Caledon Media

The Project

Year Developed: 2020, 2021, 2022

Project Type: iOS & Android Mobile App

Languages Used: PHP, HTML, JSON, CSS, MySQLi, Swift, Java

The Background

Online radio stations are becoming more popular, with set-up and running costs relatively low, certainly in comparison to traditional digital radio. In 2019, TuneIn – one of the largest radio streaming apps – had over 100,000 radio stations listed in its directory.

The Brief

Caledon Media was a new online radio station. Broadcasting was to commence in 2020. A mix of political, sport, topical & music shows all with a positive Scottish outlook. The station required a simple app that anyone could use.

The idea was to have:

  • App available on iOS & Android, with identical design & functionality
  • A simple on/off toggle button to play/pause the station.
  • Social media links.
  • A link to show the station’s show schedule for the week.
  • Track info to be visible and updated frequently.

The Design

The design of Caledon Media was done in-house. We were given the Caledon Radio logo and used the red for that throughout the app, offset with a contrasting dark grey for the social media icons and show schedule headers.

The logo doubles as an on/off button, in easy reach of the users thumb, with the track information scrolling if there isn’t enough room to show all of the titles.

The show schedule was designed to be easy to read, with large text for the weekday titles to quickly find the day you want to check.

Initial Screen
Show Schedule Screen

The Development

For what appears to be a simple app, there was quite a lot of work to get it running. The radio station used Shoutcast for broadcasting, so we had to tap into that in order to get the show information including the link for the stream itself. Shoutcast provides the track title as a single line (such as “Artist Name – Track Title”). We ran this title through a third party API that would return the properly formatted artist name, track title and album art.

The show schedule started off as a manually-updated HTML file, but after we were commissioned to revamp the Caledon Media website, we hooked the show schedule up with the website database to make sure both the website and app show the same information.

A simple WearOS version of the app was developed in 2021 that plays the station through the watch speaker or via bluetooth.

In 2022 we added push notifications to both the iOS and Android apps, allowing show presenters to send messages to all installed devices to inform the user of upcoming shows or breaking news.