About

We strive to build usable and elegant applications that look and feel like standard iPhone apps. Our ultimate goal is to build products that customers are excited about.

Our approach when taking new software projects is to set up an initial meeting with the client and discuss the project in detail. This helps to get an overview of what needs to be built, as well as understanding the overall objectives. This meeting is also important to understand the client's vision for the product.

The next steps depend on the kind of client that we are dealing with, but it's usually helpful to gather complete requirements for the features of an iPhone (or iPad, or Web) application. This work involves the creation of a couple of documents:

  • Feature breakdown document: a simple list of the features that will be included in each screen (or web page) of the product.
  • Wireframes: a set of sketches of each screen (or web page) showing how each feature will work and behave.

These documents help to create a blueprint of what the project deliverables are, and also serve to clear out any misunderstandings in how things will behave. At the end of this process, the client has a clear idea of what the project is, and exactly what needs to be built.

Having these documents available we can create a formal project proposal with milestones, deliverables, and costs.

Background

Ipanema Labs is headed by João Prado Maia, a software engineer with lots of experience in building usable applications, both for the web and now for the iOS platform. We know how to build complete systems for mobile applications, starting from the backend systems all the way to the user interface.

Community presence

Meetup

João is the founder and organizer of the Houston iPhone Developer's Meetup, one of the largest groups of iOS developers in the country with over 480 individual members. We hold monthly meetings where we share information on how to best build applications and games. The group's goal is to foster a local community of developers that can help each other improve our craft.

João has also been organizing the Houston PHP Users Group since 2005. The group is focused on web development technologies related to PHP, and has now 460 members. The monthly meetings of this group covers everything to development with PHP, such as building efficient applications, designing and optimizing MySQL databases, to unit testing and JavaScript/AJAX development.