Let me introduce to you: aPod - another Android music player
At the first glance aPod is just another music player for Android. One out of seemingly hundreds of available music players. So what makes it special and why did I have to write a music player at all?
I intially started the project when I had a Motorola Droid running Android 2.1. At that time I was using the phone for music playback a lot. And I was pretty unhappy with the available music players. Some of them had really bad userinterfaces with sometimes non-sense Activity lifetimes. Especially with the stock player I sometimes got nuts trying to open the playback screen or maintain playlists. Only a few players had a clear and classic music player interface with a playback screen and separated playlist. So the first reason for aPod was to handle this usability massacre.
Another problem with early Android versions was the bad/missing genre-support. I listen to many different genres and most of the time I like to play only one or two mixed genres. Most players had functionality to create playlists based on ratings or anything. But it kind of sucks listening to electronic and suddenly having a mario-song or a metal song pop in between. I just wanted a media library allowing me to maintain genres.
Soon the aPod project developed to a playground of what I could do with this new interesting platform called Android. Up to date aPod had a redesign and now has grown to much more than a basic music player. Read on to learn what design- and programming-patterns have been used to create aPod...