roomioTV Prototype App

Background

Last spring (2015), I had the opportunity to work with roomioTV to develop a prototype iOS app. roomioTV provides hotel in-room entertainment systems. Instead of having to choose between average cable or pay-per-view movies, roomioTV’s boxes allow you to access on-demand television via streaming, apps for watching YouTube or Netflix, games, and location-based attractions, weather, and restaurants.

While each roomioTV system comes with their remote, customers often want to connect their mobile devices to control the television. This allows users to use a more familiar interface rather than learning a new remote’s layout. The familiarity and convenience (most users always have their phone on them) makes a remote-app very appealing.

Design

I started the process by working in Sketch and Photoshop on a few mockups for the interface. I used the physical remote and the conversations I had with the roomioTV team to guide the design. After I finished the mockups, I used invision to share them with the team:

Check out the first version of the design here (opens in a new tab)

Version 1

After discussing some improvements to the User Interface, I moved on to making the first version of the app without the UI. In this version, I just used Apple’s XCode interface elements to see if the functionality worked. I relied heavily on Apple’s Resources and a Ray Wenderlich tutorial to learn about socket programming in iOS (in addition to being my first experience with creating an iOS app from scratch, it was my first time using socket networking). I ended up also using an open-source Asynchronous socket networking library for iOS to make the networking even simpler. Later, I abandoned this method and wrote the networking code from scratch.

Version 2

After testing the functionality of this version of the app and fixing a few bugs, I managed to get the bare-bones remote to work on the roomioTV system. So now, it was time to add the User Interface.

Looking back

I’m happy with how the project turned out. In a little under 3 months, I managed to create my first iOS app, written in Objective-C (a language I didn’t know before), and I was able to deliver a working prototype that was used as a demo at an industry conference. Now, I feel more comfortable with iOS development and I’m even more excited for my next project.