Music screensaver iteration #5 made on Cannes Music Hack Day 2014

We didn’t finish the app before Christmas but when Deezer offered to sponsor us for the Music Hack Day in Cannes, France, we jumped on the opportunity to work on the app!

Our flight got delayed and we ended up exhausted and late at the hackathon. Still, we managed to hide a few features to focus on the core: beautiful artist images. We’ll be adding them back in time.

What we noticed though is that having it as an app is too unstable. If you leave the app by searching for a song, it breaks. We might need to make it as a separate page, like Mentor.fm. The problem though is that it won’t be able to support Spotify.

We did a “welcome page” though, but it needs more work.

Deezer have been great so far and we’re eternally grateful. We’re currently working on PartySaver outside of hackathons.

We did have some fun though…

The alps above the clouds

The alps below the clouds

Where’s my boat?

Brazil!

French hack food

Best app!

This is what happens when hacking at 03

mmm… boat

mmm… meat

Music screensaver iteration #4 made on London Music Hack Day 2013

The date has come, and passed! Me, Jonas and Johan are at the Music Hack Day in London like we planned last time. We continued working on PartySaver [Read about iterations #1, #2, and #3] and focused on two major additions: a Deezer app and a connection to Philips HUE lamps.

The architecture of PartySaver separates the player app from the party functionalities. Meaning it was pretty simple to create a Deezer app since we already had a Spotify app. (actually, it required quite some refactoring since this is hackathon code :P)

Integrating Philips HUE proved to be quite easy, but also disappointing at the same time. The idea was to take the dominant color from the artist wallpapers and just set the lights to that color. First we noticed that the dominant color was actually most often a shade of gray. The second surprise was how lacking the lights are in the color spectrum. If you don’t send a color it can handle, it will grab the “nearest” thing which is not the nearest color as I’d imagine it (different hue basically) but instead it gets whitened.

The image above shows a CIE color chart, and the little green triangle inside it is what Philips HUE can handle. Not much in the blue/green/yellow space… Next hack I’ll try to find a better color matching algorithm than the built in one.

Oh, a small improvement we made is that to find a party you just go to partysaver.se and it’ll check for parties within your wifi (actually, your public IP).

Next time we’ll also try to create the “standard” party functionality: party queue manager for party guests.

Curious on when we release PartySaver? Sign up on our website!

Update 2013-12-12: There’s a video of our presentation on YouTube. Also, we’ve talked to Deezer yesterday and are aiming at releasing PartySaver on their platform hopefully before Christmas (i.e. next week!)