Email to music app, looking for guidance

Question

Hello!
I am very new to working with the iPhone SDK, xcode, and objective C. Most of the stuff I do is physical computing. Anyway, I'm working on a really simple media player that would interface with an iPhone. I'd like to use the iPod and Web capabilities of the iPhone as a media provider. In essence, the program checks a gmail account for new messages that contain song or artist requests, search the iPod library for them, and adds them to a playing playlist. So the program would run something like this:
Play Playlist X
Check gmail for new messages
If there are new messages check subject against variable Y
If subject matches variable Y use email message contents (a song or artist name) to search iPod library
If email message matches a song or artist add it to Playlist X
Repeat
So I think the music searching and playing should be fairly straight forward given the AddMusic sample code, but the Check Gmail is catching me up. I've found a PHP and Python API online, but nothing about doing this on the iPhone. Would it be easier to use a generic POP / IMAP API? Is something like this even possible?
Thanks for any advice, pointers, or tips you can give!
Matthew

Answer 1

mbmosher8 wrote:
Ah, now copyright law is something I am familiar with, and there is no way that playing music I own on a device I own would be a copyright violation. No one is sending the device files, just text.
Ah, I misunderstood.
I can't write the exact code for you, because I don't know how to, but I would start like this:
1. Access the user's music library (I'm assuming that it'll return an NSArray or NSDictionary, or some other searchable set/collection).
2. Grab the data from the email (Maybe have the names be comma-separated, and so the "read" command, whichever you choose to use, would loop and stop itself when it gets to the comma + whitespace)
3. Search the music library, based on the data from part 2 using the Spotlight APIs
4. Create a playlist (no idea how to do this).