November 10, 2011

Music festivals: Sonisphere, Relentless NASS, Bloodstock, Bestival, Wakestock, Boardmasters, Rockness, Camden Crawl, Evolution, Winter Wonderland, Freeze & more!

I was initially contracted to write the mobile and Blackberry version of the official app for Sonisphere Festival, which is a touring rock music festival that takes place across Europe between June and August. However after the success of this app and the fact that it could be so easily re-skinned for each European version of Sonisphere, I was asked to work on other festival apps. This continued for 2 years, and ultimately resulted in over 80 builds of festival apps for 12 different festivals in 8 different languages – some of which were featured on Blackberry World, RIM’s app store. I created a set of scripts to control the build environment so that I could build out any festival app using a simple double click, this and the fact that each app actually shared the same codebase, meant that ironing out bugs across all apps was very trivial, so even a fix to a later festival app was applied to earlier ones, and consequently the bug was fixed for the next years edition of the app.

These were complex days working with J2ME and Blackberry, I still employ the same tactics in Android but now I go for a one build fits all approach, and it works great. J2ME was awesome but creating apps that look this good took much, much longer to develop than it does on Android – these are the final few awesome looking J2ME apps that were coming out, and they were definitely blurring the lines between feature and smartphones. I’ve shown a lot of the splash screens rather than cram the page with millions of shots of each app working (they are all quite similar, but they all have different graphics, style and content) but you can see how Sonisphere looked on a classic Nokia S60 below (and some videos here on my Youtube), very proud of the magic I had to work to push J2ME this far.