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.

A few updates

I've been continuing my work on the comparative study. So far it's only a rough comparison of the most important aspects of mobile platforms, followed by a few short descriptions of popular music applications such as Shazam, Ocarina, Spotify, etc. However, the basic ideas are there.

I've also received an iPod Touch (not an iPhone as you might expect from my previous post, but it runs the same iPhone OS so it should have all I need) to have a look at some music applications. Also, a Mac Mini has been set up to start taking a closer look at the iPhone SDK. A few more application ideas have come up as well, but these need to be discussed first in a meeting with some people from Aristo, so more about that later.

Introduction

Hi all. I'm a student in Applied Informatics at the K.U. Leuven. The purpose of this blog is to publish updates about my thesis, which is about creating a (preferably unique) music application for the iPhone platform. The exact concept has not been defined yet, but the application will most likely interact with the online music system Tunify created by Aristo Music. There are however a lot of other ideas that could be added to the application, such as:

• The shuffling of playlists by shaking the phone
• Playlist generation
• Realtime music manipulation (by adding instruments, changing pitch, ...)
• Augmented reality
• ...

Currently, the focus is on creating a comparative study of existing mobile music applications. There will be a weekly update about any progress.