Blogging Gigbeat

GigBeat Design Decision 4: Empty Screens

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 12:29:58 -0400

This is a series of short articles, highlighting some of the design decision behind GigBeat 1.2.

GigBeat aggregates lots of information that comes from various sources like Songkick, Last.fm or even our own Base. Some of those pieces of information depend on an account or an active internet connection. Since we want to keep GigBeat free from a forced login to a certain network, we had to deal with empty screens and unavailable data, eventually.

We missed the opportunity to get those screens right with the first release of GigBeat 1.0. So we wanted to make things better this time. Having users take certain actions before they can use the core functions of an app is always wrong. People don’t want to deal with setups, tutorials or long explanations - they want to dive right into the fun as fast as possible. This is especially true for mobile apps, since tasks need to be completed quickly on the go. Unfortunately sometimes there is just no way around a login or an important setting to display the data you want to show. In such a case, explain shortly why this is important, and give fast and easy access to that particular setting.

Even better: Don’t break the experience. If your app is colorful and fun, keep the empty screens colorful and fun. If it is simple and streamlined, keep it that way. Try to hold up that new excitement throughout the process, even though there is no real content to be excited about, yet.

When going for the location screen in GigBeat 1.0, you had to type in a city or hit the nearby-icon at the top to get something to work with. GigBeat 1.2 scans and returns all nearby cities right away, so you can star your favorite locations or dive right into your local gigs. No need for an empty screen.

Other screens with no immediate data like recommendations or upcoming gigs are covered with small illustrations, an explanation and a button to get right to the settings or suggest content. This is even more fun on a large tablet screen, where we found the space to insert a couple of (obvious) hints.

There’s still a lot of room for improvements. I’ll keep you posted.

GigBeat Design Decision 3: Tablet UI

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 12:26:09 -0400

This is a series of short articles, highlighting some of the design decision behind GigBeat 1.2.

GigBeat Design Decision 1: Event screen

GigBeat Design Decision 2: ICS

Not long after GigBeat 1.0 was released, a handful of people asked if we were planing on a dedicated tablet version.

We were brainstorming a little about this, and decided against it. Not only did we have a lot more important things to do, it just didn’t made any sense to us. We’re using our phones to do short, standalone tasks while on the go. Exactly how you take a couple of minutes off to look for interesting gigs around. Our tablets are used for exactly the opposite: We use them to waste time on a couch, sometimes several hours at once. So just looking up a close live event seemed pointless on a bigger screen.

Introducing artist information, music and videos to GigBeat 1.2 changed that. GigBeat wasn’t only about dates and names anymore, it was about content. And everybody who spends hours and hours on Bandcamp, Google Music, iTunes, you name it, knows how fun it is to search and listen for new interesting artists.

So we decided to create that tablet version. Now what? Just displaying all those lists side by side would not cut it. Introducing all those big band pictures came in handy, but we had to rework all the content to fit nicely on the large screen. Using lots of grids, sidebars and sliders should be the way to work with all those Android tablet sizes, landscape and portrait modes. We spent quite some time with sketches, wireframes, and even paper prototypes, to get the layouts right.

The dashboard felt like a challenge at first. Just displaying 4 icons on a large screen seemed like a complete waste of space. Luckily the redesign of the Featured screen was already under heavy development. We wanted to introduce featured artists, popular and new ones, and some staff picks to round out the personal experience. So now you can dive right into the content when launching GigBeat for tablets.

Be patient, though. GigBeat 1.2 glory with tablet support will be unleashed to you couch potatoes soon.

GigBeat Design Decision 2: ICS

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:40:31 -0500

This is a series of short articles, highlighting some of the design decision behind GigBeat 1.2.

GigBeat Design Decision 1: Event screen

Android 4.0 introduced a whole new design language. Almost everything about the operating system got reworked somehow. If you’re really ambitious about an application, you want to make sure that it feels perfectly in place with all the other native apps.

We wanted to make sure that GigBeat works and looks perfectly on Ice Cream Sandwich devices, as soon as the OS was introduced. But at that time, there were no official guidelines available, so we had to figure it out by ourselves.

Taking a good look at screenshots and playing around with the available devices (that being the Galaxy Nexus exclusively in early December), there were a couple of important design decision to be noticed: Ice Cream Sandwich used almost no gradients. Instead plain color is presented everywhere. Actually this is a pretty smart move, because plain colors don’t need assets to be created, and they scale a lot better over all sizes and orientation.

Also most UI elements are rectangular, sharp and straight. You won’t find a lot of round corners, smoothed out edges or bevels. Everything feels very geometrical and futuristic. This also translates to the icons.

We embraced all the new design guidelines quickly. Unfortunately it turned out that we had to rework probably every screen and every interaction element of GigBeat. I started out by taking screenshots of every single screen of GigBeat, layed them out as a logical pattern, and added notes to each screen, what to change for ICS. Gradients became striped patterns, icons became flat and rough, and we ramped up all assets to xhdpi sizes.

A quite special case was the new band profile. We needed a nice layout to showcase tourdates and artist information side by side, without prioritizing one and burying it behind an interaction. The solution of ICS’s People app seemed perfect for the app. But the problem there was a lack of support for all devices prior to Android 4.0. Long story short - Mike Novak got it running all across the board. Pretty sue he’ll give you n update on this eventually.

Moving the whole app’s look and feel over to Android 4.0 meant a lot of work for us, but in the end absolutely worth it. All the decisions gone into it scale very nicely across all kinds of devices. The appearance feels clean and fresh and distinguishes clearly from other mobile operating systems. Finally GigBeat is ready to roll on the next generation of Android devices.

Lucky you. A couple of weeks ago, Google published the first comprehensive Android Design guide http://developer.android.com/design/index.html. I would highly encourage every designer or developer to work through this document, no matter how good he thinks he knows Android. But remember - these are just guidelines - If you find a solution that solves a problem even better, go for it.

GigBeat Design Decision 1: Event screen

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:58:00 -0500

This is a series of short articles, highlighting some of the design decision behind GigBeat 1.2.

When we released the first version of GigBeat in early September 2011, we didn’t expect a lot of interest in the app. And why should we? There were similar apps out there. But those didn’t felt right to us, somehow.

We spent a lot of time figuring out how we approach searching for good live events. Artists, locations, favorites, comfort. All were taken into consideration. We used our free time to create a couple of working lists of content, that were linked together similar to our existing mindset. At the end we gave GigBeat a name, a logo, some color, thumbnails and icons and shipped it. We never thought too much about the visual experienced and aesthetics in the first place. When revisiting the UI for 1.2, the first thing we noticed was that we were able to find interesting gigs all around. But a live concert might be one of the most exciting thing that can happen to anybody on a regular basis. In GigBeat 1.0 that event screen was just a long list of text. Not too exciting. Every live event consists of three parts: The date (do I have time?), one or more artists (do I know/like these guys?) and a location (is it worth the traveling?). There are other factors revolving around a gig, like tickets, directions and people going, but those are secondary in nature.

So we created that new event screen with a strong hierarchy around the most exciting part: The artists. Big, bright pictures generate much more excitement than just small thumbnails and monochrome icons. Wrapped between the date with the calendar option and the location, including navigation and checking, felt just right. And if only two artists are playing, there’s even some room for wishes ;-)

Gigbeat 1.2 - A look into tablet development

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 19:43:00 -0500

As the third day at Mobile World Congress comes to a close it is time to share some info on the tablet launch for Gigbeat.

Early on we decided it was smart to adopt the fragments API for Android even though we knew that we weren’t ready to release a full tablet version of Gigbeat. The tablet screen has tons of real estate and we didn’t feel we really had the content to make the experience great for the user.

With the addition of artist bios, songs, videos, and links we realized this could be the perfect platform for discovering new artists while browsing around on the tablet. Even though we release the beta version containing tablet support, we are still refining our user interface to really take advantage of both the 10” tablet screen and the 7” tablet screen. The two sizes are different enough where it might make sense to layout content in a slightly different manner. When you look at the default orientation for most 10” inch tablets you’ll notice it is landscape. however, for most (if not all *don’t quote me on it) the 7” tablets have a portrait orientation by default. This definitely has made us think about what makes sense for each screen.

Many developers have been complaining that there’s so many different screen sizes to support that it really adds a lot to the development process. While yes it is obviously more work to support the various devices, developers should really look at it from the perspective of more users. One of the main reasons Android is attractive to users is the variety and finding a device that suits their use cases. In most cases this is really just user interface tweaks and making sure the right information is displayed the right way depending on the screen. For Gigbeat, none of the actual program logic really needed a change and we were able to get up and running with a beta version for the tablet very quickly.

I would encourage developers to really take a strong interest in delivering the best possible experience to as many users as possible. Just because something is just a little bit more work isn’t really a great excuse to just shut users out. Yes, in certain cases there are limitations to what certain devices can run. Overall though if your app can support a particular device I feel it is certainly worth taking the time to make it right.

Have a look at a couple of tablet screenshots for Gigbeat 1.2 and don’t forget to give the beta a spin. Let us know what you think!

Beta: http://gigbe.at/mwc

Gigbeat 1.2 - Beta

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:35:03 -0500

We are excited to announce that Gigbeat 1.2 is available as a beta! Version 1.2 is packed with lots of changes to both improve the existing experience as well as add new features. One of my favorite new features of the release is our changes to the artist screen. The artist screen prior to version 1.2 was very simple. All that was available was tour dates. We knew early on that more information about an artist could be very helpful in both discovery of new artists as well as learning more about who your favorite band might be playing with at a show. Our only problem was we weren’t happy with the user experience concepts floating around in our heads; that is until we saw the great new user interface in the People application in ICS. The large photos and views that you can swipe back and forth seem so intuitive and a perfect way to handle the information we needed without cluttering the user interface with unnecessary buttons.

From the development side this wasn’t a simple solution to implement. We had a look at the source code for the People app and noticed that the views relied on several ICS APIs. This presented a slight problem for us as our app supports users running Android 2.1 through Android 4.0. We decided this user experience felt too right to just give up on and so we set out to port this great widget back to previous versions of Android.

This brings us to the second piece of exciting news. We have decided we are going to release this carousel widget as an open source Android library project so other applications can easily can enhance their user experience in the same way we were able to. We have a little bit more cleaning up to do but you should expect to see the source code available in the next couple of weeks.

With the release of version 1.2 comes an optimized version of the application for tablets. We are excited to finally have an experience that can be enjoyed on the large display! Check back tomorrow for a detailed post on the tablet interface for Gigbeat 1.2

We hope everyone is as excited about the new changes as we are. We ask everyone to remember that we are releasing version 1.2 as a beta. We decided to do it this way because there’s still some rough edges to iron out and I’m sure bugs to fix, but we greatly appreciate our user’s feedback and would love to hear what everyone thinks of the new version. If you have any issues to report while using the beta please send over an email to support@gigbeat.fm. Link to the beta below!

http://gigbe.at/mwc

Thanks!

Another GigBeat 1.2 Preview

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 09:46:19 -0500

We just love Android. We also love big tablet screens for wasting time on our couches. But to be honest, there aren’t too many really satisfying apps out there that make good use of the big screen. It’s about time we change that. We will be revealing GigBeat 1.2 with tablet support at MWC. Here’s another sketch, to tease you a little bit more.

GigBeat 1.2 Preview

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:08:06 -0500

We will be revealing GigBeat 1.2 at the Mobile World Congress beginning of the week. Just to get you guys as excited as we are, here are some new things you can expect:

Visual redesign - We know, we know, GigBeat worked good enough for searching events. But it lacked the real excitement that you get when going to a live show, right? We changed that with lots of big photos, more data and a richer experience all over.
Full Ice Cream Sandwich support - The new release looks and works perfectly on ICS devices, including high-res graphics, Android Beam support and all those bits and pieces that make ICS such a joy to use.
Artist information - Nothing’s more exciting than getting a quick preview of a new artist right before the show. Well, here is our version of that.

Don’t forgett to check out the attached production sketches, and get an early feel of the things that are happening behind the curtains.

Mobile World Congress

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:50:54 -0500

We haven’t published a lot of updates in the last couple of weeks and here’s why. We’re going to Mobile World Congress, and we’re bringing a brand new release of GigBeat along. We were selected as a finalist from the AppCircus 2011, and will be pitching GigBeat against 19 other great apps in Barcelona, on the 27th of February.

So, obviously we have been working day and night to get the new version up and running before the big event. What’s new you might ask yourself. We’ll share this in the upcoming posts in the next days.

Thank you so much for tuning in on Wednesday! Tell all your...

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 13:06:00 -0500

Thank you so much for tuning in on Wednesday! Tell all your friends about Gigbeat and The Hidden Static Series

Upcoming Dates:

1/29 - Mansions & The Courtesy Tier
2/4 - Sky Captains of Industry & Sea of Bees
2/16 - Gabriel & The Houn ds, John Nolan (of Taking Back Sunday) & Modest Midas (Jess from Via Audio)

Gigbeat Inc. presents “The Hidden Static Series”...

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 13:00:08 -0500

Gigbeat Inc. presents “The Hidden Static Series” broadcasting live music from local and touring artists from hidden locations like apartments to parks to backstage or historical landmarks. The series will link new fans and artists to interact together via ustream. This broadcast is meant for those who can’t travel to see bands on tour, and enjoy the atmosphere. The program will broadcast once or twice a month and curated by Brian Bonz & other songwriters. Keep up with our events via ustream, blog and twitter handles (@gigbeatapp, @brianbonz). If you are a Android user, Go download Gigbeat now to follow all of your artists on tour, tickets, other similar acts, share with your friends and more - Concerts are now redefined. Logo created by Thomas Pitilli

Our first event will be Wed January 18th at 9PM on USTREAM

Paul Basile (of The Great Elk) - greatelkmusic.com
Brian Bonz - brianbonz.com
Kevin Devine - kevindevine.net

Absolutely great video! pbsarts: Off Book: The Evolution of...

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 12:18:07 -0500

Absolutely great video!

pbsarts:

Off Book: The Evolution of Music Online

As the 90s came to a close, the business of music began to change profoundly. New technology allowed artists to record and produce their own music and music videos, and the internet became a free-for-all distribution platform for musicians to promote themselves to audiences across the world. The result was a massive influx of artists onto the cultural scene, and audiences were left wondering how to sort through them all. In this episode we discuss these massive changes, and reveal how music blogs and websites have arisen as the new arbiters of quality.

Featuring:

Jon Cohen, Co-Founder, FADER Label

Ryan Dombal, Senior Editor, Pitchfork

Blake Whitman, VP of Creative Development, Vimeo

Anthony Volodkin, Founder, Hype Machine

Music by:

Flex Blur: http://soundcloud.com/flex-blur

Mindthings: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/mindthings

Dub Terminator: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/DUB_TERMINATOR

Nestor Gonzalez: http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Nestor_Gonzalez

Special Location thanks to Converse Rubber Tracks Studio

Follow Off Book:

Twitter: @pbsoffbook

Produced by Kornhaber Brown: http://www.kornhaberbrown.com

Gigbeat 1.1.1 - Now Available

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 10:13:29 -0500

Hey All!

We just released a bug fix update for Gigbeat 1.1 that includes a bunch of fixes for some pretty annoying bugs. As always if you have any issues feel free to send an e-mail to support@gigbeat.fm and we will get right on it.

Here’s what we fixed:

-Fixed bug causing Songkick artist list to not completely load.

-When browsing near you artists, clicking will show you the shows near you and not the full tour list.

-Hide artists not on tour should work for all artists not on tour now.

-Bug fix for random crashes while using the app.

-Bug fix for not being able to star a venue from the venue event list.

Thanks!

-Team Gigbeat

How it all started

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:06:34 -0500

I love live music. No matter if a small familiar club or a sunny festival - the louder the better. So when Michael Novak asked me to help him create an Android app for gigs a couple of months ago, I was all in from the start. He wanted to participate in the New York Music Hackday, and wanted me to help him out with a couple of simple layouts, icons and assets.

This sounded quite easy and straight forward. But as soon as I sat down to work out a basic concept, I realized that the combination of music and locations is much more complicated than expected. Everything here is a matter of personal taste. Everybody loves different artist and genres, and everybody likes different locations and venues. How far will you travel to see your favorite band and will get out of your house for a third class artist, even if he’s playing right next to you? We played around with various approaches and settled on an initial 3 tab solution. Finding great gigs is half of the joy of it, right?

I sketched out some of the important screens and fleshed out the main-screen, to supply Mike with a set of basic assets. This should have been enough to get something nice done during that weekend. Music Hackday arrived and Mike worked out a lot of the back-end logic and some screens. But something just did not feel right. Somehow the app seemed out of place in the Android environment. So we went back to the drawing board.

We decided to create GigBeat as an Android reference app, going with common UI metaphors like the dashboard with big icons and the titlebar. Being tied to Songkick very closely in the early days, going with dark gray and pink came quite natural. While the logic from the first build stayed in place for the most part, we reworked most screens a couple of times. Mike pushed me very hard to stay as close to most of Google’s own apps as possible, without sacrificing GigBeat’s own integrity. At times I really hated him for this, but it turned out to be the right path, eventually. Here are some examples of design choices:

- The first set of dashboard icons were nice, but a little too generic, and they had a bad balance between them. The weight did not feel right. So we reworked all of them with a bolder shape and a distinct inlay. Have a look at the attached iterations and sketches.

- Scanning your music library is nothing unique on Android. In fact a couple of apps did this earlier with a very beautiful execution. Most are displaying very pretty graphics with nice animations while the scanning is happening. That’s what we wanted to do as well in the beginning. But after some further brainstorms, these kind of handling just wasn’t the right way to go on Android. Google’ approach is much more about simplicity and clear information than it is about beauty and detail. So we came up with a simple progress bar, showing some really valuable information to the user, while the app is scanning content, like number of files, found artists and time remaining. That should be the information that really matters to a user, shouldn’t it? Waiting is always boring, no matter how beautiful the process is. Just tell me how long it takes so I can do something else …

- The launcher icon went through a couple of iterations as well. The first one had the shape of two tickets with a note inside a circle. But we felt this one was too close to rdio.com’s logo, so that version got trashed. Finally we decided that we wanted to emphasize the name of the app much stronger, so we simplified the icon to a single ticket with the initials GB - which are by coincidence my personal initials.

While moving on further and further with the app’s development, we got more and more ideas. Slowly the app became more than just a simple Songkick client and Mike added Last.fm support, sharing options and recommendations. At a certain point we felt that we even had to cut out features, or we would never get to a version that we could release without feeling totally unfinished.

GigBeat 1.0 was released on the Android Market on September 13th. Two weeks later we had over 2.000 downloads, 95% Five-Star ratings and a couple of very positive reviews throughout the web. Now we’re at 1.1 with over 500.000 downloads and a huge feature update, including Foursquare and Rdio support. So, what’s next? There are truly some very excited times ahead of us all, if you’re into Android and live-music. We will keep you up to date, so check in here from time to time.

Let us know what you think about GigBeat and what you would like to see in future updates.

Thank you for reading.

Gigbeat 1.1 - Now Available

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:49:15 -0500

We are very excited to announce that Gigbeat 1.1 is now available in the Android Market. This release has tons of new features and lots of fixes for issues found in 1.0.

Here’s a summary of what’s new!

* You can now check-in to concerts using foursquare from any Gigbeat event detail page! All the concerts that you check-in to will be listed under your My Gigs screen as past gigs.

* In addition to revamping our initial user experience, we have added the ability to login to Rdio and pull the artists you have in your collection. You’ll notice you have the ability to add all your artists from a particular source or manually select artists from these lists by starring the artist.

* We made several improvements to the performance of event loading in the app. There was a bug in the 1.0 version of the app that wouldn’t let you scroll past a certain date for some artists, but this has now been fixed. We also added the setting to allow you to sync content over wifi only or to disable loading images to save on bandwidth.

* You can now track multiple cities and also follow the upcoming schedule at your favorite venue! You’ll receive artist on tour near you notifications for any of your starred cities, allowing you to keep up with what’s happening all around you. When viewing a location’s calendar or a venue’s calendar you can select a date to filter the results by clicking on the calendar icon in the action bar.

* We added a homescreen widget that let’s you cycle through your upcoming gigs right from your phone’s homescreen. Clicking on an event will take you to the details screen.

* We greatly improved the search results screens for both cities and artists. You will now see results for your search instead of just the top result from the search.

* We added a brand new featured section of the application. For the launch of Gigbeat 1.1 we hand picked some favorite bands that we think everyone should check out, you’ll find this list under ‘Staff Picks’. You can also see which of the Grammy Nominees are on tour right now by heading over to the featured page.

We hope you enjoy the new release of Gigbeat. Let us know what you think of it and if you run into any issues send over an email to support@gigbeat.fm and we will gladly help!

Thanks!

-Team Gigbeat

Gigbeat Update

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 06:48:01 -0400

In addition to packing in some really awesome features into the next version of Gigbeat we have been preparing for the new version of Android. The next version of Gigbeat will fully support the new Galaxy Nexus resolution as well as Android 4.0. You should expect to see this release out within the next few weeks. Thanks for being patient!

Sneak peek at Gigbeat 1.1

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 15:32:15 -0400

Here’s a look at the new app widget, part of Gigbeat 1.1 due out Oct. 11th. The app widget allows users to see their starred gigs right on their home screen! This is one of the many new features you’ll find in the next version of Gigbeat.

Gigbeat Goes International!

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:07:35 -0400

Today, Gigbeat version 1.0.2 is available in the Android Market and it comes with added support for German and Spanish users! In addition to support 2 new languages the ability to add an event to your calendar has been released. Version 1.0.2 also fixes several reported bugs.

Grab the new version: https://market.android.com/details?id=fm.gigbeat.android

Gigbeat 1.0.1 update live in the market

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 11:00:52 -0400

GigBeat version 1.0.1 has been released to the Android Market. If you have not seen the recent changes show up in the market I’ve listed them below.

Version 1.0.1 Changelog

* Fixed a few unexpected force closes of the app.
* Added the ability to untrack an artist.
* Few visual clean ups.

market: https://market.android.com/details?id=fm.gigbeat.android : website: http://gigbeat.fm

GigBeat 1.0 now in the Android Market!

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 15:22:22 -0400

Today marks the release of GigBeat 1.0 in the Android Market! You can now download the app for Android devices running version 2.1 or higher.

Below is a short list of the features in GigBeat

* Scan the artists in your music library to see when they are on tour.

* Location based search to see upcoming shows near you.

* Receive notifications when your artists add new tour dates.

* Search for tickets to shows via Songkick.

Download now on the Android Market: https://market.android.com/details?id=fm.gigbeat.android