We wanted to make Mix & Mash as stable as we could, so the release date has been pushed back quite far (just over a month), but it will be worth the wait!

Head over to www.mixandmash.co.uk to check out the latest updates and features as this dev blog will be closed down shortly after Mix & Mash goes on sale.

Our developers have been busy at work over the past month, getting things ready for the release of Mix and Mash.

Unfortunately, we won't quick make the scheduled release day (of today...), because we want to make things perfect!

Don't worry though, things are not that far off, and the list of known issues is fast declining!

Stick around for the final few announcements before release!

Well, the next stage is alpha testing, and lots of it. This is the stage before BETA testing, and is where we test the out as much as we can to iron out the bugs.

We'll then put it into the hands of our dedicated testers (apply here). They will continue testing to find those bugs that we haven't found ourselves. We've allocated a whole month to do this. That's how dedicated we are to make Mix & Mash as good as we can.

On another note, we have made a great start to the Mix & Mash Official Website. We'll keep the development blog on here though. If you would like to test Mix & Mash, check out the website, where you'll be able to apply. We're only accepting 20 testers so you'd better be quick.

So, we look forward to releasing Mix and Mash to our dedicated testers!

Mix & Mash is now nearing the end of its development cycle, in fact.

A big update since last time is the now playing window is now complete. We won't be releasing any screenshots for now, as we'd quite like to perfect everything first.

Anyway, the settings are saved and loaded, we've identified many major bugs,  revamped the adding song method, and created a snazzy little volume control. They're just a few of the things we've been up to recently, but rest assure, we've done plenty more and are putting everything we have into the development.

Listen closely over the next couple of weeks as we'll be releasing information on becoming an official Mix & Mash BETA tester. We only plan on having 15-20 BETA testers so be sure to be quick as the demand will be very high.

In summary, we're well on schedule to finish development by the end of January and very excited to release Mix & Mash.

Stay tuned!

New Audio Player

After discovering the many limitations of the audio player that we were previously using, we had to look for an alternative method, which still allowed us access to the iPod music library.

The Good News: We found what we were looking for; AVPlayer. 

The Bad News: AVPlayer is only available in iOS4+ We will later look into implementing a less feature-rich version for devices <iOS4, but we'll stick with this for now.

So, what does AVPlayer allow us to do?

- Allows iPod controls in multitasking mode

- Control over audio in background mode, hence, mixing & mashing!

- The ability to play multiple songs simultaneously. This will be useful for fading songs into each other, etc.

- The music won't be temporarily paused every time you shuffle your play queue or add new songs etc.

Background Audio

We've now set up the foundations for background audio using our new audio player. This should give us some control over the audio, whilst Mix & Mash is running in background mode.

Internal Optimisation

Much of the work over the past few days is simply changing and optimising how Mix&Mash will work, setting the main foundations for us to build our features on. This takes a while as we need to plan out & predict how everything will work together.

We've also started commenting the Mix&Mash source code. This will be completed over the past few days as it will make it much easier to write the rest of the programme. OK, so we admit, this should have been done from the start. We'll keep the comments up to date from now on!

So thats about everything for now. Apologies for the lack of news in the past 9 days. We've been very busy.

Check back in a few days for more..!

The tab bar

We decided to take a tab bar approach for Mix & Mash, much like the iPod app. This gives users an easy way to switch between multiple views. There are 4 main views to Mix & Mash: Settings, Select Music, Play Queue and Now Playing.

Settings

This view contains all of the apps settings, including

 - Mix time: this defines the time that Mix & Mash plays your songs for.

 - Play Queue Count: this setting sets the number of songs to display in the play queue (for info about the play queue see below!)

 - Special Feature: this setting will turn on a special feature in Mix & Mash. We're not going to release details for this yet though! Keep an eye out for hints.

Select Music

On this view, you get to manage the music that you'd like Mix & Mash to work with. You can add playlists, songs, albums, artists, or simply use your entire music collection.

Don't worry, we'll add indexing to the list in the future! We plan on putting a search box here too, but for now, we've got the basics set.

Play Queue

A great advantage that Mix & Mash has over the iPod app that comes as standard with iOS devices, is that it shows you a play queue. This is a very useful feature, allowing you to rearrange the play queue, remove items or simply shuffle your music collection!

We're very excited to get this feature to you, and hope you are too. 

Now Playing

The now playing view shows you all about the song playing and allows you to control your music player. You can perform standard functions, skip, play, pause, and much more from this view, just as you would on the iPod app.

We're yet to finish building this view however, and would like to perfect it a little more before showing you!

That just about wraps up what we've got so far on the visual side on Mix & Mash. Don't forget, we've also got a lot of code written 'under-the-hood' to make Mix & Mash functional, so we're sure it'll be in your hands in no time!

Here, you can follow the follow the progress of Mix & Mash, and see what interesting things we're doing with it.