Rdio

Rdio brought your music collection, playlists, and friends' listening into the same place. You could listen on your phone, at your desk, or through the television.

I moved to San Francisco in 2011. Rdio was my first job out of university and a real learning experience.

The original iOS app was built around Three20, an Objective-C framework that came out of Facebook's iPhone app. I worked on the iPhone and iPad rewrite from the beginning.

For version 2.0, we rebuilt the apps in C# using Xamarin's MonoTouch, starting from our existing Windows Phone codebase. The mobile apps shared a common C# core, with native interfaces for each platform. MonoTouch compiled the iOS app into native code.

We shipped on November 27, 2012. The new apps brought the lighter desktop design to mobile, with a sliding sidebar, a shared queue, and remote controls for playback on another device.

These screens are from Federico Viticci's launch-day review.

The Mac app was mostly a thin Objective-C wrapper around Rdio's web interface. Most of what you saw was the website running inside an app window. I worked on the native layer around it, including gestures and AppleScript support.

The March 2012 redesign brought music collections and social activity together, with drag-and-drop playlist building and private playlists.

I was the sole maintainer of Rdio's Roku app. It brought the same music service to a television and remote, alongside the phone and desktop apps I worked on.

The Roku app already existed when I joined. My role was to maintain it, add features, and fix problems. Working directly with customer support and listeners was part of that job.

I remember the Rdio billboards in Times Square. The campaign put silhouettes and album artwork across the buildings, under the words "Human powered music discovery."

The campaign was already being photographed in November 2012. This larger photograph comes from Martin Grasser's archive of the campaign work at West.

I still miss Heavy Rotation and the social side of listening on Rdio. Seeing what friends were playing gave me new music to try, and during that year my tastes expanded a lot. I discovered so many artists. I haven't been able to replicate that experience with any other music service.

I kept listening after my year at Rdio. When the service was closing in 2015, its farewell page put together my listening history.

I had joined as a listener on November 21, 2011. The first song I played was Midnight City by M83. By the end, I had listened for 4,323 hours. I saved this recap on December 14, 2015.