Makes No Sense At All

MPoD version 1.3.1 is available in the AppStore. This version ensures that cover art will still work after August 15, and has some small improvements:

• finer grained volume controls;
• enabling/disabling of configured mpd outputs;
• displaying the filename when the title tag is missing;
• MPoD can detect when the mpd database has changed and reload its cache;
• bugfixes in connection settings screen.

MPoD is retrieving cover art for the currently playing song from Amazon the AWS (Amazon Web Services). From August 15 onwards, all requests made will have to be signed using a secret key that is attached to the registered AWSAccessKeyId. Searching on Google, I found various helpful bits, especially on the learn amazon web services blog. But I didn’t find a ready made implementation that I could use directly from my code.

Based on what I found I created a helper class AWSRequestSigner, that takes a dictionary of parameters to pass to the webservice, and returns a ready made NSURL object that can be used in an NSURLRequest object as in the following example:

NSURL *url = [AWSRequestSigner urlForParameterDict:[NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:
                                               @"Sea Of Tears",        @"Title",
                                               @"Eilen Jewell",        @"Artist",
                                               @"ItemSearch",          @"Operation",
                                               @"Images",              @"ResponseGroup",
                                               @"Music",               @"SearchIndex",
                                               @"AWSECommerceService", @"Service",
                                               nil]];

To look at the source code for the AWSRequestSigner class, download it here and open it in XCode.

Below are a couple of screenshots of the new v1.3 of MPoD: cover view, improved list view, support for multiple connections and support for icecast (to listen to your mpd stream directly on your iPhone).

Testing is well underway and I expect that this version can be submitted to the AppStore in the next couple of weeks.

For a great start of 2009, version 1.2 of MPoD is available in the AppStore. The main change in this version is on the inside, where a local database is implemented that caches the information from your MPD server. This results in a major improvement of the startup time, which for my 10K song library goes from 18 seconds down to about 3-4 seconds. Furthermore the main screen should be more responsive now.

In addition to this some smaller functional changes have been included as well:

• Shaking your device while you’re in the now playing screen will activate one of the random modes (random album, or a number of random songs)
• The active playlist includes the artist for each song in case the playlist contains songs by different artists
• On the artist, album and song tabs you can immediately toggle between ‘add mode’ and ‘replace mode’. The ‘add mode’ will add the selected item to the active playlist, whereas the ‘replace mode’ will replace the active playlist contents with the selected item.