Student Radio Association

Whilst looking for projects to do for Xtreme, I noticed that the amount of students with iPhones was slowly increasing. I also noticed that whilst I could listen to Xtreme on my iPhone with 3rd party apps, none of them offered a truly integrated experience with Xtreme, and so I decided to attempt to create our own iPhone app. I also decided to make it my 3rd year project at university after my tutor being very excited about it due to it being a unique project; no one in the Computer Science department has ever programmed an iPhone for their projects at the time of writing.

I hadn’t ever programmed for the iPhone before, and so I learnt iPhone programming especially for this project. The project is programmed in, the only official language, Objective-C. Objective-C is Apple’s language and the only language that is truly native to the iPhone. Objective-C is also a very hard language to get to grips with and I spent a lot of my spare time fully understanding how to work with it.

So what does my iPhone app offer compared to the generic third party apps such as ‘Tuner’, and even the ‘I Love Student Radio’ app? Well it’s fully integrated into the Xtreme Radio ecosystem. The app shows you what song is currently playing, what show is currently on the air, it’s ranking in the Student Radio Chart, as well as being able to read more information from Wikipedia, Last.FM and the SRA music webpages.

However when I was listening using third party apps I often had a desire to email the studio, however this couldn’t be done without exiting the app (and therefore losing the audio), and I thought that this could be improved upon. So when I designed the Xtreme app, a system allowing the user to contact the studio was one of my priorities. The app allows the user to type and send a message to the studio whilst still enjoying uninterrupted audio at the same time. At the time this couldn’t be done on the iPhone as multi-tasking didn’t exist.

The Xtreme app also allows you to listen again to the last seven days of audio, and allows you to integrate with Facebook so you can update your Facebook status from within the app; templates are included so you can very easily say “I’m listening to Ellie Goulding – Starry Eyed on The Flux on Xtreme Radio” therefore helping to promote the station.

One of the features I’m most excited about though is the ability to scrobble what Xtreme Radio is playing to the user’s Last.FM account. Last.FM is a social networking site that keeps a record of all the songs a user listens to; the application has the ability to add to a user’s list. This is done through HTTP GET and POST requests to the Last.FM servers.

The app supports landscape and portrait modes, allowing the user to use the app in whichever way suits them;it also supports the new iPad, and has done since before the iPad was even available in the UK.

With the advent of iOS 4, which allows multitasking for audio apps, I have updated the app to play even when the app isn’t running in the foreground, i.e. when the user is using other apps. I have also written it so that the audio system is integrated into the OS so that the user can use the controls built into the iPhone OS which would usually control the iPod app on the iPhone to instead control the Xtreme app; for example the controls on the locked screen, and the controls on the multitasking pane. These updates are currently in the process of being approved by Apple at the time of writing.

What impact has this app had on Xtreme? Well this app was the first ever student radio iPhone app in the UK, and so the Student Radio Association kindly gave us a front page story on their website promoting our app. The Swansea University student newspaper have written about the app and promoted it; the app has had over one thousand downloads; it's received large amounts of positive feedback (including from those within the radio industry); I've also had people coming up to me at university saying how much they love the app and how they listen to Xtreme a lot more now and had a lot of interest from students who have used it and wanted to know how it works. Additionally, I demonstrated my project at the university project fair which gained a lot of attention from visitors from the industry whom were so impressed with the app that they wished to discuss further work with me.

I have had a few people from different student radio stations asking me for advice on creating their own iPhone apps, after seeing ours; and I’ve hopefully helped give some advice about how to go about making one.

So in conclusion I’m very proud of the iPhone app, I feel as though I’ve managed to do something new and exciting in Student Radio and one of my lecturers at university told me that in his opinion, it’s the most technically advanced project that he’s seen for a dissertation since he’s been at the university.