One of the featured apps in HTC Get Started, Stitcher delivers your latest news and podcasts directly to your phone every day. I recently spent some time with Beth Murphy, Chief Marketing Officer of Stitcher, to learn more about how Stitcher introduces the world of talk radio to our smartphones
Leigh Momii (LM): What is Stitcher?
Beth Murphy (BM): Stitcher is an app in the Google Play store that streams the latest in news, sports, talk, and entertainment radio, from over 15,000 radio shows and podcasts, to your smartphone. Further, we’ve been able to integrate Stitcher with Ford, GM, Mercedes and BMW vehicles to make it easier to access the content you want from wherever you are.
Beth Murphy (BM): Stitcher is an app in the Google Play store that streams the latest in news, sports, talk, and entertainment radio, from over 15,000 radio shows and podcasts, to your smartphone. Further, we’ve been able to integrate Stitcher with Ford, GM, Mercedes and BMW vehicles to make it easier to access the content you want from wherever you are.
LM: Stitcher recently
re-launched the Android version. Can you talk about the Android
re-launch, how that went and what your vision is for the Android version
of Stitcher?
BM: Stitcher has had been on Android since 2009 – but early this year we launched a brand-new Android app, rebuilt from the ground up. We wanted to create a content discovery and listening experience optimized to take full advantage of the Android native UI, featuring more intuitive navigation, browsing and discovery features. This holistic approach included:
BM: Stitcher has had been on Android since 2009 – but early this year we launched a brand-new Android app, rebuilt from the ground up. We wanted to create a content discovery and listening experience optimized to take full advantage of the Android native UI, featuring more intuitive navigation, browsing and discovery features. This holistic approach included:
- Complete Interaction and Visual Redesign now makes navigation easier by using Android’s Action Bar.
- Improved Performance and Stability to deliver a smooth listening experience.
- Smart Station makes it easy to discover new shows by making recommendations based on your listening activity.
- Improved Browsing experience let’s you review your list of recommendations without interrupting the listening experience.
- Rich Notifications makes it easy to control playback, pausing and tracking without unlocking your phone for customers running Jelly Bean.
LM: One of the first things I
notice about Stitcher is the great design of the app. At HTC, beautiful
design is something we value. Can you talk a bit about how you went
about re-designing the Android app.
BM: We used the new Google Design Guidelines as a starting point, with the intent of creating a beautiful and functional Android app that takes advantage of “holo” UI principles. As Google and their partners continue to improve user interface principles for Android, Stitcher will be working in lockstep to give listeners an even more fluid experience.
BM: We used the new Google Design Guidelines as a starting point, with the intent of creating a beautiful and functional Android app that takes advantage of “holo” UI principles. As Google and their partners continue to improve user interface principles for Android, Stitcher will be working in lockstep to give listeners an even more fluid experience.
LM: The latest Stitcher update on Android includes HTC Media Link HD integration. What was involved in integrating?
BM: We know that while a lot of Stitcher listening happens on the go (commuting, exercising, traveling), there are also many listeners who use Stitcher at home. We saw integrating with the Media Link as a chance to give listeners on HTC devices the ability to seamlessly play on demand radio right from their TVs.
BM: We know that while a lot of Stitcher listening happens on the go (commuting, exercising, traveling), there are also many listeners who use Stitcher at home. We saw integrating with the Media Link as a chance to give listeners on HTC devices the ability to seamlessly play on demand radio right from their TVs.
The Media Link integration was pretty seamless. Using the Media Link HD API (part of the HTC OpenSense SDK),
we were able to synchronize our custom playback controls with the Media
Link playback state and provide the user with a good experience – the
user is able to navigate around the app, and use our in-app mini-player
and our rich notification to control the content playing with Media
Link. Currently, users are able to send content to their Media Link
receiver and control playback, but in the future we hope to take
advantage of some of the more advanced features offered by MediaLink HD.
We’ve already shared how Sense TV brings an interactive TV guide and universal remote control to your HTC One. But that isn’t all, the HTC One’s infrared (IR) blaster is also open to developers for integration into their own amazing apps.
A great example of this is the “Smart IR Remote for HTC One” app from Color Tiger, a Palo Alto-based development company. Where HTC’s Sense TV focuses on simplicity and controlling your entertainment system, Color Tiger’s Smart IR Remote is a sophisticated tool for power-users who want the most flexibility from their IR remote.
I spent some time chatting with the developers from Color Tiger on their new app:
What is the Smart IR Remote?
Sergiu Dogaru: Smart IR Remote is an app built solely to replace the multitude of remotes in everyone’s house with only one remote, available as an app on something that’s already always in your hands: your phone. And because it’s running on such a marvelous piece of hardware, we are trying to make it much more than just a remote replacement. You can now make your phone do multiple remote actions with the touch of a single button (like turning on all your devices at once), but buttons of multiple remotes on a single screen and arrange them to your liking, and even let your phone mute your TV or Home Theater when your phone rings!What gave you the idea for the app?
Sergiu: When we first found out that the HTC One will include an IR Blaster, we just knew that this is going to be big. The idea simply popped into our heads, and we knew we had to do it. So we started working on it, a little over a month before the HTC One would officially be available for people in the stores, so they would be able to use our app from the first minute. And we did.What was the most difficult part of developing the app?
Sergiu: Well, we can certainly say that integrating the HTC Sense SDK with IR support was the easiest. As for the most difficult, there isn’t something in particular we would say it was difficult.We’ve been doing Android for 5 years, so now the only real challenge was building a product that’s powerful and customizable, while still being simple and really easy to use. That kind of balance is really hard to achieve, and no matter how close your app gets to it, there’s always room for better, so we’re working on that!
What was involved in using the IR API? What was your experience like?
Sergiu: Since the HTC One is a feature-complete phone when it comes to the IR, and HTC provides us access to all the features, we’ve tried to make best use of every capability in the phone. Integrating the SDK was extremely easy (it literally took us only 15 minutes), and we can honestly say it’s one of the easiest android SDKs we’ve ever integrated in our apps.On top of all these, we’d like to say that we believe that building Smart IR Remote for the HTC One was one of the best ideas we’ve had in a long time, and we’re really happy with the results. We only wish more people knew about it!
The IR Blaster API is just one of the many features of the HTC One you can integrate into your application. Learn more about enhancing your app with features from our HTC OpenSense SDK on our HTCdev site.
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