Power Player
July 2014 - Now
With Power Player, I wanted to create a music player that made full use of the iPad's display and that would reflect the user's artwork colors. In order to realize it, I had to learn Swift, Apple's programming language using numerous tutorials and courses.
The evolution of the albums view.
Albums
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to have the selected album available in the same View Controller. In order to achieve this, I made two custom UICollectionViewLayouts. The first one for the master, and the second for the detail. The album's contents are sorted by disc and are divided over multiple columns.
Continuous Sections
Continous Sections is a feature where the next section will be placed on the same row if it fits. In order to build it, I made a custom UICollectionViewLayout.
Now Playing
With the now playing view, I wanted a mix between large atwork and usibility. My solution was the two column layout. Depending on the app window ratio, the app will choose between one or two columns. When only one column is displayed, the user can swipe between the columns using the UIPageViewController.
Home
With Home, users can access their recently added albums, recently played songs, most played songs and their loved songs and playlists. The loved items are determined by checking the liked state.
The layout is built using the Collection View's Compositional Layout class in combination with the Diffable Data Source.
Tab Bar Icons
I wanted to create icons that looked as native as possible. Therefore, I studied line width and sizes of various system tab bar items. I have made versions for both iOS 10 & iOS 11. Starting from iOS 13, SF Symbols are used with minor alterations for the Albums and Artists icon.
App Icon
During the development phase, I had created the double play button icon. However, for the beta version, I wanted to update the icon with a more striking appearance. I chose the LP because it was the most unique. A nice detail are the groves, that are made of the same gradient.
Metadata
In order to prevent copyright issues, I have used various generators to generate metadata for song titles, artist names, album titles, lyrics. In addition, I have made artwork in Photoshop and Sketch to match the title name and genre. The artwork is composed of various royalty free images or illustrations that I have made and uses free fonts.