Songfight App

[ken]

Hey All,

I finally figured out what I want from a Songfight App.

1. Push the title when it is posted. You that thing where and app sends you a message regardless of what else is going on on your phone? As soon as a new title is posted, it tells me.

2. Countdown clock. If I go to the app, I want to see a big clock letting me know how much time I have to complete my song before it is due.

That's it. It seems like that isn't too much to ask for, and app that tells me the title and keeps track of how much time I have left to complete it. Any of you programmer types up to the task?

What would other people like to see in a Songfight App?

Ken

[Manhattan Glutton]

I've been meaning to get an apple developer license...
1. What other app can I make to cover my costs?
2. Would it be a big faux pas to use "Song Fight" in the app name since I don't own the rights?

[Lunkhead]

Sounds like fun! And relatively straightforward. I could write the Android app, and at least the Android server side stuff. For Android, the phone app would have to request a push notification id from Google, then send that id to a server app. The server app would store the list of ids to notify when the title is updated. When the title is updated, the server app would make a request to Google for each Android phone that it knew about, to send the notifications. I could probably do the server side too.

Any designer-y type folks want to make mockups of what an app like this could look like?

Also, I could probably set something up now on sfjukebox.org to do something like this, only it would just notify people by email. I could add an option for people who register to get an email when the title goes out, and maybe add an option to specify a local time zone so they could get the due date in their local time (and maybe see a countdown in their local time even when they visit the site).

[Manhattan Glutton]

I forgot what Apple notifications require, but please keep them in mind so I don't have to do any server programming.

[Lunkhead]

Ha. Here's a document about it:

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/ ... rvice.html

Looks like there is some kind of Apple provided certificate stuff involved:

Each provider requires a unique provider certificate and private cryptographic key for validating their connection with APNs. This certificate, provisioned by Apple, must identify the particular topic published by the provider; the topic is the bundle ID of the client application.

It sounds functionally equivalent to the Android push system, more or less.

On the Android side, we could bypass the Market if we wanted and just post the app for download somewhere. It's not like random Android users would care about it anyway. People would have to allow installation of downloaded apps on their phones, though. (But if you've used Amazon's app store you've already done that.)

[JonPorobil]

2. Would it be a big faux pas to use "Song Fight" in the app name since I don't own the rights?

I don't think it would be that big of a deal unless you were planning on charging money for it.

The only possible trouble is that once you take the name "Song Fight!" for your app, then that name would be unavailable if/when someone else wanted to use it. To the best of my knowledge, neither Fightmaster has plans to develop an app, so I'm pretty sure you're fine, unless Spud or JB specifically tell you not to do it.

One thing you can do to cover your bases would be to proactively contact them and ask whether there are any features they'd like to see in a Songfight app. Seeing as an official release would permanently use up the name "Song Fight!" then it stands to reason that you'd want to make sure that it includes (or plans to include in future versions) every feature that the people who run the show want it to have. I've never heard Spud or JB express strong opinions about whether there should be a Songfight app or what it should do, so I'd be surprised if any real bile were stirred up over this.

If I had an iOS or Android device, I'd be clamoring for an app, for sure.

[Lunkhead]

Yeah, naming an unofficial app just "Song Fight!" seems like a pretty bad idea. I don't think anybody was suggesting that, though. Also "Song Fight!" would not be a good name for an app that is just about notifying people of the new title and deadline, anyway. Probably "Song Fight! Notifier" or something more specific that actually described what it did would be a better name. It sounds to me more like a utility app for fans of Song Fight! There are a bunch of unofficial Bay Area Rapid Transit apps called "BART Something" ("BART Droid", "BART Usher", etc.). This seems like it could be something like that possibly.

[Manhattan Glutton]

I would want to call it Song Fighter or something of the like.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I'd love the app Ken described. Something to simply tell me when I title is up. I often lose days of writing time and my time this time of year is very limited. Time time time! If I say time one more time, I'm gonna punch a clock write in the face!

edit:.....you know what wasn't intended?......that pun.

[Lunkhead]

I'm going to try to get some of the server side written tonight so that sfjukebox.org users can opt in to get notification of the new titles via email. I'll try to make it so the code for Google and Apple push notifications can be plugged in easily later, just in case these apps actually happen some day.

[Manhattan Glutton]

I've been meaning to do some hobby iOS programming, so it's likely that I might whip up something.

Oh man, you know what would be a GREAT feature (of SFJukebox or any SF app) - a reviews editor that automatically posts to the forum thread in a nice format. So you have a notes section for each song, fill them in, and hit "Post Notes to Review Thread". Yeahhhhhh!

[Caravan Ray]

Hey All,

I finally figured out what I want from a Songfight App.

1. Push the title when it is posted. You that thing where and app sends you a message regardless of what else is going on on your phone? As soon as a new title is posted, it tells me.

2. Countdown clock. If I go to the app, I want to see a big clock letting me know how much time I have to complete my song before it is due.

That's it. It seems like that isn't too much to ask for, and app that tells me the title and keeps track of how much time I have left to complete it. Any of you programmer types up to the task?

What would other people like to see in a Songfight App?

Ken

That sounds good. (Though i don't have a mobile phone, so it probably wouldn't help me. And...I'm not entirely sure what an "app" is anyway) - but the big clock thing sounds good - but it MUST be able to be changed to different time zones. Submit dates/times always confuse me.

[signboy]

1. Push the title when it is posted. You that thing where and app sends you a message regardless of what else is going on on your phone? As soon as a new title is posted, it tells me.

2. Countdown clock. If I go to the app, I want to see a big clock letting me know how much time I have to complete my song before it is due.

Ken

3. make it for android.

[Lunkhead]

OK, I've got the basic server side infrastructure in place, and have done an implementation that notifies sfjukebox.org users via email. If anybody wants to move forward with the iOS and Android versions I should be able to add in code for those pretty easily.

[Lunkhead]

Anybody who wants to write one of these apps will maybe want to use this:

http://sfjukebox.org/fights/next.json

It's the next title and due date in a format that's easy to request and consume from a mobile app. Probably the first time somebody launches the app you'd want to request this stuff so you could show them the next title and due date right away (until they get their first push notification).

[Manhattan Glutton]

Hey Sam, I'm actually investigating this now and I plan on using your wonderful JSON services. I'm not all that familiar with JSON but a problem I was having is that there was a missing } at the end of one of the files. Is that common practice, or am I doing something wrong?

[Lunkhead]

Cool! That's exciting. I haven't been working on the Android side unfortunately. But I'd still like to get to it at some point. I've gone more in a direction of really trying to figure out how to make the Jukebox a single page app so people can navigate around the archive while the music keeps playing.

Anyway, as for the JSON, there should not be a missing "}". Can you post the URL that's returning the malformed data? I'll figure out what's wrong and fix it. I think I may have changed some of the JSON recently to add some more data to it. Most likely there is a place where I'm not escaping double quotes or something like that.

[Manhattan Glutton]

http://sfjukebox.org/fights/thats_enough.json

Just the latest fight... I made sure to try running it through an online JSON too incase my iOS JSON lib was broken.

I don't know how far I'll get, since this is going to take a bit of work and money, but I'm getting some practice in... if I make more apps than this one, the $90 app store license would probably be worth it for me personally.

It's really awesome that you already have these web services. One less thing I have to worry about.

Mind refreshing me on all the json URLs I can hit? How to get "current fight"?

[Lunkhead]

Fixed. You're the first to attempt to use this stuff so expect some bumps in the road.

[Lunkhead]

Also let me know if there is data that's not in the JSON that you want to use. It's pretty easy for me to modify it.

[Manhattan Glutton]

So we have http://sfjukebox.org/fights/next.json, fights/{title}.json, what else is there? Is there a "current"? How about news?

[Lunkhead]

Ha ha. OK, slow down there. You can add ".json" to any fight or artist URL to get JSON for that fight or artist. Then there's the "next.json" link, which was just a one-off. You can also add ".json" to /fights, /artists, and /songs, and you can submit any query parameters that are on the forms on those pages, to filter the fights, artists, and songs. That's all I've got so far.

I don't have the news data. I haven't tried to scrape that off songfight.org.

You can request this:

http://sfjukebox.org/fights.json?current=true

... to get some info about the current fight, but currently that doesn't include the songs. So you'd have to pull the fight key out of that response then use it to request /fights/(fight key).json to get the songs for the current fight.