DJambalaya introduction

Last year, I began planning a spatial multimedia organization, visualization, and annotation environment with my roommate Cole Krumbholz. It would be useful for everything from spatially arranging various notes and images while writing an article to creating collages to readily navigating through files of similar type. We had mockups and specs written when we realized that this was a huge project and we weren’t sure when either one of us would have the time to devote to such an undertaking. Rather than kill the project, we decided to break it down into smaller pieces, each of which could be sold as shareware to finance further development.

The first piece is DJambalaya, a playlist creation application for the iPhone that can be used on its own or to control a remote computer. Cole and I wanted to create an application that would allow a person to dynamically change playlists at a party without having to duck out of an interaction. The goal was to enable the user to queue up about 30 minutes of music in about the time it takes to send a text message – a socially acceptable break in conversation. To do this, we had to create an interface that allowed for fast movements aided by some form of music recommendation to prevent cases of obsessiveness in finding “the perfect track”, an obsessiveness that leads to unfortunate dallying in selections. After a user selects a ‘seed’ artist, we’re going to hit last.fm to provide waves of related artists, speeding the selection process by only presenting the user with a small number of valid choices as opposed to the hundreds or thousands of choices available if an entire library were exposed.

Here’s a screenshot of the iPhone app circa mid-November after a couple days of development after learning the iPhone SDK. We hit some delays due to holidays and beginning-of-the-year business, but we’re preparing to ramp up development once again.