SynchStep & Personal Soundtrack

Creator, Designer, and Software/Hardware Engineer · 2007 - 2008

Tap start and SynchStep will automatically match your music to your pace.

The Independent design and build of an iOS app called SynchStep, which automatically matched walking and running pace to music tempo. Based on my grad school hardware product (Personal Soundtrack) and pre-iOS App store, SynchStep was written from scratch for the iPhone and released on Cydia using jailbroken iOS API’s that I reverse-engineered. It was a top 5 app for around 6 months.

Additionally, I built a companion Mac / WIndows app that automatically computed the BPM for personal music libraries, offloading expensive computation away from limited mobile devices.

Designing for a wide range of severity and conditions

Match music to pace

Tap start and SynchStep will automatically match your music to your pace. The original hardware project had no interface at all - an interface less experiment - so SynchStep just had a giant start button to tap and go with a few additional actions.

synchstep 2.png

Lock Screen

The accelerometer needed the screen on, so I had to build a lock screen because at the time iPhone screens could not be kept on.

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Quick adjustments

Guess who the someone was? Me. It was me.

synchstep 7.png

Based on Gumstix

The original hardware device featured a custom PIC (yes, I wrote step-detection in assembly - no I won’t do it again), hand-built case, SD card based library, and a TINY charging port and cable.

synchstep 8.png

UX minimalism concept

What if a device had no buttons? No interface? What if it just worked?