The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Colony is a new free application that showed up on the iPhone App Store just recently, but it won't do much of anything if you download it -- unless you're hooked up to the WiFi at the Life.Lab building in Digital Harbour in Melbourne, Australia. The app is actually part of an art installation by an artist named Troy Innocent, and was developed by Stewart Haines specifically to control the setup there in Melbourne.

It's a very interesting project -- while it doesn't mean much to anyone not in Digital Harbour, the idea of bringing the iPhone into a location-specific setup is intriguing. Haines has a nice page on his site that details the process of creating the app, and you get to not only see the thought behind the process, but some of the concepts and tech behind the app as well. Very cool.

There are lots of location-specific applications that have yet to be explored on the iPhone, most of them commercial (putting your order in while waiting in line at Starbucks, for instance). But Colony looks like a really thoughtful take on the idea -- I would say that it's too bad you have to go all the way to Australia to use it, but then again that's kind of the point.