Today we bring you a story of an in-house app development project done by our sister company Waracle, for the Scottish Album of the Year Award (SAYAward). The app features a couple of neat functions, such as the the ability to stream tracks from the long-listed albums, a “record store finder” using geolocation and an “Album of the day” feature which lets the user listen to the entire chosen album of that day for free over the 4 week lead up to the award.
All of this on top of the obvious ability to vote for your favourite album and share it with your friends.
The app was developed in large by one of our own developers, Calum MacUisdean, and he took some time out of his busy schedule to talk to us about developing the app, how using Kumulos’ Mobile Backend as a Service made development easier and also a little about his own thoughts on app development.
Calum only started in app development a year ago, his first project being an app for the NHS where he converted a paper publication into an app – with a table of contents, favourites and a search function, “Very simple really!” Calum tells us.
His background was originally in Interaction Design and web development, and he had also picked up experience supporting mobile platforms during his time working for a telecoms company in Dublin, Ireland before moving into mobile app development. “…moving into mobile development was a logical path…”, Calum says of his step into app development, “…a lot of the technologies and software design concepts are similar to web programming.”
The SAYAward development was a client project, which means that Waracle received a call asking them to create an app on behalf of the SAYAward folks, a project brief was drawn up and a fee decided upon before the project was put under way.
According to Calum the brief did not have a very detailed set of desired features, “so [we] came up with the idea of streaming a track from each longlisted album, and in addition have a featured “album of the day” that you could listen to in the run up to the awards.”
He also tells us that “Adding on a feature to find record shops near your location was an obvious choice as we could use technology for geolocation that we’ve used in other apps.”
As for Kumulos’ place in this, “…allowed a fast turn around of the project by making the database design very quick and versatile…” Calum says.
Keeping on top of a changing scope in a project can be tough if you’re trying to add in new feature on the go, but according to Calum, Kumulos made this “simple” and that in addition, they were able to “easily” build a voting system for the user’s favourite album and that querying the database was just as easy; apparently it only took “a couple of minutes”.
All of this combined to create the SAY Award app that you can find right here.
To finish off, Calum gave us an insight into his business orientated view of app development, telling us app development is “A means to provide information to people in a useful (easily accessible) and contextual (location-based) way.” And that it “…allows clients to have greater engagement with their customers by presenting their content in a meaningful and speedy way – using rich media and broadcast notifications to ensure that anyone who is interested in the topic gets up to date and interesting content from them.”
Well, many thanks to Calum for sharing his thoughts and experiences. As you can see, we don’t just use Kumulos’ Backend as a Service platform for customers, we also use it for in house projects; simply because of the convenience it brings to any app project! Database building and management, geolocation, custom methods, all of these things are made easier with Kumulos – so why not sign up for free today and start to use the tools that our own developers couldn’t keep their hands off!
