[flickr album=72157623609430187 num=5 size=Thumbnail]
It was one of those weekends that a project had begun for simply wanting to accomplish a single task, and eventually snowballed into a full personal challenge. A few days ago, i posted a rambling about using trig to create a turning knob like effect. The real world application to this practice was to apply it to a FM radio like interface. Of course, this begged for a real time radio interface….
…and off to find an api. YES offered just what i needed…it’s a simple api that allows a developer to tap into all the local radio stations based on location, genre, or whatever criteria you are using to filter. Duh, sounds like the perfect opportunity to slap in some CoreLocation. The snowball gets bigger. Eventually, the application unfolded into the following:
- CoreLocation/ Reverse GeoCoding to get the users location
- Query to YES api to find stations, songs, artwork etc-
- allow the user to “dial” through the stations in the traditional sense, or perform a list view of what is playing right now.
- Tap on a station to see their latest played songs
- Tap on artwork to read more about the song and the artist
i had grandious ideas about connecting a stream (but there were so few from YES) and a link to iTunes and all the stuff we have already seen in Pandora, Last.FM, etc etc. Fact is, my mission by this point has been accomplished…trig, api, fun weekend project. More so, unless something new and pivotal where to hit me with epiphany , this project was quickly becoming a drawer project. i have no intention of sending this to iTunes so i receive the usual “user bantering” of disappointment for an app that was just intended to be fun and clever. It’s a brutal public at iTunes with such high expectations….i suppose for that 1%, like me, who actually still listen to FM radio, there is a need for this. In fact, just the other day i found myself in that pickle when a song comes on and you ask yourself “should i roll the dice and search the dial for something better?”, only to find you probably should have just listened to what you had going.
i will clean this up and publish source code later….another weekend project.