I recently wrote an iPhone application that provides a guided tour of the University of Bristol’s precinct. You can get the application from the iTunes Store. The Undergraduate Recruitment team had already created the concept of a walking tour with a paper printed map and some mp3 files when I became aware of the idea in one of the MyMobileBristol project meetings. Delivering the content in an app seemed like the logical next step. The content was further developed by the Public Relations Office and Ben Hayes provided help with the design. I worked on bringing it all together with the iPhone SDK.

The core of the application provides a map (that shows your location if you are near the campus) with a number of points of interest:

Selecting a point will give you an audio narration and some photos:

The app also provides access to videos that should be of interest to prospective students:

Version 1.0 of the application was around 22MB in size which was an issue because the phone won’t let you download anything that large over 3G. I compressed the audio files for version 1.0.1 and we are down to a slimmer 12MB.