The past 6 months have been incredibly busy. Since Shanghai Expo, I turned my hand to iPhone app development. Weeks and months have flown by with the release of two apps for iPhone/iPod touch as well as the launch and continued success of the Innovation Dublin website.

The Innovation Dublin festival is looming, and the free iPhone app was number one free business app in the Irish app store last night. Happy days!

Dublin City Walls app for iPhone/iPod touch has been nominated for an Appy in the “Best Tourism Travel App” category and a Golden Spider in the “Mobile App” category. Currently, I’m waiting for those results – but I’m blown away that the first app I was ever involved in has received this recognition.

I have to say a huge thank you to the good people at Noho and Silver City Media for trusting me with their amazing content, and believing that the lad they hired 3 (or is it 4?) years ago to write a bit of lingo code (remember Director?) could turn his hand to Objective C.

If you are interested in having awesome audio/video content created for your brand/company and delivered to web or mobile – Noho/SCM are the people to call. I couldn’t, and wouldn’t recommend anyone else above them, and working with them (even on a freelance basis) has been awesome. They’re on the lookout for a multimedia developer, so if you’re any good, check out the job ad!

Which brings me on to my next bit of news – the most exciting turn of events this summer was the offer of a place on the Interaction Design Programme at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. I have long been a fan of the work being done there, having twice visited Kevin Cannon during his time as a Pilot Year student.

I’m incredibly excited at the prospect of learning from and working with some of the most talented IxD professionals in the world, collaborating on some awesome projects and basically living and breathing IxD on a day-to-day basis in Copenhagen for a full year. It’s going to be awesome.

Finally, the more astute will recognise that all of the above are good news stories. Recently, I attended two events organised by IxDA here in Dublin. Against the backdrop of the current economic/political scenario in Ireland these events were positively intoxicating. Dublin is shit-hot right now when it comes to IxD and UX and there are lots of people just buzzing about it. You won’t hear government/Enterprise Ireland/IDA talk about it because let’s be honest, they don’t have a clue what it is, and they don’t deserve the credit. It’s here, and it’s real, and we can be very good at it given the chance.

In 2012 the great Dubliners involved with IxDA will take the annual conference of the International IxDA off U.S. soil for the first time and land it right here in Dublin. It’s only going to get better folks, I’m very excited, and I think we all should be.