During the development of the concerts website for MuchMusic MuchConcerts, they asked us if we might be up for the challenge of making a companion application for the iPhone. At the time we were looking for the right opportunity to get our still incubating iPhone department to hatch. This was it.

The advantage of being the builders of the concerts application allowed us to easily define the scope of the project. But as this was our first application we didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew. So our efforts were focused on making a simple application that read a feed of available concerts in the geographical location of the user. After a couple of weeks of development and completion of our scoped out functionality we were ready to review our app. Much to our disappointment, it fell way short of our expectations as our flagship application.

It was time to go back to the scope of the project and identify what we could do to make it a real app. We decided that, for us to be proud of the application we made, we needed it to be as full featured as the website itself. So instead of being a companion application, this iPhone app would be able to stand on its own. And this became the foundation of the application we created.

Below is a feature list of what the application offers:

Upcoming concerts, presents a list the of all concerts in a user defined geographical area. It works with GPS, Major City selection, or even Canada wide. Users can even set the kilometre radius from which to search. Upcoming concerts also offer the user access to purchase tickets online, through the Rogers urMusic store or directly from Live Nation.

The recent events listing, lists past concerts with the same geographical settings. The past concerts offer a Social Snapshot of each concert that happened. Presenting user with the ability to view Twitter and YouTube streams of everything that happened in and around the time of the concert -by far our favourite feature of the app.

No geo coded app would be complete without a full featured mapping component, so users have the ability to view every concert by venu on a Google map integrated directly into the application, (we thank the 3.0 update for that).

All good mobile apps have some kind of personalization component to them, so we offered users the ability to add any concert they might be interested to their favourites under the two categories of Upcoming and Recent.

The search feature allows users to find any concert happening in all of Canada and even the ones happening in their backyard.

From a design perspective we wanted to keep the UI controls close to the original iPhone as possible, but at the same time offer some custom branding and design. The tab bar in the application is the most customized component. Custom icons, custom color scheme and even a little 20px branded footer, a nice little touch to bring the piece together.

The app was pretty ambitious for our first iPhone app we would like to think. But at the end of the grueling process to figure out how to make it all go, we are proud of what we built. It’s been submitted to the app store and is pending approval. Hopefully it will only be another few days.