Popcycle
Meet Popcycle, a new music application for iOS. Popcycle has been our project since May as the design and development interns at Made by Many in NYC. We’re excited to introduce the beta version of our application!
We like to think of Popcycle as a more thoughtful shuffle. Jump through songs based on the artist, genre, year or city of what you’re listening to now. Along the way, you’ll discover new music and learn a thing or two about your old favorites.
Popcycle is powered by The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform, and will be available for both Spotify Premium and Rdio Unlimited listeners.
The app was born out of a rather open-ended project brief: more or less, to make something useful, and accordingly, to make something that interested and excited both of us. A few weeks and one surprisingly lengthy conversation with a stranger in Washington Square Park later, we decided to pursue music as a problem space.
For the archive, here’s the first vague sketch that led to our two-month build of what has come to be Popcycle:
This lead to the unique, and often frustrating, opportunity to work with Spotify’s very young beta iOS SDK as well as Rdio’s iOS SDK. Popcycle doesn’t intend to compete with or replace any current music player. Rather, it serves as a playful layer over an existing service.
Currently, there are several third-party music applications that are powered by Rdio’s SDK. Therefore, we believe the upcoming release of Spotify’s iOS SDK will encourage the introduction of more third-party music apps for less exclusive, more situational methods of listening to music, and hopefully Popcycle will be one of the first.
We blogged weekly about our building and learning process. Here’s a quick timeline, from a proof-of concept web app, to the current version:
So what’s next for Popcycle? It’s soon to be on its way to the App Store — in the meantime, you can sign up to be notified when it’s available, or to be a beta tester.
We’d like to thank all the mentors that have supported us in the making of Popcycle, especially Chris and Adam. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to be part of the first internship program at Made by Many NYC, and we’re thrilled that we get to see Popcycle through to its official release.
We’ll miss you, New York.
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‘Til Next Time,
Dana (design) and Dory (development)
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