After the post yesterday I have received some questions and suggestions about looking into TouchOSC. Thanks for the feedback! Back in the days when the blog was hosted using Zope, I got bugged down with spam comments and pingbacks to the degree that I just disabled the whole lot. When revamping the site as a Rails app I didn’t even bother to develop a solution for comments, so it has become pretty much of a monologue…
Anyway, TouchOSC is one of several iPhone/iPad applications available that can communicate with Max using OpenSoundControl. It is a nice application, and could e.g. be used to to mimic the Monome. Part of what makes TouchOSC attractive it the fact that it offers possibilities for customizing the user interface.
Another interesting app offering the same, using standard Max objects to build the interface, is c74.
But when it comes to the kind of interface that I am currently working on, they both fall short. As the screenshot illustrates below, TouchOSC has a GUI widget for controlling two-dimensional positions. But the widget is only able to cater for one point, and one would therefore need to have several of them next to each other. That limits spatial resolution. But more important it greatly reduce the intuitive visual feedback on how different sources relates to each other.
The OSCemote app is getting closer, with genuin support for multiple points within the same interface. However it is not able to keep displaying the positions on the screen once the fingers are released.
If the features for 2D-positional data of the two applications could be bridged, that would make for a nice addition to both of them.
And while I’m on the feature request bag, I am also wondering what Stantum (previously JazzMutant) will be up to next. IMHO the software developed for the Lemur would make for an awesome iPad app. Just take a look at work Mathieu Chamagne was doing several years ago:
PS: The fancy framing of the screenshots is curtesy of the handy iPhone Screentaker application.
