Eter 2.0 — about radio, music and a rock band creating applications
The Eter radio application I created will soon be three years old. It was in May 2021 that it appeared on the App Store. Now we can present you Eter version 2.0.
In a nutshell, the history of version 1.0 is as follows: Initially, Eter was a purely hobby project that was launched on the day of the launch of the new Polish internet radio — Radio Nowy Świat. In the first week of broadcasting, this station was only available via the website, and I wanted to listen to it using the app. This is how a very simple program was created, to which I quickly added several more stations, including: French Radio France Culture and Radio France Internationale. I listened to these stations as part of my self-study of French.
I received numerous requests from my friends and followers on Twitter (currently X) to make this simple application of mine available, at least in a beta version, via Test Flight. So I had to decide on a name and put the program in the App Store. The name Eter (English aether) actually came to me first, because the radio broadcasts in the so-called aether.
Later, there were requests to add more stations to the list. In fact, there were so many of them that I realized that the best solution would be to add a search engine to some public database of radio station streams, and that is radio-browser.info.
I also wanted to offer users something to start with, so I decided to create lists of recommended stations for specific countries. Searching for stations from different countries around the world was an interesting journey through different cultures. It was then that I discovered several stations that I still listen to today (e.g. the Ukrainian Radio Roks) and those that for me — a resident of Poland — were a very interesting experience in themselves (e.g. the Cuban news radio, which constantly broadcasts pings in the background measuring the elapsed seconds).
Ultimately, Eter in the iOS, macOS, tvOS and watchOS versions hit the App Store as a freemium app, allowing you to listen to and search for stations for free, but requiring you to unlock the full version to add them to your list. The premium (full) version also allowed you to hide the list of recommended stations. Eter was my first app that used iCloud syncing of favorite stations and — in the iOS version — offered CarPlay support.
As some of you probably know, I am a guitarist who plays in several metal bands, and on a daily basis I work as a programmer at Apparent Software, a four-person studio that creates its own applications. For me, Apparent Software is, to some extent, also a rock band in which I play, not on guitar, of course, but on a Mac, in Xcode. Our relationship from the beginning reminds me of working in a rock band. So I wanted to contribute my piece to this band — Eter. I felt that, just like the music I bring to the band and which is arranged together, Eter can only benefit if we all start working on it together. And the result of this work is Eter version 2.0.
Joint brainstorming brought many interesting ideas, some of which were included in version 2.0. Jacob Gorban, who like me is a guitarist and with whom I share a passion for progressive rock, proposed a very useful feature of the history of songs played by the stations the user listened to. Thanks to this feature, I discovered many great bands whose music had previously caught my ear, but I didn’t have time to note down the names of these bands. Now I just go into the history and if only the meta data has been read correctly, I can immediately open the song in Apple Music.
Another great idea came from Susannah Skyer Gupta, who proposed adding a mini player nested in the top menu bar to Eter for Mac. Thanks to her persistence, Eter 2.0 for Mac can now work in four different modes, classically with the main program window and dock icon, with dock icon, main window and mini player in the top bar, and with the main window without dock icon, invoked via icons in the top bar and in minimalist mode, as a mini player nested in the top bar of macOS. In a word, everyone will find the optimal Eter operating mode for themselves.
Eter version 2.0 also has a new icon, redesigned UI elements, and beautiful artwork templates that can be assigned to stations. All designed by our great graphic designer Braden Froese. Braden is also a mine of knowledge when it comes to great radio stations playing different types of music. Many of his suggestions were included on one common list of radio stations recommended by our team.
It doesn’t end there. Eter 2.0 now allows you to search for stations not only by name, but also by tags (music genres) or the names of cities, regions, provinces or states. There are also smaller improvements, such as the ability to quickly remove stations from the favorites list in iOS directly in the list view.
Our joint work on Eter does not end there. We are planning a lot of new features, including the ones you are asking about. Stay tuned!
