On my way back from Guernsey earlier this summer I picked up an iPad at Gatwick. The iPad is still not available in Norway. It was mostly out of curiosity for the device, and to see how the difference in size alters the affordance as compared to the smaller iPhone. I am constantly reading and looking up PDF documents, mainly manuals and technical literature, and I expected the iPad to be preferable for this as compared to my laptop (stuck at the desk) or the iPhone (to small). In addition the work carried out within the French Virage research project has sparked my curiosity for multi-touch interfaces as control devices for live performance.
I have used it extensively over the summer, mostly for reading. I also have found it useful for reading papers online, and tend to read more international papers than Norwegian these days. In addition I find lots of useful learning material as video podcasts as well as at iTunesU.
Over the summer I have started looking into development for the Mac platform(s). A long term goal of this is to be able to explore the iPhone as a device for portable and geo-located sound art works.
In June I used Quartz Composer to develop a playback solution for the video screening program of the Contemporary Artists from South Africa at Galleri 3.14. For the screening program we had a mix of 4:3 and 16:9, PAL and NTSC, SD and HD videos to be played back as a synchronized dual video projection. Having abandoned using the Dave Jones owned by KHIB for playback, as all videos would have to be reduced to SD resolution, I ended up developing a solution using Quartz Composer for playback from two mini-macs using OSC for communicating sync information.
The application worked for us. It is not quite ready for prime time as a public release, but definitively sparked my interest in learning more on Quartz Composer, and how it might be integrated into custom applications.
The screenshot above is a simple proof of concept of a standalone application rendering a simple Quartz composition. Pardon the pathetic visual result, that was not the main focus this time.
