Matt West, an experienced freelance Enterprise developer for Westbright Ltd [1] is based in Bradford West Yorkshire in the UK. “I had been developing Java web applications for eight years and Oracle databases for twelve and fancied a change”, says Matt. He began learning programming for the Apple Mac about eighteen months ago in his spare time, but then took a week long Apple training course. He had a few ideas for Mac utilities but changed tack to target the iPhone.

“When I saw the iPhone demonstrated for the first time I wanted to design something great for it”, says Matt. “The iPhone was the first decent smart phone I’d seen. All the rest had tons of features, but all were cumbersome to use”.

A few years earlier as the dot com bubble was bursting, Matt was writing a game for the Palm handheld organizers. “I was and still am fond of the Palm organizers”, says Matt. “I enjoyed coding for the Palm, but got caught up in all the non-development things involved in selling software to the general public on the web. How would I take payment? How would I generate license keys to protect my efforts from software piracy?”. Apple solve this for software developers by providing the App Store and development tools to ensure applications only run on properly authorised devices.

Westbright have Zombies currently under development, a turn-based board game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. “It is very much a comic Scooby Doo-like game suitable for little kids and big kids alike”, says Matt. “Game play is simple but addictive. Feedback from playtesters have come up with many great suggestions so things are hectic at the moment”. Zombies puts the player up against advancing zombies. Zombies will be released in Summer 2009.