/RapidCast

iOS app that generates a playlist of podcasts specific to your tastes

Primary LanguageSwift

RapidCast

Rapidcast is an iOS app that generates a playlist of podcasts specific to your tastes. After little intial setup, Rapidcast will run a smart algorithm to generate a playlist for you filled with popular and recent iTunes content to stream.

  • Current features

    • Allows user to select desired categories
    • Auto-generates a playlist with the tap of a button
    • Allows user to stream straight from the phone

  • 1.0 Release

    • Improve/refine algorithm:
      • Optimizations: (speed and consistent results)
        • consider new xml parser [ONO]
        • work from xml parsing algorithm
        • caching images
        • Figure out best possible way to make the http requests
      • Conceptual Improvements:
        • Give something better than just the most recent podcast
    • Podcast playing:
      • Background audio
      • 15/30 seconds
      • Scrubber
      • Automatic scrolling for long titles
    • Storage Decisions:
      • store categories in nsuserdefaults
      • remove realm
      • Realm for persistent podcast storage
        • store most recent generated playlist
        • trimming image for storage
    • New Features
      • utilize more specific genres
        • requires testing of new genres in search api
        • come up with new UI (expandable table view?)
      • allow users to "star" podcasts channels to select and listen
      • give both the ability to pull from favorited channels or random channels

  • 1.5 Update

    • Storage & Algorithm:
      • consider holding references to podcasts already seen by user (storage AND algorithm side)
    • Podcast playing:
      • possible speed changing? (1.5x, 2x)
    • full searching functionality (heavily using query API)
    • Podcast library-like feel for ultimate browsing

  • Other features:

    • Notifications
    • Scrollable text (for long podcast titles titles)

Logs

  1. [4/8/16] HUGE Bug (still in testing): when generating random integers (used to be 1 - 25) to pick from list of "top 25" from each category, sometimes we wouldn't even receive 25 podcast channels; the random integer would be larger than the actual list, thus giving us an empty lookupID.
  2. [4/10/16] Heavily refined xml parsing algorithm with ONO parser! XML Parsing speeds improved the entire playlist generation process from an average of ~15 seconds to ~5 seconds!