The iPhone University Developer Programme, which was previously only available to US educational institutes up until February 2009, is now available worldwide. University College Cork (UCC) is the first in Ireland granted entry into this programme, and plans to incorporate it into two of its courses.
From the September 2009 college semester, both the mobile application design module within the MSc in mobile computing, and the mobile multimedia application development module within the MSc in interactive media, will feature development for iPhone applications.
What this means is that 200 students will have access to UCC’s official iPhone developer portal. This includes the iPhone software developer kit (SDK), iPhone Developer Centre resources, testing on iPhone and iPod touch, internal or App Store distribution and access to the Apple Developer Forums Beta.
Another perk for students of the course will be the chance to go to the famed WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference), where professional developers meet and often exciting product announcements are made.
As part of the bursary offered by Apple to EU universities, there will be 100 free places valued at €1600 each for students from either of the UCC master’s degrees involved.
Dave Murphy, multimedia lecturer at UCC, told siliconrepublic.com that as well as having close links with Apple in Cork, the UCC computer science department has been doing a lot of Mac development over the past number years, and that iPhone development was a logical step.
As soon as the iPhone Developer University Programme was launched outside the US, UCC applied and received official status soon afterwards.
By Marie Boran
