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!