When designing Run Mate’s integration with iPod music library, my main goal was to be a good neighbor in the iPhone OS and to not impose unnecessary actions to start the run. Thus, if you had any music already started — regardless is it playing or paused, it is enough that iPod app with its library is in memory — Run Mate will go along and re-use that.

If that is the case, then when you get to the Sequence screen this is the display you will see if the background music is playing:

With background music is playing, Run Mate shows pause and stop controls

or this one if background music is paused:

With background music paused, Run Mate shows play and stop controls

If you now tap “Start run” that music will be reused.

If you tap the red Stop button, you will effectively clear out whatever playlist is in memory and thus no music will be available to Run Mate, so the screen will change into this:

No background music available, "Pick music" buttons shows up

Thus now you can tap “Pick music” button and the iPhone’s music picker screen will show up:

The standard iPhone's music picker

Here you tap any number of songs you want (or just tap “Add All Songs“) and then tap “Done“; you’ll be returned to Run Mate which will again show the appropriate interface with play/pause and stop buttons.

I hope this helps.

New icon

New icon :)

Not really a feature, but it will be a relief to me. New icon is a bit unusual, in that it does not have a background at all and no shine that Apple is adding by default. Hopefully you’ll like it too.

New pace types: warm up, cool down

Needed before and after each run, they can be anything you like or are used to: brisk walk, stretching, jumping etc. There are no rules, do whatever you feel like doing for warming up or cooling down.

Time intervals definable in seconds

We opted for the 5s increment, mainly to prevent too much scrolling when setting pace interval. I wanted to do this in the first version, but Apple time picker has only hours and minutes.

New pace types and new interval picker

This time I wrote my own, it looks rather fine. Upgrade will update anything you might already have defined.

Ability to clone entire session

This allows quicker setup of the weekly running programs where sessions are often repeated several times in one week with few or no changes at all.

No music required

If you want to run in silence – maybe you want to hear your breathing rhythm – now you can. Run Mate will fully work with no music, even with screen locked.

Access iPod library from Run Mate

This removes the need for switch into iPod app and back into Run Mate – access all your music and pick individual songs, albums or playlists. Through iPhone’s default Settings application, set your preference should music start as soon as picked (this is default) or when you actually touch the “Start run” button.

Of course, there’s inevitable bug fixes. I have fixed few that I have found and some reported to me and all that have shown up in iTunes Connect as crash logs. Hopefully this will also help with issues few of the people that left a review on the App Store had. As I don’t know what the actual problem is — I can know this only if I receive the crash log — I can’t be sure. And App Store does not have any means of contacting people that left the review. Frustrating, but that’s how it is. If you do have a problem, of any kind, please contact us, I’ll do my best to help.

Now, off to working on 1.2 :)
I hope to have a shorter period between updates, adding few features at a time.