Hear Here version 0.1
My weekend programming project was to build a bare-bones version of Roadtrip Mixtape that runs on an iPhone. This is an MVP (a term I learned from my Product Management buddies at work) - with only 5 basic features:
You can press 'next' and the app plays a song by the nearest band to where you are right now.
You can press 'pause' to pause/resume the playing
You can login to Rdio so you can listen to full streams
You can look at the album art
You can simulate moving to another location (I was getting sick of listening to just Nashua music).
Here's the app in all it's designer beauty:
This is the first significant bit of iOS programming that I've done. It is a lot of fun. Xcode has tons of features that make working with all the idiosyncrasies of the platform manageable. There's a huge amount of documentation including many tutorials, examples and recorded WWDC talks, plus tons more info on Stack Overflow. To stream music I'm using the Rdio iOS SDK. It is very easy to use, very well documented, with lots of good examples. I thought that getting music to play was going to be the hard bit of this project, but it was actually really easy. Well done Rdio programmers!
Tomorrow I'll take V0.1 on its maiden test drive on my commute to work to see how well it works on the road. I suspect that the playlists will not be the most listenable since they are often filled with very long tail artists. On the list for V.2 will be the ability to add popularity and style filters to make it more likely that music that I actually like appears in the playlist.
Oh and I came up with a new working title for the app = 'Hear Here'. Not sure if I'm 100% on board with the name though. No one likes puns anymore.