Weatherify

Inspiration

Weatherify was inspired by the idea of listening to music that fits your environment. It always feels off-putting when listening to upbeat music on a rainy and dreary day. However, music listening services such as Spotify usually only give recommended songs based on user interests, making it difficult to search for and discover music that fits the weather outside. Weatherify aims to be an extension to Spotify that allows users to discover new music and listen to songs that they like based on the weather.

What it does

Weatherify is an iOS application that gives Spotify music recommendations based on the weather. It allows users to sign in through their Spotify account to access all the features of the app. Users get live weather updates in the app and recommended songs and playlists available on Spotify that match the weather updates. Clicking on any of these recommended songs and playlists redirects the user to the Spotify app where they can begin listening. In addition, users have the ability to generate/create a playlist, also based on the weather, that is created as a private playlist under their Spotify account. Users have immediate access to these playlists and have the ability to listen or share their created playlists with other users. Overall, Weatherify aims to be an extension to Spotify that users can access to get quick and helpful music recommendations.

How we built it

Weatherify was built through Swift for both the frontend and the backend. For authentication, I used Spotify's login authentication services. I also used the OpenWeatherMap API by using HTTP requests to retrieve live weather updates which include details of the forecast for the current weather. In addition, Spotify's Web API was used to search for songs/playlists, create playlists, and get recommendations for tracks based on many factors such as genre, energy, etc. All of the API calls were written in swift. The frontend was built through swift and UIKit and additional pods such as SDWebImage were used to improve factors such as the speed of downloading of album cover images to make the app run more smoothly.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenge was building out the application and dealing with everything from developing to designing and figuring out how to make the app look more marketable. In addition, it was difficult at first to figure out which parts of Spotify's API to use that would help make the best algorithm to determine what songs and playlists to recommend as Spotify's API provides an immense amount of detail and opportunity.

What we learned

I learned a lot about incorporating APIs and how to use them. In addition, I learned how to make the user experience as smooth as possible.

What's next for Weatherify

It would be great to expand Weatherify to different platforms such as Android or possibly transform Weatherify into a chrome extension that can be used right on top of Spotify to make it more accessible.