Posts Tagged radio

Maxi80 App for iPhone – new release

Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in iPhone on 22/06/2010

We just released the updated version of Maxi80 Application for iPhone. This new version is available for iOS 4 phones only, you’ll have to update your phone software to find and install the update.

This new version brings the following new features :

  • You can now listen to Maxi80.com while the application is in background.  Listen to Maxi80 while surfing the web, reading emails or your tweets on Twitter
  • You can now listen to Maxi80 in any position, landscape or portrait.  The application will adapt its screen to the way you’er holding your phone
  • You will enjoy high resolution graphics on iPhone 4 devices
  • We added an iAd banner to generate some revenues for the radio

Do not hesitate – Update today !

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Developing Applications for Android

Posted by Sébastien Stormacq in Android on 14/06/2010

As promised, I started looking at the Android development platform and, I must say, I am quite surprised by the results.
First, Android uses the Java programming language as language of choice, combined with a Google made class library. In this respect, my learning curve was much shorter than it was with Objective-C and Cocoa. I had to install and get used to Eclipse, but I could work over that too 🙂 (although there is an Android plugin for NetBeans too)
Secondly, once we get over the basic application programming principle and life cycle, I am surprised how quickly I was able to assemble something and how few lines of code were required.

I decided to port my Maxi80 iPhone application to Android.

I was pleasantly surprised that the Android MediaPlayer class is able to read ShoutCast stream, out of the box, starting with Android 2.2.  I decided to take the quick an easy way : let Android connect and decode the stream and piggy-back maxi80.com‘s web site to get the song cover and title.

Unlike iPhone OS, Android let you run applications on the background, allowing you to enjoy the music while using your phone for other tasks.  (I will update the iPhone application – as soon as iOS 4 will be released – to provide similar behavior for iPhone users)

The result is surprisingly compact : about 200 lines of code.  Half of them to manage the player and the other half for the (simple) user interface.

As usual, the source code is available under a GPL v2 license at Kenai.com

Should you own an Android 2.2 device, the application is available on the Android Market.

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