Apple currently featuring "radio apps" and Stormy Productions has a strong presence on the list

I was pleasantly surprised this morning to discover Apple currently has a list of featured radio apps on the iTunes store, and Stormy Productions was involved in the creation of 10% of those apps.

There are two lists, one for iPhone apps and one for iPad apps.

The iPhone list contains 30 apps, and I've had a hand in the creation of 4 of those apps. Specifically, I wrote all the code for both the Tunemark Radio and JAZZ.FM apps. I also wrote all the radio streaming code and the "now playing" portion of the user interface code for the Public Radio App. And finally, I wrote the radio streaming code used by the PRI app. (A good friend of mine wrote the rest of the code for the PRI app - congrats Rob!).



For the iPad list of featured radio apps there are only 11 apps listed, and Tunemark Radio is one of them!



As an iPhone developer, one always hopes to some day have an app make Apple's "featured" lists on the front page of iTunes, so I am unbelievably happy today to have several make one of Apple's lists.

As for what effect this exposure has on app downloads, I only have access to the stats for the Tunemark Radio app (the rest of the apps are under other developer accounts), but I can say, for my Tunemark Radio app, after one day being on this featured radio app list, the number of downloads have more than doubled. The average daily download count jumped from 500 to over 1100.

Tunemark Radio iPhone app visualizer demo

I put together a video demo of what the Tunemark Radio app music visualizer looks like. I've gotten a few queries from people who didn't realize the app included a visualizer, so hopefully this will give a little more visibility to the feature:

Tunemark Radio visualizer demo from Brian Stormont on Vimeo.
Music in the demo is "Not Hip Hoppie" by Digitube (http://digitube.us)

I'd like to stress this this visualizer will work with any audio stream being played in Tunemark Radio. It looks best when the stereo channels have distinct volume levels.

Also, it should be pointed out that the visualization is not using the local microphone to pick up the audio signal, so will also work if you are using headphones or a dock connector. It's not a responsive as a full desktop-based music visualizer, but this is because the iPhone SDK does not provide access to the decoded data packets of MP3 or AAC audio as they are being played. So, instead, I have to only use the audio chaneel gain status words returned by the SDK.

You can download the app for free from iTunes.