Alabama iPhone App Now Available

After nearly two months of not approving my iPhone app, Apple finally approved it last week while I was away on vacation.  It’s called Alabama, it’s a music player, and you can get it here.

I created Alabama because I love music, and I love whole albums.  I don’t listen to singles, I don’t skip tracks, and "shuffle" is something I would never do to an album.  When you’re that kind of music listener, and you have hundreds of albums, scrolling through a long alphabetical list of artists or albums is annoying and unsatisfying.  I can never find something that I want to listen to that way.

So I created an app which is a simple music player with one important additional feature: a "Pick" button which picks one album at random from your music library.  You can then simply tap the Play button, or tap Pick again a few times until you find something you feel like listening to.

Another neat thing about Alabama is that it actually uses the iPod application to play the music, so it keeps playing when you quit the app.  And conversely, if you start playing something via the iPod app, you can quit that and launch Alabama, and then tap the "Now Playing" button to view what’s playing within Alabama’s interface -- which is superior to the iPod’s interface because it uses letters that are large and actually legible to display the artist, album, and track names.

So check out Alabama for your iPhone or iPod touch.  There’s a free lite version and a 99-cent full version.