New Gadget Madly In Hope
A blog about my iPhone dev efforts
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24 July
NGMIH rolled way, way back
goDaddy lost my old blog database, so .. I restored it back to a really old one I had lying around.
Pity.
They may find it in which case, whoopiieee,
Meanwhile, I'm updating a lot of my apps to run with 4.0's audio. Stay tuned.
09 January
New App Doings
I'm building a new fun app that I hope will turn into a series of fun apps.
It involves this one:
29 December
Wind Chimes 1.0.1 Live
Wind Chimes went live on Dec 22 (while I was away) so - enjoy it!
Next time I revisit it I may add fix things that have annoyed me about it for a while:
- maybe drop the sample rate so the sound won't break up so much while keeping the latency fast.
- fiddle with the timbre some more (you may have noticed that the attack portion of the sound is a bit modulated and "noisy" now.
- make the settings "word free" for better internationalization (that's a lot of design work, actually)
- get the automatic mode (or "raindrop mode", as I'll probably rechristen it) to work when the phone has the hold switch on.
- new chimes , movements, backgrounds, etc.
- come up remembering the last chime used. I don't know if I'll be making a whole chime-saving interface or social interface, but this is easy!
19 December
Wind Chimes Update coming
Wind Chimes v 1.0.1 is coming... submitted tonight.
NEW! Hearts and Lights added for festive imagery!

NEW! volume slider! it goes to 150% (because the chimes often aren't all playing at once and decay quickly)
This update fixes some pesky anomalies with 2.2 :
- sound continues when the "silent" button is down
- sliders jump to tapped spot
15 December
Thoughts about SrutiBox
SrutiBox has been out for a few months now - and more than a thousand people have bought it.
Thank you very much!
It's been extremely gratifying to be able to contact a few of you in email and to read your positive comments!
Usually when I write a program, I get to some level with it and then it's not interesting to me anymore, but I'm finding SrutiBox is not one of them. I realize that it is not part of a real Carnatic music tradition - it's actually more of an outcrop of my own music in the 80s, which I called Beatless Music: music that was a kind of extreme rejection of the extreme beat heavy excesses of pop music, and also the ticky-tocky texture of minimalism and classical toccatas and the like. It's also in line with the philosophy of my old program
RGS (which I may transmogrify into some sort of iPhone form). RGS is a real time sonic spectrogram paint program, and playing with it makes you realize that there is no real difference between chords, timbres, beats, rhythms and other characteristics of music - it's a matter of scale. Beatless music is an attempt to explore the scale of events below the level of a beat - and the new SrutiBox Churn feature is really good at that.
Here's an example of my "Beatless" music:
Attention All Passengers", made with tape loops on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, an EQ box and a Casio keyboard.