Yellow Watermelon

Inspiration

Tanner had the idea for Yellow Watermelon while riding in the car with his friends. He was stuck with the position of DJ and found it difficult to decide what songs people wanted to hear due to the fact that they were all on their phones. A lightbulb went off as he realized this would be the perfect opportunity to develop an application that has a real world, well, application! Upon sharing his idea with Ryan, the perfect name arose. Ryan had just discovered the existence of yellow watermelons and found it to be an interesting name. Tanner and Ryan both agreed that the name Yellow Watermelon would perfectly balance the simplistic interface yet playful nature of the app. :)

What it does

Yellow Watermelon is a real time playlist in which people join watermelon parties and vote on the songs they want to hear on the speakers.

How we built it

We built Yellow Watermelon on top of Swift and the CoreBluetooth framework. We wrote networking code via CoreBluetooth that takes care of the low level communications between all of the peers taking part in a watermelon party. Another big part of Yellow Watermelon was the user interface. We tried to make the application user friendly and intuitive while keeping a unique and cheery design.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge was definitely writing all of the code that took care of the Bluetooth communications. Because we chose to target the latest beta version of iOS, there were not any compatible higher level Bluetooth connectivity frameworks. Therefore, we chose to implement the communications of Yellow Watermelon with CoreBluetooth. This presented a challenge because we had to write code for each step of the bluetooth connection process, as well as handling errors when things went wrong.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of the fact that we are coming out of SoHacks with an app that we would consider 90-95% ready to launch. We knew that it would take a lot of work to make a fully functioning app and were unsure of how efficiently we would be able to work.

What we learned

We learned a lot about the low level implementation of Bluetooth on iOS. We also learned about and often practiced the wizardry of resolving git merge issues from the command line. Moreover, we understood more about the MVC model and also utilized some information about protocol-oriented programming.

What's next for Yellow Watermelon

In the not too distant future, we hope to release Yellow Watermelon to the iOS App Store. After that, we'd like to implement other technologies including other music services such as Spotify. Furthermore, down the road we may want to release a web app in order to enhance the user experience of the party host.

Built With

• apple-music
• core-bluetooth
• ios-10
• iphone-sdk
• swift
• xcode