Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>
KIM: Hi. I’m Sung Hu Kim. I work on the Android team at Google. And I’m here to
interview Allan Hsu from imeem. So, Allan, maybe you could tell us a little bit about
your role and about imeem in general. >> HSU: So imeem is a social networking site
based around music streaming. And on our site, users can upload music and stream it on demand.
Our Android application allows users to listen to stations based around their preferences
or listen to music that they’ve uploaded to the system, kind of like a storage locker
without using space on the phone. >> KIM: Okay. Great, so, you know, imeem has
been on Android since almost the very beginning when the first device is shipped, and I know
that you guys are also planning some kind of additional features and improvements in
the near future, maybe you could talk about this.
>> HSU: So, the next release has got some kind of Cupcake features. And, also, we've
just decided to do a little more integration with the system in general. So, we’ve exposed
the search to other application so you can launch media searches against the imeem system
from, you know, the media player on the phone or any applications that supports it. We also
made the media player aspect of our phone a little more integrated with the music on
the phone itself so you can use imeem to listen to music on the phone. We've also got a desktop
widget and some other Cupcake features that we've got in the works and we've also got
like a visual refresh. We got a new look for the phone that I think--or not for the phone,
but for the application that we think will be a little bit of an improvement over what
we got right now. >> KIM: Okay. Maybe you could focus a little
bit on a couple of the things that you talked about. So, one thing you mentioned was media
searches from other apps, maybe you can kind of walk through what would that look like
from the user's experience. >> HSU: So, I mean, one thing you can see
right now is, like, you press hold on a name of an artist in the media player that comes
with the phone or on the platform... >> KIM: Is it the long press?
>> HSU: The long press, yeah. >> KIM: Yup.
>> HSU: It will pop up sort of a list of applications you can use to search for that artist or the
name of that song, like the... and imeem would show up there now.
>> KIM: So you basically launch a radio station... >> HSU: Yeah, like a...
>> KIM: ...off the titles of the songs from the media player.
>> HSU: If you got music on the phone then you are, like, "Oh, I want to listen to more
of this artist or more music like this," you can search imeem right on the spot and launch
the radio station for that right there. >> KIM: How easy or difficult was it to develop
that feature? >> Alan: That one's really easy, and part
of that was because of the way of the platform is put together. You know, when launching
a search like that isn't much different than launching a search within the application
itself, so you just have to hook up a little bit of glue and it's there. In general, that's
sort of a nice thing about the platform. It allows you to do things easily and quickly
because of the way you're sort of encouraged to develop things, makes it easy to do other
things like that later on just because it's sort of like the disconnect between the different
activities, you know. There's just a distinction that's made in terms of this activity gets
things this way from being tense that allow you to do stuff like that.
>> KIM: Okay. One other thing that you mentioned was the home screen widgets, can you talk
a little bit more about what that feature would look like?
>> HSU: So, basically, from your home screen, you'll be able to see what music is playing
and you'll be able to pause the music or skip tracks or launch imeem.
>> KIM: Okay. And then how easy or difficult was it to build this?
>> HSU: It wasn't much harder than writing another view. Your layout language is the
same, and the way you send data to that widget is different but not much different than the
way you update views in your own application. >> KIM: Okay. Great. Maybe you could talk
a little bit about your experience developing it on Android 1.5 with this new feature and
some of the kind of the clean up things that you talked about. What are some of the things
that you like? What are some things that you would want to have improved in the feature?
>> HSU: So, I'm pretty happy that the documentation is much better. In Cupcake, that was one of
the big hurdles with the first version of the application was that sometimes, to get
answers, I had to call somebody at Google, which, you know, luckily for us, we were able
to do. But not everybody knows people at Google, so, you know, the documentation is a pretty
key aspect, I think. You know, other than that, you know, a lot of the features kind
of just build on top of the foundation that was there on 1.0 and without really radically
changing anything. So, if you know how to do something on 1.0, any new functionality
kind of just fits in with your view of how things worked before.
>> KIM: Great. So, I guess, one final question, when do we as users, when can we expect to
see these new features on imeem? >> HSU: I think the Cupcake centric feature
release will be, probably, sometime soon. >> KIM: Okay.
>> HSU: Maybe within the next couple of weeks. >> KIM: Okay.
>> KIM: You know, it's pretty close to ready, but there's some other things we want to get
in, stuff we want to work on, kinks, things like that.
>> KIM: Great. We're looking forward to it. Thanks, Allan.