This is part 2 of a series following the development of Loopy, my iPhone app.
In part 1, I wrote about Loopy’s interface. Part 2 will be more technical, and will cover some challenges encountered during the evolution of Loopy from concept and mockup to working software. Or, more specifically, the stupid things I did along the way.
Read MoreLoopy is my first iPhone app, a loop-based performance/musical scratchpad app based on looping audio equipment and inspired by, equally, the fantastic and free “Freewheeling” application, and an a capella performance by Imogen Heap.
It’s development was a whirlwind of obsessive coding, near-vertical learning curves, impatience, excitement and occasional burnout and writers block.
I thought I’d share some facts and lessons learned from the process, in a several-part article. For part 1, read on.
Read MoreLinks for December 29th through January 28th:
Loopy has been generally successful in the 3 weeks it’s been on the market, and I’ve received many useful suggestions from users, as well as lots of positive feedback:
“What a fantastic app. It is entirely intuitive in use (although there is a very neat video tutorial) and is just the most wonderful fun.Be the first to write a bit of music using extant environmental sounds; loop them and then bung them wirelessly into your Mac (Or Windows) DAW for that final bit of tweaking.Or just sit there humming. Or plucking. I said plucking.This is a beautifully written application.Go. Have fun!”
“Great app! By far the most useful multitrack on tis appstore (yes I have tried them all) in spite of some UI niggles that I am sure will be ironed out (such as the miniature glowing LOTR icons/buttons), very excited for how this app will evolve…”
“By far the most useful multitrack recorder for the iphone.”
LOTR icons, you say? One loop to rule them all…
The most demanded features so far have been:
I’m in complete agreement that these would be useful features, and will be working to include them all in the next release of Loopy.
Other things currently on the to-do list include:
And of course,
I am currently engaged in putting together the next iPhone App, which should be completed over the next few weeks. Then, back to Loopy.
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I’ve written a droplet which takes a transaction report, as downloaded from iTunes Connect and containing a summary of sales, and produces a single figure representing the total earnings, in a particular currency.
Because the report shows sales for each separate region, a bit of work is required to get a total earnings figure, involving multiplying royalties by number of sales for each region, and then converting each currency type and adding all results together. This droplet does it all for you – just drop the downloaded text file from iTunes Connect onto it and it’ll bring up a summary. A preferences window allows configuration of the currency.
Currency conversion information provided by timegenie.com.
Download it here: Process Transaction Reports droplet
Read MoreA friend recently asked for my thoughts on iPhone development so far. I thought I’d copy them here:
My thoughts: Well, it’s certainly fun, for the most part – the development environment is generally very well designed and the APIs are intuitive and well documented. There are a few glaring exceptions, and when things go a bit wrong, they go very wrong. That’s a feature of any closed-source API, though, so not Apple’s fault. The other thing is there’s a pretty strong developer community and a number of reasonable forums (Apple’s Beta Developer Forums, the Developer discussion forums, the #iphonedev channel on irc.freenode.net) to discuss problems.
A very impressive part of it all is the speed with which one can accomplish great things; I wrote most of Loopy in about a week – the rest of the time has been adding polish. I wrote TSWebServer, which I’m now integrating into Loopy (http://twitpic.com/rjw4) in two days. So it allows for quite rapid, satisfying development.
I can’t comment on the non-tech side yet, as I’m yet to release Loopy, my first app. I know there’s a big community of iPhone users and they’re quite vocal; there are quite a few sites that cover new apps and such. I get the impression that once you get lucky and get the attention of some important individuals, you can accelerate pretty quickly in publicity. Apple’s featured and top lists are the holy grail, of course; with over 10,000 apps now on the app store, the competition seems quite fierce though.
You do hear success stories, but that’s just a couple out of many thousands of developers, so… Who knows. Maybe we’ll all get lucky.
Read MoreI have iTunes and my iPhone configured to sync tracks automatically, without requiring manual intervention. Smart playlists, coupled with my application, Autorate, pick my favourite tracks, and make sure they’re on the iPhone. I previously wrote an article on my iTunes playlist setup; this draws on that prior setup, but this is slightly more refined.
Like the prior setup, I have two standard playlists: iPhone Exclusions and iPhone Selections, which allow me to manually include or exclude tracks.
I then have three smart playlists which work in tandem to select the top tracks, not including the exclusions, and including the selections. The top-most smart playlist is then selected as the playlist with which to sync tracks for the iPhone.
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