Interview with Neil Mix of Pandora – iPhone Audio Streaming, Memory Management, and More

In this latest episode of Mobile Orchard’s iPhone Development podcast, Dan Grigsby speaks with Neil Mix from popular personalized Internet radio service Pandora. They talk about how Pandora created an iPhone application that allows users to stream music over EDGE and 3G networks, the parallels between Ajax/JavaScript and Objective-C programming, and iPhone UI conventions shared with Tivo and — fire up the Internet time machine — Gopher!

You can listen using the Flash widget above, download the MP3 on its own, or subscribe to our podcast (iTunes link) using the instructions at the bottom of this post. For easy scanning of the interview, the following indexes shows what was covered and when:

• 1:45 – Pandora usage numbers, position in the top-25
• 2:10 – Big moving parts that make Pandora work, Pandora client-server API
• 3:20 – Broadband vs. mobile carrier connections
• 5:00 – Streaming music over the EDGE network
• 7:00 – Parallels between Ajax/JavaScript programmer and Objective-C
• 7:45 – “Run to completion” execution model, run-loop and threading
• 8:50 – Objective-C memory management inc. method naming conventions, factory methods
• 11:00 – Debugging and profiling on the simulator vs. actual hardware
• 11:50 – UI frames-of-refernces: iPhone == Tivo == Gopher? Evoking past memories..

Not a subscriber to the podcast yet? There are two great ways to subscribe to the Mobile Orchard iPhone Developer Podcast:

1. Use the feed in the feed app of your choice: https://podcast.mobileorchard.com/feed/podcast/
2. Subscribe using iTunes by clicking here.

We hope you enjoy the podcast, and if you have any suggestions on who we should interview or want to be interviewed yourself, use our Contact page or leave a comment against this post.

Thanks for listening!