illumineX
Mobile App & Cloud Services Development
Established in 1998, illumineX has a few cool feathers in her cap.
Our Infinity GamePaX was among the first games to appear on Apple’s new Mac OS X platform, entirely written for the platform in Objective C, using the native Cocoa software developer kit. Recently we updated some of these games including BabelBloX, HoppiX, and RuniX, for the Mac App Store.
In their very first incarnation our games provided a modern In-App Purchase experience with free downloads. Other software licensing at the time involved web browsers and email and typing long strings of numbers and letters into the app. Our system provided a secure connection to our own app store within the games, permitting the same easy software licensing of a modern app store, years ahead of the industry curve.
We revolutionized mobile blogging with iBlogger in the earliest days of the iPhone App Store (one early release was even featured in a brief article at MacWorld), and recently rebuilt the product from the ground, up, using Apple’s Swift programming language and modern Cocoa APIs including Combine.
We love to solve challenging problems.
Gary W. Longsine
Optimizing for Great Software
Contact me for free birdseed.
Today (in August of 2020) I had a call with a prospective client eager to pay us to help them build out a new social media feature in their (very cool) software system. They had an urgent deadline, and had already done some exploratory prototyping before they realized they needed some help.
After listening to them describe their current status, I asked a few questions and then realized they had run into a little snag with a non-obvious feature of the API used to talk to a CMS (Content Management System).
They didn’t really need our help building and delivering the short term solution, they just needed an email briefly describing the shortest path from where they stood, to the goal.
I sent them the email right after the call.
We didn’t lose business, we made a friend.
The Crew
A Team You Can Rely On
Our team created EyeSpy the first cartoon googly eyes toy on the Rhapsody developer pre-release of the very first version of Mac OS X. You might remember the original characters, Chucky, the BSD mascot, Tux, the Linux mascot, and the dust ball from the User Friendly comic were included along with a couple others.
We only ever made one version of that original EyeSpy app, and we stopped distributing it. However, that first binary ran OK on Mac OS X for years, until it finally stopped working.
When that happened, we started getting emails!
Finally the emails started nagging at us. We loved this little toy, and clearly other people did, too, but we knew we could do so much better than we had done, before.
So, we spent some time in a coffee shop, brainstorming how to make the best cartoon googly eyes toy that had ever been.
Great software is deceptively simple, but you would be amazed at how much love goes into making it.
See our EyeSpy press release at prMac for more fascinating details about the agile process we used to reimagine and rebuild the classic google-eyes toy, EyeSpy.
