Introducing the CloudSeeder Devkit

Today we’re featuring a guest post from our friends at
Retronyms. They’ve built some amazing
community features into their app
Tabletop
using the SoundCloud API and have open sourced their CloudSeeder
Devkit. This post was written for us by David Shu. David is a
software engineer at the Retronyms and has worked on a number of iOS
apps, including Tabletop and Dokobots. He currently resides in San
Francisco, CA. We recently built a SoundCloud-powered community into our app
Tabletop,
a modular audio environment for the iPad, using the
CocoaSoundCloudAPI.
The project, CloudSeeder, lets users browse, stream, favorite, and
comment on Tabletop tracks without ever leaving the app. As developers, we discovered tons of talented users in our Tabletop
community. At the same time, our users found inspiration from each
other and a new showcase for their creations. To share in the
excitement of community creation with all developers, today we’re
releasing the CloudSeeder Devkit as open source on
Google Code.

Introducing the CloudSeeder Devkit

August 13th, 2012 by David Shu

*Today we’re featuring a guest post from our friends at
Retronyms. They’ve built some amazing
community features into their app
Tabletop
using the SoundCloud API and have open sourced their CloudSeeder
Devkit. This post was written for us by David Shu. David is a
software engineer at the Retronyms and has worked on a number of iOS
apps, including Tabletop and Dokobots. He currently resides in San
Francisco, CA.*

We recently built a SoundCloud-powered community into our app
Tabletop,
a modular audio environment for the iPad, using the
CocoaSoundCloudAPI.
The project, CloudSeeder, lets users browse, stream, favorite, and
comment on Tabletop tracks without ever leaving the app.

As developers, we discovered tons of talented users in our Tabletop
community. At the same time, our users found inspiration from each
other and a new showcase for their creations. To share in the
excitement of community creation with all developers, today we’re
releasing the CloudSeeder Devkit as open source on
Google Code.

What does CloudSeeder do?

Let’s run through a typical scenario using Tabletop as an example. When you
start up an app with CloudSeeder integrated, you’ll get an at-a-glance view of
the latest community happenings including app news, latest track posted, and
likes and comments on tracks you’ve uploaded. When someone makes a cool new track,
everyone who launches the app gets notified immediately in their feed.

[CloudSeeder Headline view]

Tabletop displaying the Headline view in the upper left hand corner. All the headline items are cycled through with a nice animation and you can size this view to suit your UI.

Tapping on the Headline will bring you to the CloudSeeder
community. The Main view will slide up, showing you News, Featured
Tracks, Popular Tracks, Latest Tracks, My Uploads, My Activity, and
Following. CloudSeeder filters all the tracks for you (using the
"created_with" property, for those of you familiar with the SoundCloud
API), so all the tracks and activities you see will be specific to
your application.

[CloudSeeder Main view]

The CloudSeeder Main view showing the Featured Tracks tab.

Curating Featured Tracks can be done in the app. When you point
CloudSeeder to a SoundCloud user in the config file, all you have to
do is “like” a track as that user and it automatically shows up in the
Featured Tracks list! If you’re a user, nothing feels better than when
the app creator features your track!

Integrating CloudSeeder into your app

If you’re ready to poke around CloudSeeder, you can head to the
Google Code project. We had
fast integration and easy customization in mind when developing
CloudSeeder, so the repo contains source code and images for UI
(including Retina!) that you can just drop into Xcode. You should be
ready to go after adding
CocoaSoundCloudAPI,
filling out the config header file with a few SoundCloud details, and
adding the CloudSeeder resources to your project.

We also added a couple new features to the upload process. If you
and BPM to the track metadata. For example:

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter]
addObserver:self
selector:@selector(soundCloudShareWillShow:)
name:kCSShareViewControllerWillShowNotification
object:nil];
...

- (void)soundCloudShareWillShow:(NSNotification *)notification {
CSShareViewController *shareVC = (CSShareViewController *)[notification object];

// Add tags, description, bpm to track metadata
[shareVC setTags:[NSArray arrayWithObjects:@"TABLETOP", @"CloudSeeder", @"bunnies", nil]];
[shareVC setDescription:@"Created with Tabletop for iPad"];
[shareVC setBPM:getTempo()];

Be a part of CloudSeeder Select

CloudSeeder has one more trick up its sleeve to benefit developers:
cross promotion. Apps that are a part of CloudSeeder Select get
featured across all other CloudSeeder Select apps. When users check
out their Featured Tracks list, one track out of that list will be a
featured track from another fellow CloudSeeder app. Tapping on that
track will show the usual track view, along with a section promoting
that app.

*CloudSeeder Select: Cross promote your app to users in
other CloudSeeder apps! A banner on top of the Track view shows the

A simple email with an icon image and some information on your app
will get you in and ready for cross promotion. Find out the details in
the documentation.

Get CloudSeeder!

So if you’re the proud developer of an iPad audio app, get the devkit
from the Google Code project,
see CloudSeeder in action with
Tabletop,
and check out the
CloudSeeder SoundCloud group. Thanks!

• ← Go at SoundCloud
• Shoot yourself in the foot with iptables and kmod auto-loading →

Original source