Working with another super development shop – Cosnetics, Airwave was an attempt to dip our toes into the world of social networking with a Facebook application. We had spotted a distinct gap in the usability of Facebook at the time – namely users outside of the USA were unable to upload photos directly from their mobile phones.
I had been tinkering with the Facebook API for some time prior to working on Airwave, whilst Cosnetics already had extensive commercial experience in mobile technologies – in particular SMS and MMS gateways. After having a clear idea of how to solve the technical side, we shifted our focus onto usability. We planned for a dynamic “web 2″ interface, ensuring images and galleries rapidly loaded and zoomed: on top of this was placed a fresh and clean set of branding for Airwave. More importantly, we wanted to ensure that the application integrated tightly into Facebook and provided end users with a seamless user experience.
The application soon came together: a lightweight PHP & MySQL solution to provide the core Facebook functionality on the backend, a swish JavaScript gallery on the front-end and an efficient PHP script to link the whole system together with the third-party MMS provider. The application was well received by not only Facebook users in the UK, but from across the world in areas where there was no direct upload to Facebook from mobile phones.
Airwave
