Wherein I Categorize American Radio Formats

For my AM Towers USA, and FM Towers USA mapping apps, I had to compress well over a hundred radio formats into a handful of categories (it ended up being 11) so here's the raw source:

    NSArray* listOfCategories =

    @[

    @[@"Ethnic Formats", @"Cajun Music", @"Adult Urban Contemporary", @"Black Gospel",@"Classic Hip-hop", @"Contemporary Latino", @"Hawaiian Music", @"Hip Hop", @"Hispanic Rhythmic", @"Hispanic Urban", @"Holy Hip Hop", @"International language", @"Latin American music", @"Latin Pop", @"Latino", @"Mainstream Urban", @"Merengue Music", @"Mexican", @"Native Americans in the United States", @"Polka music", @"Polynesian culture", @"Reggae", @"Reggaeton", @"Salsa Music", @"Soul", @"South Asia", @"Spanish Language", @"Spanish Adult Hits", @"Spanish Contemporary", @"Spanish music", @"Spanish Norteno", @"Spanish Oldies", @"Spanish Religious", @"Spanish Top 40", @"Spanish Variety", @"Tejano", @"Urban Adult Hits", @"Urban Contemporary Gospel", @"Urban Gospel", @"Urban Oldies", @"Vietnamese", @"World Ethnic"],

    

    @[@"News Formats",@"News",  @"All News Radio", @"News/Talk", @"Classical Music/News", @"Public Radio", @"Weather", @"Public Broadcasting", @"Sports", @"BBC World Service"],

    

    @[@"Talk Formats", @"Talk", @"News/Talk", @"Christian Talk and Teaching", @"Conservative Talk", @"Hot Talk", @"Progressive Talk", @"Public Affairs Programming", @"Radio Reading Service", @"Sports Talk", @"Talk/Personality", @"Comedy", @"Educational", @"English Language", @"ESPN Radio", @"Home Shopping", @"Non-commercial Educational"],

    

    @[@"High Brow", @"Beautiful Music", @"Classical Music", @"Classical music/News", @"European Classical Music", @"Jazz and Classical", @"Jazz"],

    

    @[@"Country Formats",@"Country",  @"Classic Country", @"Classic Country Music", @"Contemporary Country", @"Progressive Country", @"Current Country",@"Hot Country", @"Real Country", @"Mainstream Country", @"Modern Country", @"New Country", @"Texas Country", @"Today‘s Best Country"],

    

    @[@"Religious Music Formats", @"Religious Music", @"Black Gospel", @"Bluegrass and Southern Gospel", @"Christian Adult Contemporary", @"Christian Alternative Rock", @"Christian Contemporary", @"Christian Music", @"Christian Rock", @"Contemporary Christian Music", @"Contemporary Inspirational", @"Gospel Music", @"Holy Hip Hop", @"Inspirational music", @"Southern Gospel", @"Urban Contemporary Gospel", @"Urban Gospel", @"Worship music"],

    

    @[@"Classic American", @"Americana", @"Big Band", @"Bluegrass", @"Blues", @"Cajun Music", @"80‘s Hits", @"1990s in Music", @"Active Rock", @"Album Oriented Rock", @"Bluegrass and Southern Gospel", @"Children‘s Radio", @"Chillout", @"Christian Rock", @"Christmas Music", @"Classic Hip-hop",@"Classic Hits Oldies", @"Classic Rock", @"College Rock", @"Easy Listening", @"Gospel Music", @"Indie Rock", @"Jazz", @"Lite Rock", @"Mainstream Rock", @"Modern Rock", @"Smooth Jazz", @"Pop", @"Punk Rock", @"R&B", @"Rhythmic Oldies", @"Rock", @"Soft Rock", @"Soul", @"Southern Gospel", @"Southern Rock", @"Top 40", @"Tropical", @"Variety Hits"],

    

    @[@"Contemporary Music Formats",@"Contemporary",  @"Adult Album Alternative", @"Adult Alternative", @"Contemporary Hit Radio", @"Contemporary Hit Radio/Pop", @"Adult Contemporary",@"Hot Adult Contemporary", @"Bright Adult Contemporary music", @"Adult Hits", @"Adult Standards", @"Adult Top 40", @"Adult Urban Contemporary", @"Alternative Radio", @"Chillout", @"Christian Adult Contemporary", @"Christian Alternative Rock", @"Christian Contemporary", @"College Progressive", @"Contemporary Christian Music", @"Contemporary Inspirational", @"Contemporary Latino", @"Electronic Music", @"Hip Hop", @"Independent", @"Mainstream Top 40", @"Modern Adult Contemporary", @"Modern Rock", @"Smooth Jazz", @"Pop Contemporary", @"Rhythmic Adult Contemporary", @"Rhythmic Contemporary Hit Radio", @"Rhythmic Contemporary", @"Rhythmic Top 40", @"Smooth Adult Contemporary", @"Soft Adult Contemporary", @"Spanish Adult Hits", @"Spanish Contemporary", @"Top 40, Hot Adult Contemporary", @"Top 40", @"Urban Adult Hits"],

    

    

    @[@"Religious Formats",@"Religious",  @"American Family Radio", @"Catholic", @"Christian", @"K-LOVE", @"Christian Talk and Teaching", @"Fundamentalist Christianity", @"Modern Worship", @"Religion", @"Religious Broadcasting", @"Spanish Religious"],

    

    

    @[@"Hard to Categorize", @"Campus Radio", @"Alternative/Free Format/Adult Contemporary", @"Children‘s Radio", @"Christmas Music", @"College", @"College/Oldies/Country/Hip-Hop/Rock and Roll", @"Commercial broadcasting", @"Community Radio", @"Dance music", @"Diversified", @"Eclecticism", @"Educational", @"Freeform", @"High School", @"Home Shopping", @"Indie Radio", @"Mass Appeal", @"Music", @"Non-commercial Educational", @"Non-commercial", @"Student", @"Stunting", @"Urban Adult Contemporary Oldies", @"User-generated Content", @"Variety Hits"],

    @[@"NPR Affiliates", @"NPR", @"National Public Radio", @"NPR news, classical music, jazz"]

    ];

Using Unicode and Emoji In Your Interface

In my newly released iOS app, FM Towers USA—map of most of the FM radio stations in the United States—I had the problem of wanting to customize the popup indicator which appears when you select a pin on the map, but I didn't want to work too hard on it. All the MKAnnotation protocol in MapKit allows is returning strings for the title and subtitle.

I could spend a lot of time adding custom overlays and hit testing to how I deal with Map Kit, or I could just insert a few colorful Emoji characters into my strings.  (Unfortunately, I don't know how to get Blogger to encode the blue diamond character for view even on OS X or iOS.) 

- (NSString *)title
{
NSString* result = result = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ 🔷 %.1f", self.callSign, self.frequency.floatValue];
return result;
}

You might notice that I even made use of the Emoji characters in the images I generated for my map pins. Thus the guitar emoji became the catch-all icon for music like rock, rockabilly, R&B, while the cow represented the various country genres—I wish their was an Emoji cowboy hat. Hey, it's free, quality colorful scalable artwork, I'd rather use it than draw it.

And sometimes, making use of the huge number of characters in standard Unicode can save a lot of time, let's say you need to display chemical formula like H₂SO₄ well,  you might think you'd need a complicated NSAttributedString to insert the subscript codes, but no, all you need is to use the subscripted number characters. Or maybe you want to say 4 1/2, but want to make it pretty, well let me introduce to you the vulgar half character with 4½. I don't know why it's vulgar, it's so beautiful and elegant and has a few cousins ¼ ¾ ⅓ ⅔ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞ ⅐ ⅑ ⅒, all of which you can just insert into your source code or localization files.

So, the next time you need an image lain out within a string, look under the Special Characters palette found at the end of Xcode's Edit menu. [Update: I've just realized that iOS 5 has many fewer, and much uglier Emoji style characters, so if you target that platform, please check out the results in the simulator.]