Before we start... here are some of my fav instruments...



QY70 - Awesome musical possibilities. PlayFX is fantastic - More later.



MPC 1000 - Just hit it - More later.



Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) - Nothing has ever come close to a perfect audio editor and nothing has ever come close to the control of CEP. More later...



OR...



I had the Supernova II before, to me the Radias sounds better. Slightly better IO on the Novation. However, what's important here is realtime audio mangling, the total break down of what's in and what's out... More later...

New horizons in sound now as Roger plays a solo on the electric shirt collar...

By daytime I'm a mild mannered developer and hacker. I fix people computers, recover their data, fix up websites - that kinda thing. I enjoy it.

By night I make strange noises and build strange new designs.

This is just to say "it starts here".

The end result should be a user programmable system for the creation of mad audio. No holds barred, all options are possible. Speak soon.

Getting started with iPhone/iPod development

It needn't be _too_ expensive.

Here's a reasonable route that, so far, I've found pretty good.

Buy a MacBook - you can get something bigger and more powerful but this will work fine. 800 pounds from www.argos.co.uk - this is your biggest expense.

Buy a Mini DVI to DVI adapter - 15 quid from the apple store on New Oxford Street. YMMV

Buy a 19" LCD screen - this will be essential for debugging. There simply isn't enough screen space EVER for debugging! You should be able to find one for a shade less than a 100 pounds.

Download the latest SDK from Apple.

Register as an Apple Developer

Pay up! Become a paid up Apple developer - 60 quid

2nd hand iPod - if you're not using the mobile network (or audio input) this will work fine - second hand units are around 80 to 100 pounds.

SOooooo...

1075 Pounds all in to start developing - Nearly all that cost is hardware.

Get stuck in - it might seem like a lot of money but this is fairly cheap in the grand scheme of things.

Laters, Matthew.

It's here....

Open Pandora lives and breathes... Hell yeah!

Video of a production model here...

Vid on Pocket Gamer

Now... Where's my one! Any minute, any minute, any minute ;-)

I'm not that rushed... I preordered in November last year. I'm patient!

Can't wait for this and, although I'm not the most vocal of supporters, it has been fascinating, and a learning experience of it's on) to watch the guys build this thing and all the trials and tribulations. The fact they've pulled it off in a year is astonishing.

Ohh... and it's just started snowing again.... could this chrimbo get any better (yup... I get to spend ages with my lovely missus in "the lodge" eating and boozing our way through my parents larder... then her parents larder!)

Rant in 0x0e minor...

This has bugged me for a LONG time. First of all this... my first machine didn't have "characters" at all. It was a KIM1 and characters were just a pattern on the 8 style LED read out - you couldn't even draw some letters like Z or X - yeah, very strange. After this I had a ZX81 - this didn't use ASCII either, in fact not at all, but plugged into the telly and displayed 8 by 8 pixel chars (a whole 64 of them).

The CPU of this machine and others had some very odd assembler ops to cope with converting "raw" numbers to displayable ones. Many CPUs did, it required extra flags and extra instructions... they were only there cos' it was quicker than software. The x86 still has them.

Eventually I had a real machine that had ASCII(ish).

So, I posit the question. Why isn't number 0 (0x00) the character '0', 0x01 is '1' up to 0x09 for '9' THEN A-Z...

Think about this. When we convert from integers to text strings we no longer have to add 0x30 to the output characters. It's worse still if you're printing hex as there's a gap between '9' and 'A' so you have to detect this and add a little more.

How many machine cycles have been wasted doing this? It might not seem important on a quad core, nitrogen cooled behemoth under your desk but when you study the problem the problem is still there.

This has carried on, we've inherited this baggage in the UNICODE spec... Strange...

Maybe that '0x00' was useful as a string terminator... fact is, you SHOULD remember the length of the string. Blimey 0xff is just as easy to detect in HW as 0x00 is if you want a terminator.

Yours,

Ranty 'burnttoy' MacRant.

Awful sorry!

I've had my Vaio die on me so I've got a cheapo Mac Book (the white one). I _will_ fix the old Vaio shortly after getting paid! Having just moved jobs I'm doing that "blimey... how long between pay cheques?" thing... *argh!*. Anyway, it has to get fixed so I can recover http://www.archway-london.co.uk and the canvas projects amongst other things (like all my SSE DSP code!)

Anyways - I've spent a huge amount of time working with Qt - which, as always, doth truely rock thy world (native C++ components in Webkit? Very bumpers!).

It even supports the HTML "Canvas" element.. cripes (very useful test bench). There are bugs... but then, ain't there always?

Been working on some QObject <-> Table Model stuff and autogenerated XML output of any QObject. Priddy sweet. More later.

Not Dead!

The project is going great (honest!) in theory I will "soon" (I anticipate New Year as I've a nice tasty chunk of chrimbo holiday coming up). So, what do I expect to deliver... the following.

The basic canvas/bauhaus font (scalable with various stroke/fill effects).

* MCP:NOTE:The font will be extended with various diacritics. Umlaut, circumflex, acute, grave, cedilla an dot.

Matrix math class with optimiser - a "simple" piece of code that supports various transforms (please note that this is not a replacement for a JS library such as Slyvester. It does not have that scope instead supporting scaling, translation, shear, rotation, identity, multiply and can also "optimise" a matrix multiply by creating a chunk of JS code that has multiply by 0, 1 and -1 optimised (away in the case of 0 or reduced to add or sub if the input is 1 to -1). Also, the entire multiply is loop unrolled so do NOT use this for large matrices! A vulgaris multiply is available. Matrices can also be output to an HTML table (very handy).

* MCP:NOTE:This will probably need "inverse" eventually.

Canvas based control point and control point view with grid and user grid. A "fake" canvas that can record canvas activity (somewhat like ExplorerCanvas). A canvas JS program can be used to supply the editing surface (although some metadata may be unavailable - MCP to confirm). Colour gradient editing _will_ work! This will include "in place" (that is actually on the screen) editing of linear and radial colour gradient positions. A property window that offers a colour gradient "ruler" and colour selector. However, I may not be able to offer anything other than RGB for the colour selector (yet) and probably no bitmap patterns either (yet - eventually more advanced Canvas effects will be possible such as using a Canvas as a pattern). In place editing of all control points with rubber banding, snap to user grid and shared user grids (with ruler). A property window and code output window (interactive) will be displayed.

Note system - pulled from the old "COD2" project - little more than a tree of notes really with a few clever pruning/renaming methods. Should let me write code on my crackberry via Opera Mini (seems to be holding together).