Run Mate — how to pick and play music, inside the app

I received sev­eral emails with ques­tion “how to play the music from the iPod library, inside Run Mate”. These ques­tions point out that this inter­face could be improved and I’ll cer­tainly look into pos­si­ble ways to do that. In the mean­time, I hope this post will pro­vide suf­fi­cient help.

When design­ing Run Mate’s inte­gra­tion with iPod music library, my main goal was to be a good neigh­bor in the iPhone OS and to not impose unnec­es­sary actions to start the run. Thus, if you had any music already started — regard­less is it play­ing or paused, it is enough that iPod app with its library is in mem­ory — Run Mate will go along and re-use that.

If that is the case, then when you get to the Sequence screen this is the dis­play you will see if the back­ground music is playing:

With back­ground music is play­ing, Run Mate shows pause and stop controls

or this one if back­ground music is paused:

With back­ground music paused, Run Mate shows play and stop controls

If you now tap “Start run” that music will be reused.

If you tap the red Stop but­ton, you will effec­tively clear out what­ever playlist is in mem­ory and thus no music will be avail­able to Run Mate, so the screen will change into this:

No back­ground music avail­able, “Pick music” but­tons shows up

Thus now you can tap “Pick music” but­ton and the iPhone’s music picker screen will show up:

The stan­dard iPhone’s music picker

Here you tap any num­ber of songs you want (or just tap “Add All Songs”) and then tap “Done”; you’ll be returned to Run Mate which will again show the appro­pri­ate inter­face with play/pause and stop buttons.

I hope this helps.