing and magical to me but is beyond my mortal grasp of understanding, so in his own words:

“It can be a little confusing as to what exactly this app does – especially to those outside the DJ community. Tonetable is an application that sends out a control signal (through the iPhone/iPod Touch audio output – it basically sounds like a sine wave tone) that most DJ software can use to track movements (forwards or backwards).

“Essentially, most of today’s vinyl controlled DJ software uses the same underlying principles to control them – usually the only difference is how they add timecode to the tone, and what base fequency they use for the tone. Generally a control tone is then pressed onto a vinyl record, and this is put on a turntable and fed into…

In our relentless quest to find out how New Zealanders are using their iPhones, we caught up with veteran kiwi comic icon Dai Henwood, star of C4′s ‘Roll the Dai’ and ‘Jono’s New Show’ (and iPhonewzealand subscriber!) and learned that beneath the hilarity and downright mentalist facade there lurks a seriously gadget-loving inner-geek who loves his iPhone and isn’t afraid to admit it!

I asked Dai how long he has been an iPhone owner and how it fits into his life? Is it purely for keeping in touch or does he use it for gaming or blogging? Maybe it’s a chick magnet or did he buy it for the hilarious fart apps?!

“I can’t remember exactly when I got my first iPhone but it was about two years ago. I was an early adopter due to a huge amount of gadget envy. My mate Clay got one and showed me all the features. I was at the parallel importers at 9am the next day and have been through three since then! I use it mainly for phone and e-mail, but also for web browsing and games when I am travelling. I travel a lot in my job and…

Here at iPhonewzealand, part of our mission is to turn the spotlight on the burgeoning community of local Kiwi developers who create apps for Mobile OSX through Apple’s App Store. These digital pioneers are keeping the iPhone relevant to New Zealand, and some of them are making their fortune in the process. In the first of the series, I caught up with Sam Giffney of Zenbu, the little battler taking on the dinosaurs of the ‘find it’ market, such as Yellow Pages.

If you haven’t already download Zenbu to your iPhone, do it now. Of all the apps I’ve downloaded, I can put hand on heart and say honestly that this is one of the most frequently used and genuinely useful one of them all. It’s basically a catalogue of more-or-less every business in New Zealand that resides locally on your iPhone, taking up no more data than a couple of tracks. It finds listings with such speed and efficiency that you’ll never look to traditional sources again. You can tell it specific company names such as ‘Bond and Bond’ and it will list every branch in order of distance from your current position, or you can…