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The following interview is with Sam Vermette, the creator of one of our favorite iPhone apps here at Limited Pressing: Shows. Learn more about Shows or download it by visiting the website or iTunes.

Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do?

I’m a 25-year-old, self-taught iOS and web developer living in Montreal. I’ve always been passionate about how people interact with things, so software development appealed to me like the most accessible way to scratch that itch. You just come up with an idea and get to build it out of thin air. It’s nothing short of amazing.

I’ve always been a big preacher of Apple design and that’s kind of how I learned to make things look simple and clean. Studying industrial design at University of Montreal also helped, as I was taught how to better approach design problems and solutions. Looking back, I’m glad I spent those 4 years studying design. With so many apps in the App Store, it has become clear that design is what make apps stand out (it goes without saying that I’m among those who claim ideas by themselves are worthless, execution is what matters).

Tell us about Shows. How does it work?

Shows is your live music companion. It automatically stays in sync with your iPod library and makes it really easy to import artists from your Rdio and Last.fm accounts. From there you usually have all the artists you’re interested in seeing in concert, but you can also add more manually.

By default, Shows will show you concerts in your local area. You can easily offset your location so you know what’s going on at your next travel destination. You can also increase the area radius so that Shows displays concerts from further away. For instance, say you’re in NYC, you can increase the distance slider to view shows from more cities like Boston, Miami, etc.

Location offsetting and area radius are in fact the only 2 settings in Shows. Settings are evil!

Last but not least, Shows sends you push notifications when artists you follow announce a new gig nearby (where nearby is defined by the user-defined location and radius).

Oh and I should probably mention that it’s all powered by Last.fm (although Shows has its own backend, which is the one interacting with Last.fm).

Why did you decide to develop Shows?

In 2009, I was sick of not knowing when specific artists were coming next to Montreal. All the apps out there were showing me *all* local upcoming concerts for artists I didn’t even like. They were terribly designed, slow and had too many useless features (most of them still do). So in the summer of 2009, I decided to make Shows. Version 1.0 was using Apple standard UI and had very rough edges, but it still gained a bit of traction. By the end of that year, I was ashamed by it and didn’t have any more time left to work on it, so I decided to take it off temporarily (I was still in school back then).

Then in October of last year, I had just graduated and decided to rebuild it from complete scratch. When it launched In January 2011, it gained tremendous momentum, so much that I had to momentarily take it down within the first 2 hours. As I kept working on other projects and learning more about design and good coding practices, I once again felt guilty about the version that was in the App Store. I got back from WWDC with a huge list of improvements to be done on the app, which led me to this week’s release of Shows 2.5.

What’s your favorite thing that Shows does?

Push Notifications are probably the feature that’s the most exciting to me. That feeling when you get a push notification about your favorite artists coming to town, it’s quite awesome.

What kind of feedback have you received from Shows users?

It seems unanimous that everyone loves the design effort that went into it; the simplicity, the lack of settings, the very straight-forward display of content. The sliding panels, although non-standard and maybe hard to grasp at first have also become a hit and are kind of Shows’ trademark. The 2.5 update has only been out for a couple of days but Favorites and Artist Sources (which allow you to import music from Rdio and Last.fm) seem pretty popular so far.

The complaint I’ve been hearing the most about Shows is the sometimes inaccurate data. Since Last.fm is all user-generated, erroneous data gets in (like dead artists playing at some place in Brazil) as well as dupes, or missing listings. I don’t have much control over this, and I’m guessing Last.fm has other better things to do than to moderate content (although they do). Some other sites allow artists to post concert listings themselves, therefore making their data set super accurate. It’s the case of Songkick, from whom I’ve been declined an API key because our apps are too similar (I don’t blame them, they have a business to run).

Do you have any plans to develop other music related iPhone applications?

Very much so! I love music and there are a couple other problematics I’d like to tackle with iOS apps. One particular thing that’s been bothering me is album releases — I always find out about them weeks later! That being said, I have a bunch of other ideas in the works, so it might take a while before this one ever sees the light of day.