This previous Sunday Secret Lab was fortunate enough to appear in the Sunday Tasmanian! After being e-mailed by one of the editorial staff on Friday afternoon, I did a quick phone interview with them and we were rushed off to The Mercury building for a photo shoot.

Jon Manning, Andrew Bennett and myself appeared alongside Josh Deprez in a rather complimentary article entitled “Cyber students hunt big game”. Good press all around! Read our 5 minutes of fame here!

In other news, I was saddened to be present as Starbucks in Hobart closed its doors for the last time tonight. Secret Lab (and myself personally!) have effectively used it as an office since it opened in late 2006. No other coffee shop in Hobart provided a decent working space and didn’t mind us sitting there for hours upon hours (nor the strange noises we sometimes made!)

As Jon has noted, Culture is out on the iTunes App Store and as far as Secret Lab is concerned it’s a resounding success - 3 sales in the first 20 minutes of the App Store and then Apple’s stats page disappeared! But 3 sales! At the minimum! That’s a coffee-time! You can check it out on Secret Lab’s site right here or just go and look on the App Store here.

We’ll be updating Culture soon with some bug fixes and performance enhancements and releasing the OS X version (freeware!) sometime this next week or two.  Thanks to those who have/will be providing feedback lately!

Andrew has posted an interesting post on some of his thinking behind the art in Culture - you should all go and read that.

As Australia’s iPhone release looms ever closer, the decision of whether to go with Telstra, Optus or Vodafone is undoubtedly on the minds of the Apple faithful here.  I’ve already decided, I think, to go with the enemy - Telstra. Their offer of free access to their WiFi points (i.e. free wireless for my at coffee shops) has basically won me over.

On the matter of Secret Lab, we’ve almost finished Culture, our game for OS X - it will be available for free on our site this week! An iPhone version will be forthcoming when the App Store launches as well, although you’ll need to part with some of your trinkets for that.

I return to Uni in a week for the second semester of my Honours year. In a fun twist, I have my first semester exams at the end of the first week back; I need to remember what I’m actually enrolled in so I can study for it!