What makes Kirby all jittery and over-the-top excited? A Stanza concept that he can run on his iPhone. Folks, it looks like we’re making progress. We have successfully hired a UI developer, who is doing a fantastic job creating the user interface in SwiftUI. Granted, it’s far from done, but we’re all pretty stoked to see this happening. Like we’ve mentioned before, SwiftUI is Apple’s UI code language, so once this concept is done, the whole process will have to be repeated for the Android version. Not to mention that the APIs and the “business logic” and a bunch of other fancy stuff we’re forgetting about right now need to be written, and permissions need to be acquired, and a myriad of other things must happen before we have a usable app.
Speaking of permissions, Taylor is nearly done with the massive hunk of legalese they call a contract template. He even paid a real lawyer to go over it with him at least once. Once the authors start signing away their souls or whatever it is we require of them, then we can start the long and arduous process of “on-boarding” the songs (such a delightful corporate term, don’t you just love those happy little corporate terms bouncing around?)
What’s happening in the programming department? The developer we hired is making massive strides at converting our Figma into an app for iOS and iPadOS. We lucked out on this first hire, at least.
Our programming roadmap looks a little bit like the early Spanish explorers’ maps of America. Which is to say, our roadmap says California is an island (oh the good ol’ days!) I digress. The next thing we have to work on is to start planning out schemas (data blueprints, if you will) and think about ourselves instead of our customers for a bit. What I mean is, in order to–more corporo-speak coming up–facilitate consumer access to copyrighted sheet music, we need to build ourselves a handy-dandy admin console. The easier it is for us to use, the faster we’ll be able to bring new songs and collections online for the ravenous consumers of content.
In tandem with the administrator console, we will be able to develop a simple API for managing and accessing data related to authors, copyright holders, songs, books, and collections. Along with that comes authentication. Those of you who have not written web applications–these are different from websites–will never know the horror which the word “authentication” brings to mind. To programmers who don’t specialize in authentication and authorization (two different things), those fields are depressing and tend to suck away our life-force, leaving us desiccated husks of what we once were. This may be a slight exaggeration, but not much of one. Case in point, I (Kent) got enthused to look into authentication code while writing this blog post, but after taking a break, I realized that it is as soul-sucking and pointless as I remembered.
Once we have a basic admin console in place, with a basic API with simple authentication, then we can actually make our iOS app start doing actual things. There will be other features like “enriched” search and amazing scroll experiences for projectors–both things that are going to be much more difficult than we think.
And after all that is done, then we can start on the Android app. We might actually be able to start on the Android app before the Apple app is done, but that remains to be seen.
So, I guess that’s about all for this update. We’re finally doing something other than nothing, so that’s cool.
We still welcome your questions about any part of the app, Stanza Music Inc, royalty payments, or whatever you are curious about. We want to be transparent about Stanza and we want you to understand why we do the things we do. Feel free to post your questions in the comments, reach out to us via the Contact form, or message one of us personally.
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