As of today, we officially open source our iPhone/iPad app “ Radios“. We started Radios as a Liip Hackday project soon after the iPad was announced and it was clear from the beginning, that we will make the code public some day. We used a lot of Open Source code to build it, after all. We publish it under the same license as the underlying software we used. It's the very liberal MIT license and the whole code is available at our github repository. So feel free to do some great new stuff with the code.

The app is built on PhoneGap, meaning that the whole UI and most of the logic needed is written in html, JavaScript and CSS. It should be therefore very easy to get into it and enhance it. The more “core-ish” stuff is written in Objective-C and is described in another blog post.

For getting started, all you need is the iPhone SDK, an installation of PhoneGap and of course our code. Open the “radioapp.xcodeproj” in Xcode, Build&Run it in the simulator and you should be ready. If you later want to test the App on your actual iPhone, you also need a paid iPhone Dev Account (those 99$/year)

For some special features like the “3G/Edge detection” I had to patch PhoneGap and that fork is available at github.com/chregu/phonegap-iphone, but for just enhancing “Radios” with some new features, you don't need that fork, the standard PhoneGap should be fine.

I'm sure, you now want to go ahead, fork Radios and start developing for it. Let us know via comments or email, if you did something cool and we will try to integrate it into the official version. And if you don't know, what you could add to it, here's a little wishlist:

  • The possibility to add your own radiostations
  • Use touch instead of click events
  • A sleep function (turn off after one hour)