Waeo

Music is everywhere. You shouldn't be.

[waeoapp-blog]

Beta Blues

We've been drawing a considerable amount of flak lately. Our beta package is much too late - and we're painfully aware of that.

All we can say is, our tiny team is trying our best to handle the pressure of fixing bugs, getting a decent functional design in place, sorting out legal issues etc. and we should have the beta version out by next week.

Thank you for your patience. Cheers.

[waeoapp-blog]

Forums, Reddit & more!

We've been dormant for the past few weeks. Here's why - 

To build a good product, besides great UI & flawless functionality, we realized it is important to be in touch with users - to listen to their feedback and, more importantly, ensure that they have a platform to reach out to us with their issues, suggestions & requests. And a cliched [email protected] is hardly a useful way to go about this. It's like we aren't even trying.

Having identified the need for a streamlined, more uniform way to do this, we started devoting a considerable amount of time to research on various possible ways of making something like this. 

Our solution? Waeo Forums. 

Over the past 2 weeks, we've meticulously set up the forums to act as an interface to all current and future users. How are they going to be useful? Well, we basically put up everything related to Waeo on the forums - neatly classified into relevant categories and discoverable through related tags. Having trouble starting up through the app? Check out 'Tutorials'. App crashing on your phone? Check out 'Help Wanted' to view known bugs & issues and how to fix them. Didn't find a relevant fix? File a report under 'Bug' (although, chances are, we've already gotten your crash through analytics and are already working on a fix). Thought of some addition that you would love to see to the app? Start a new topic under 'Feature Request'. Pretty dope, right?

To complement these forums, we have also established a presence on Reddit, with our own dedicated subreddit - r/waeo. We figured that a presence on the front page of the internet would enable more people to discover the app and help re-direct more users to the forums for addressal of their issues.

So, while we're completing the packaging of our beta, do subscribe to our forums and the subreddit, maybe check out the tutorials to get a sneak peek as to what you're in for, and start talking!

[waeoapp-blog]

Check out our logo!

We’re excited to (finally!) unveil our logo which has been in the works for some time now. Having glossed over hundreds of beautiful designs and brand identities of apps on Pinterest & Behance, we decided to get in a professional hand to create an identity for us.

We weren’t asking for much :  just wanted it to have a clean, legible form and, at the same time, exude a vibe of being funky and cool. Not to forget the fact that it should underscore the 3 salient features that define Waeo - personal usage and multiple peer control, connectivity and, mainly, music. No biggie.

After having many designers balk at the prospect of creating something to meet our expectations, we finally met a match with the class act of Chaitanya Modak at Inhouse Design. After 3 weeks and numerous iterations, we are glad to unveil an identity that incorporates both, subtle, and explicit elements to define our identity.

                                                                                 Ta-da! 

Now the break-down for everyone's benefit.

The ‘W’ is inspired from the popular Fido Dido caricature. This is meant to add the ‘funky’ characteristic to the entire logo and personify the primary focus of personal usage of the app - and the single headphone is meant to personify a music lover or a DJ. It also doubles up as a hand making the devil's horns gesture - in case you didn't notice that yet. The form of ‘A’ & ‘E’ are meant to signify connectivity. The ‘O’ at the end is meant to represent many things at once - through it’s coloration, it embodies a vinyl music record;  it’s bilateral form also represents a DJ’s turn-table and, finally, it’s stylization in the full word is meant to build the form of a stereo boombox.

And here's the sleek button logo icon -  

So, basically, we covered everything we were hoping for, as best we could. Hope people get a hint of at least a couple of the elements that have been put in. 

[waeoapp-blog]

The start of something beautiful!

In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. Then came music, the Internet and cat videos on YouTube - which were instrumental in placating the irate populace. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about.

As the more perceptive of you may have realized, this blog is eponymous. We are here to talk about Waeo - a software that we have been building over the past few months. It is a beautiful interface that will help you develop a whole new perception about playlists and enable you to listen to and control your music.

So what does Waeo do exactly and why should you want it in your everyday life?

Consider the status quo - your favorite music is all over the place - it’s on your phone, on your iPod, on your laptop, on YouTube, on SoundCloud etc. If you live in US / Europe, you have the comfort of Spotify as well and if you’re an enterprising third-worlder, you’ve even figured out a VPN connection hack to make Spotify work for yourself. The point is this: the majority of us don’t depend on a single resource to get our music fix - heck, we don’t even stick to a single source for streaming online. We have a myriad different sources, for a myriad different reasons - logistics, availability of songs in a particular location, personal preferences, DRM restrictions or just a good ol’ cheapskate attitude towards buying music.

Why then, are the playlists on our devices still bound to drawing music from the devices they’re on?

We opine that playlists should be more flexible - you should be able to add music from any device we want to our #CLT playlist without having to bother about transferring them through pen drives or Bluetooth or worrying about installing and syncing Dropbox on every damn device. If you don’t have a copy of the song, that you feel like listening to, you should be able to queue up an online link in your playlist of local music that would stream the music seamlessly, without you having to move an inch.

Wouldn't it be nice to have an interface that afforded you this freedom within the existing frameworks that you’re comfortable with so that everything just… worked?

This is the change we want to effect. And this is our motivation behind developing Waeo.

Music is everywhere. You shouldn't be. Stay tuned for updates.