Who does not like the Tenori-On? Pingmag published today an interview with Yu Nishibori, that throws light into the story behind the Tenori-On plus technical background. Hot reading tip of the day! Yu Nishibori also releases music on the Notype-label.
Don’t forget to check this flickr-pool on the making, development and prototyping of Tenori-On.
Circle is a new synthesizer. To me it seems a little bit like the counterpart of the golden age of software-instruments innovation, done by Native Instruments and Ableton, for instance with Traktor, Reaktor and Live. The emphasis in Circle is on building software-synthesis instruments and quickly trying out things. Necessary parameters are not hidden behind windows, but are plain visible and also directly editable. Most impressive are the drag and drop features. The clear screen design without annoying graphic-elements follows the interface design tradition of Ableton Live and the Native Instrument range.
Circle is not out yet. They are planning to get it out by May, the pricing will be at 149.00 Euro or 199.00 Dollar. A video from the Musikmesse Frankfurt demonstrating features and interaction design can be found at the Future Audio Workshop blog.
Maybe some words about Future Audio Workshop itself, that is also interesting:
Future Audio Workshop is a pan european collective of engineers, programmers and designers, with the main office based near the Connemara region of Ireland. Formed in 2007, FAW’s main aim is to create and develop exciting new audio software for the international community of musicians, sound designers and live performance artists.
I added a third little tutorial on how to make first steps into the wonderful world of Actionscript with Flex. This tutorial shows how to build a custom class, that extends the sprite class. The objects in this class are transformed, in this case by a rotation, and move autonomously when the objects are created on the screen. All this stuff is foremost one: simple. Look at the code.
Feels like BASIC
You can download it as well.
It’s the mid of the month again. As always I put interesting findings into this blog, that are somehow cool or something to think about it, like todays issue. Let’s do it like theorists!
Bruce Sterling needs no introduction. He is a Science Fiction author, but do not write Sci-Fi books anymore, instead design-theory and travels around the world. Sometimes I have the feeling, that he travels to all this talks, just in order to have cool videos online, like the one shown here.
Crap games. An aspect of game design, that is far too underappreciated. Enjoy this video, but beware of explicit talk. Nevertheless, you have games – 52 games! – on one cartridge. Some you really can’t play or win, because the level design or the gameplay suck. Are unplayable games computing games in nature? Or are they something else? Maybe more like audio-visual artifacts, assuming you to play, but not to win. Related: the B-Games competition.
What happens if you concentrate on creating new gaming ideas, instead of realizing the games? Three Hundred is such a case. It is an ongoing sketchbook of conceptional studies and ideas of realizing new forms of games. He did not manage all 300 sketches, but there are about 80 online. We hope to have more things to come.
RSS-feeds are a convenient way to stay connected to your favorite website. We offer a full fledged Digital Tools RSS-feed and the small sister Microcontent Feed that contains various findings in a tumbleblog-style.
Uhh, I love acid. And thanks to the solid taste of the mighty Independent Gaming Source I discovered this two games today, that make extensive use of acid as the music score. Game, Toy, Sound-Sequencer. The games are a little bot of everything, like “Space Invaders meets Jump’n’Run, R-Type and Doijin-Shooter”. Not much gaming elements, but all mixed up a little bit.Download them here.
You control the the player sprite and the music sequencer with the cursor keys, while jumping and shooting is done with X and C. Press X two times for double-jump. Music is getting loud and tricky from time to time. The sprites have a nice and reduced pixelstyle. It somehow reminds me on the game Dive from the Gamma256-collection.
This is basically a shooter. Press space to start the game. In the game you press X to shot and C to drip a bomb in order erase all bullets from the screen. The bullets are synchronized to the sequencer sound. Unfortunately I did not found any instance to change or modulate the sequencer data. That would be a cool feature, even if you had to modify a simple text-file. You can change the sequencer-data by shooting the white squares that appear on the enemies ship.
I didn’t test it, but you should also be able to replace the sound-data. They are stored as wave-files in the sound-folder of the game-directory. What I also like about these games: the usage of the keys C and X instead of Z and X, that most games from Japan and US use. Using C and X makes it seamless playable on qwerty and qwertz-keyboards – without changing the language scheme.
PS: I noticed, that the independent gaming source freshly opened up a database of indiegames. Good work! Clean and usable design.
Don’t click it is a research-study in interactive design from 2005 that follows a systematic approach of making complete interaction with the mouse, but without using the buttons. The websites informs about the history of mouse-interaction and delivers interesting statistics about button usage of the users. It also transforms: at first it’s really hard to resist clicking the button. But after a while you begin to wonder, why we still use the click? It’s like a miniature world. It made me see the click as a transitional frame of time in the history of computing, where CPU performance did matter and navigational elements were not be able to be as fluent as today. Nevertheless I think it’s unrealistic that we will abandon the click on some day. It is somehow similar to the QWERTY-Keyboard. At least we can doubt, that click-less designs really speed up work, like Benoit Espinola notices on his blog.
One of the biggest problems of getting into Actionscript with the new open source Framework “Flex” from Adobe is, to make instant use of Actionscript 3 to generate and modify things. Many people will convert from old Flash, Processing or whatever scripting facilities to Flex, because the Flash Player 9, that goes along with Actionscript is really enhanced. And Flex from Adobe offers an open source SDK, where you can develop cool applications straightaway for free.
Instant fun for beginners.
When you start to get this done, Adobe only will throw Flex-examples at you. Or examples and tutorials with Actionscript, that are far too advanced for the beginners “Hello World” level. I also searched forums: most people want to get done quickly and start out coding with Actionscript without all this things in mind, but don’t get support. That’s why I prepared three files, that let you start immediately with coding pleasure.
The first file is a template, that show two ways to get sprites, that were generated with Actionscript directly on the screen. It shows two techniques, that are not obvious, especially not for beginners. Don’t mind the details. Just start your projects and feel free to use my files to build upon.
The other file is more strapped down version of the above. It provides you just with an empty Flex canvas, a stub for the Actionscript and a timer to control and animate things that should appear on the screen. If you download and compile the file, not much happens. Just an empty canvas. But you can easily build scripted animations with it, also with Flex-elements, like text-boxes that jump around or buttons with bouncing width etc.
The third is at the Olympus of simplicity. I create some rotating objects on the screen, that are derived from a custom class I wrote, that extends the Sprite class.
