I am pleased to announce that my first Spotify App went live a couple of weeks ago and was quite an exciting time for me. The app was built for the iconic music brand NME to bring new music recommendations, featured album and track reviews and NME generated Playlists. You can read the official announcement on NME.COM
It was a fairly long drawn out process from the conception of the app to getting it live which involved a number of revisions from what was built for v1.0. Working with both the editorial and publishing teams from NME and the QA teams at Spotify a lot of attention to detail was put into the app and I am really happy with how it turned out in the end.
As well as the development of the App itself which is built using HTML, JS and CSS there was also the need to build an API which could be utilised to get access to the great content created by the NME.COM team.
This was built as a REST API using Zend Framework which came with challenges on its own, I think in hindsight I wouldn’t try and use the Zend Framework 1.x REST components again as I don’t think it worked very well for building a REST based API, I will no doubt be blogging about that at some point in the future.
There were also a number of challenges around working with the Spotify Apps API, firstly there was a lack of documentation on a number of key components and often I found code examples which didn’t work due to changes in the API which were not reflected in the documentation itself.
I also hit a number of bugs in the Spotify API as I was building the app which meant having to find workarounds until they could be fixed, I will be blogging about some of the solutions in the near future, the Spotify development team were exceptionally helpful whenever I got stuck and were always on hand to offer advice and code examples when needed.
Here are some screenshots for those of you without access to Spotify
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For those of you that have Spotify installed you can get the app by going to App Finder or Clicking Here