Recent highlights

Once again it's been a while since I last updated this blog. I tend to forget I have one.

Some of the highlights of the past few weeks:

• The basic idea for the iPhone application is known. At a basic level the purpose of the application is to create a lightweight version of Tunify. So the application could allow you to browse and edit your playlists, browse the music channels, look for similar music and maybe allow you to schedule your playlists as well. Besides that, the idea is to create some interesting extensions. Possible ideas could be to include a social networking component, offering users to share songs and collaborate in the creation of playlists or basically anything that sounds interesting and has value for the user. It could also be nice to do things with the built-in GPS of the iPhone, the time of the day, the weather outside... I'll think about these things the moment I've finished the literature study.
• The first presentation has been given. The purpose was to give an idea of the work that has been done so far and the future planning. The slides are available here (in pdf format). Note that there is a little error on the sixth slide: Ocarina does not allow you to listen in real-time to performances of other users. It does however, try to select the most recently played tune.
  

The plan for now is to finish the literature study by the end of next week. After that, I can focus on the application development part and start tinkering with both the Tunify API and the iPhone SDK. This is just for research purposes. Before I can start programming the actual application, I need to specify the exact details of the application and evaluate (together with others) the usability and usefulness of the desired features, application screens and general flow of the application.