Nonsensor: Mike's Blog

Can the iPad be a functional music tool?

Mike Propst — 2010-06-04T17:51:00+00:00

Not long after the App Store opened, music creation programs for the iPhone started to trickle in. Some were downright amazing, considering they were operating on a freaking phone. And considering a sequencer I'd demoed for Windows Mobile wanted $75 for the full version, even the "expensive" ones were a bargain and a half. So when the iPad came out, one of the reasons I jumped on it so fast was the potential for music software on it.

But so far, the story is not quite what I'd hoped. Toys far outnumber legit tools, ports of iPod software are delayed and often come at extra cost, and some of the most promising ideas haven't convinced me they're not vaporware. But useful stuff is starting to make its way into the app store.

GrooveMaker (Free to $9.99)

IK Multimedia is one of the first (only?) pro music software companies to have a strong presence in the App Store. So why does their first app have "groove" - a sure sign of non-pro music software - in the title? Testing the waters I guess. The iPad is not a technologist's device, but it sure seems to me that that's a great reason why it could be a musician's device. I don't want to take pre-made loops and string them together in "remixes," but that's apparently what IK thinks I should be doing. Gotta give props to the interface, it's very nice and easy to use, but it does present a problem that most iPad apps have: it mimics a real-world metaphor too much. You could do anything with the multi-touch screen, so why do news programs look like newspapers and "groove" apps look like hardware grooveboxes?

RJ Voyager (Free)

This crazy thing is also a music toy made for loop-based "remixing" that succeeds in two key places that IK's box fails: it has a unique interface that takes advantage of the unique device, and it lets you use your own sounds and loops. You could very easily play a show with this thing, and the learning curve is zilch. Really one of the more awesome devices out there in App-land.

Beatwave (Free)

Another toy, essentially, but a fun one. Essentially a matrix sequencer, with a couple drum layers on the bottom rows and some pitched sounds in the rest of the rows. The twist is, there are 4 layers, each with its own potential sound, and all the pitched notes are made to sound good. You can't screw up. You can then mix the levels of each layer, add reverb, and algorithmically "morph" the sequence. It's very cool, very ingenious, and though you can't import your own sounds, you can buy more. My biggest gripes are that the pattern has an unchangeable length and the sound overall is pleasant, new age, and background-ish. So it's a lot more about having fun than creating something with true personality.

SunVox ($4.99)

Now here's a real tool. But if it looks a little inscrutable, that's because it is - it's based on the trackers of yore. See, back before musician-friendly piano-roll style sequencing was popular in anything but the most high end music software, DIY computer music enthusiasts used software called trackers. And their interfaces were horrible. They can produce professional sounding results, sure - I played in a band whose producer created everything in a tracker called Buzz and it was slick as anything - but man are they hard to use. This one is no exception.

Korg iElectribe ($9.99)

Speaking of emulating hardware devices... this one replicates an actual existing hardware device, The Korg Electribe series of hardware sequencers. And in this case, that's actually a good thing. They're based on a TR-808 style light-up step sequencer, but their strength comes from great tweakability and realtime manipulation of the sounds. Build some patterns, hit play, and twist knobs to your heart's content. This app recreates all of that faithfully and includes WAV export. And it's the only real no-brainer in the App Store right now.

AC-7 Pro Control ($9.99)

It may not do as much as the promised Midipad (linked above), which also includes DJ-style scratch pads and what looks like an Ableton loop launcher, but at least this exists. The AC-7 is essentially a hardware external controller for your DAW software, the kind with transport control, motorized faders, a jog wheel, and lots of neato buttons so you don't have to navigate through menus and learn key commands. Except instead of hardware, of course it's a touchscreen. It requires a bit of setting up on the PC side (including a wi-fi MIDI driver made for... the Nintendo DS? sounds fun...), but in the end it set up much easier than any hardware controller I've ever used and worked better with Cubase to boot. I should probably note that even factoring in the cost of the iPad, the AC-7 Pro is still way cheaper than a comparable hardware device.

So what's the answer to the question in the post title? I suppose yes, although it's interesting that the one completely indispensable tool I've found so far is actually something to assist me with music on the computer rather than a standalone program. But Korg's Electribe and the RJ Voyager, along with the AC-7's capability to interface with MIDI, do point to a really fun touchscreen future for music makers.

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It's almost here

Mike Propst — 2010-05-20T17:00:00+00:00

The finale...

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Bonus in the Fraud Department

Mike Propst — 2010-04-20T17:30:00+00:00

These. F**cking. Guys.

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The iPad 180

Mike Propst — 2010-04-16T17:09:00+00:00

It was not too long ago that I sat with the rest of the Blogsmith crew monitoring the Engadget coverage of Apple's iPad announcement keynote. The near-universal consensus at the end of the day was, of course, "what is this thing and why in Jobs's name would I pay 500 bones or more for it?" We'd speculated that it'd be a full fledged MacBook Pro with a touchscreen, something resembling an Apple netbook, and a million other variations. But no one had really imagined that it'd be a giant iPod Touch with a 4:3 screen. The more we thought about it, the more baffled and frustrated we were that we'd been screwed out of our touchscreen MacBooks.

But the Reality Distortion Field does tend to have a way of creeping up on Apple watchers, and pretty soon people started grabbing them up. Fulfillment seemed to plague Apple, which meant that someone had to be buying the things, even if the shortages were artificial. And the more people I knew who had them, and the more applications that started to surface, the more I knew that the music performance laptop that I was in the market for was going to slip through the cracks. More on that some other time.

So what happened with this thing and how did it get to me?

Reading and Watching

This is huge. The iPad is definitely something different from an iPod touch and something less than a true netbook, but it's definitely more than a regular e-reader. On my last trip to Orlando I was seated next to someone with a Kindle on one leg of the flight and someone with a Sony Reader on the next leg. Neither come close to the beauty of the iPad screen, and it seems to be equally stress-free on the eyes even while being backlit. There are .CBR format comic book reader apps, free Project Gutenberg books in Apple's iBooks store, and of course there's the Kindle App. One thing that'll strike you immediately about the Kindle app is that not only is it better looking than an actual hardware Kindle, it's much nicer than Apple's iBooks reader. That amuses me to no end, especially with its WhisperSync and really competitive book pricing. But the Kindle app will ultimately face the same battle against iBooks that Amazon MP3 does against iTunes, another inferior Apple competitor: tight integration with the device. While Apple's iBooks store is a lovely thing that works with the iPad so well, Kindle simply takes you to a web browser to buy books on Amazon. Not so bad, sure, but put the experience of a built-for-touch interface next to a regular website and there's not much contest. And of course, credit card info is all tied into the same account you buy your apps with, so I'll bet you anything everyone's got that set up.

Add to that the power of the video iPod functionality, the Netflix video application, and all the myriad video programs that are sure to come out, and you have a really appealing media viewer. As for that 1024x768 screen or the huge black bezel, something odd happens when you watch a movie. The black bezel blends with the black bars around widescreen movies, and you get an effect not unlike two wrongs making a right. I feel really apologist saying that, but there really is a nice black viewing field that helps suck you into the video. I've never been opposed to Steve Jobs and co's decision to leave Flash off their devices - it destroys netbooks and phones, it's not even kind to computers. And honestly the big loss is not the format (it isn't even that great), but the content, which in quite a few cases (YouTube, ABC Video, Crunchyroll) has already been ported to a native viewing experience.

Apps and the App Mentality

The browser-vs-native app issue is one that permeates the whole device. That's the success factor right there.I have a more traditional netbook, the ASUS eeePC 900 (in fact, it's one of the first ever netbooks), running an Ubuntu variant specifically made for the hardware. And regardless of the large supply of programs available to Gnome users through Apt (the original app "store"), most of your world on a netbook is viewed through the lens of a web browser. Sure, I had MPlayer and Comix and AbiWord on there, but Facebook is Facebook, Gmail is Gmail, and Twitter is sorely lacking on Linux. Viewing all these sites technically works on a netbook-sized screen, but it's hardly ideal. Intense JavaScript operates really slowly, and heavy Flash use (such as watching Keyboard Cat for 30 seconds on YouTube or even pretending that Hulu will work) threatens to melt the plastic case. The only part about my eeePC that's really nice is the OS itself. Why? Because it was built by some ASUS and Ubuntu fans to run specifically on the hardware. With these Apple devices that piss off open-computing advocates so bad, that philosophy extends to literally every third-party software application that you can run.

And a really exciting thing is happening with those third party developers. Over the past few years as server space, storage, and bandwidth becomes cheaper, applications have moved increasingly to the web. Web apps allowed people with no previous experience in software to become UI designers, and after the initial horror of that, many became really creative within the limitations that the browser imposes. But Apple almost singlehandedly altered the progress of software design when the SDK for the iPhone came out. Suddenly, a full-featured web app is not enough. Suddenly there is a smartphone with so much market share that the small screen is a necessity to design for. And those web app designers who got really creative by working within limitations suddenly had some of their limitations lifted. Now, with the iPad, one of the limitations they traded for (a small screen) is out the door as well. Touchscreen apps are a new field anyway, but this new breed of software folks, trained in HTML and professionally re-tooled by Jason Fried and Jesse James Garrett blog posts, have the power to blow interface design way open.

And that's the ultimate thing that makes the iPad the complete 180 device: its interface. As XKCD pointed out, it makes you feel like you're living in the future. Combine it with the thin form factor and start living out your fantasies of the Minority Report movie, whether you're browsing the web, making music, or just reading a book. The iPod's major innovation was the hard drive, the iPhone's innovation was a touchscreen that was finally responsive and high-res enough to replace hardware buttons completely. The iPad has no such innovation, which is why that initial reaction was so ... meh at best. But what it does have is a user experience that intrigues, delights, and gets the job done in simple but enjoyable ways that computer users just aren't used to. And I'm having a blast with it.

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SXSWi Recap

Mike Propst — 2010-03-21T12:06:00+00:00

Once again, another South By Southwest Interactive is over, and for me the music fest as well. Overall, SXSWi was probably better than last year's, but let me stress that that isn't saying a whole lot.

The Good

Jared Spool. Ever since Alex dragged me to one of his panels a few years ago, I have felt obligated to see the guy speak every year. He's entertaining, he's got a lot of numbers and research, and he draws conclusions that you can actually take home and use in your designs or business plans.
My 3-year-old Is My Usability Expert. Initially I was skeptical, considering the standard "my wife/kid/mom/dog looked at your design and we have some feedback" thing. But this panel by University of Florida educator Dave Stanton made me want to take one of his classes. He rocked some science and brought the numbers, not to mention his case study: an eye-opening screencast of the titular 3-year-old playing online games focused at her age group.
Chris Poole. The young 4chan founder actually has been devoting a decent amount of brain cycles to figuring out why the thing works, and his panel on how that can be applied to your site, web app, or campaign was really insightful.
AOL's presence. While not something I can use to better myself and my work, the fact that AOL was such a large force at SXSW (the whole thing, not just interactive) was inspirational and exciting. The Seed booth was excellent, the response to the pitch (yes, our team did some pitching --who better?) was overwhelmingly positive, and I can't help but think AOL's image in the eyes of the tech-savvy is finally turning around. Not to mention we were able to attach some faces to those voices on the phone.

The Bad

Commercials. When I go to a panel about prototyping, I neither expect nor want what amounts to a commercial for your favorite wireframing tool. Were you paid by them? Likewise, for four years now there has been at least one Drupal advertisement panel disguised as an intriguing look at website CMSs.
Surface scraping. I realize some talks are not that long and don't have time to go into great detail, but if I feel like you've glossed over everything rather than really getting to the bones of it, you should maybe narrow your topic. After seeing Spool and Stanton, I felt even more dismayed by the lack of meat on these presentational bones. I want giant data dumps that I'll be thinking about for weeks to come, not overviews of single chapters in books I've already read. And I definitely don't want to see people just showing off their work while lamely "umm"-ing their way through explaining absolutely nothing about how it applies to me or my own work.
Overcrowding. Apparently somewhere around 12,000 attendees registered this year, the first time interactive badge sales outstripped music ones. The conference has spilled into the Hilton, the Marriott, and the Radisson, but that really isn't the problem. The problem seems to be that no one quite knows how to estimate which panels will be popular. Giant ballrooms sit relatively empty while small meeting rooms spill out into the hallways, letting one in as one comes out.
The iPhone app. Constant reloading, resetting to the first day, no panelist names in descriptions, inability to list events by venue... it was much tougher to get around using the iPhone app than the mobile-friendly site of last year.

Like I said, overall it was a better experience than last year's, but I think I'm even more solidified in my plans to do a panel next year...

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RIP Alex Chilton

Mike Propst — 2010-03-18T18:00:00+00:00

SXSW recaps coming, but for now...

Alex Chilton, the influential musician and producer who worked first with The Box Tops and then with the power pop group Big Star, died this week from a heart attack at age 59.

Chilton is somebody who has really started to influence me in a huge way as I've started to play more pop-oriented, "accessible" music. Big Star were an anachronism when they came out, a Beatles/Byrds-influenced shiny pop group in the early '70s heyday of heavy metal. They enjoyed few record sales, and an interview recorded after their second album finds Chilton calling their first one "rare" and hard to find. But their sound looked as much to the future as the past, and by the 1980s bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements were making a solid living with a jangly Big-Star-influenced sound.

An earlier follower of theirs, Cheap Trick, brought "In The Street" back when they covered it as the theme song to "That 70s Show."

Here's Alex Chilton with his first band, the Box Tops. Even your mom knows this song:

And here's one of those cheesy YouTube slide shows of my favorite Big Star song, "The Ballad of El Goodo"

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What I did on my blog's vacation, part 9 of 3

Mike Propst — 2010-01-20T23:29:00+00:00

I've been out of it for quite some time, so I thought I'd update on some of the wonderful things that I did during those dark, dark days. People who know what I work on probably have a pretty good idea of where most of that time went (plantin' seeds, yaknow), but it wasn't all Gavin-directed slave driving.

For one, I bought a snappy little netbook. They're quite the thing; all the kids seem to have one. And these days, they're sturdily built, powerful machines for their size. They can run Windows XP and MS Office, and have great multimedia capability.

Unfortunately, mine is not a product of these days.

The eeePC 900 is Asus's first netbook, and one of the first ever. It comes with a 4GB solid state drive but is otherwise spec'd out pretty much like a tiny, cheap plastic hybrid of a Speak & Spell and a Commodore 64. If only the keyboard were as big as the Speak & Spell's.

Actually, with a little gumption you can turn an older model eeePC into a nice little portable. The screen is great, the battery life is decent, and the multi-touch trackpad is pretty nice. First step is to kill the stock OS, which is a customized version of Xandros. That piece of crap choked on even the tiniest videos and web pages. I wonder how these things sold at all. It certainly doesn't do Linux advocacy any favors. So I searched around for a while until I found that some guys had made a eee-specific version of Ubuntu called (not so cleverly) eeebuntu that really whips this thing into shape.

Using the eeebuntu base install and throwing a few extra programs on, I was able to make this thing into a usable machine for browsing with Chrome, writing documents using AbiWord, reading ebooks by rotating the screen, and even watching fairly high-res video on MPlayer. With the 10.1 beta of Flash, little toy netbook processors can now hang in there with YouTube and (on a good day) Hulu. After the OS is in place, you can start upgrading the RAM and SSD and you have a decent machine.

I got the little doodad on Woot for a buck fifty, otherwise I probably wouldn't have it at all (somehow once I hit $200 I expect "real computer" specs), but it seems like they must have sold out stock because they've moved on to the slightly pricier XP-powered Acer Aspires. But if you do find one cheap and you're looking to play around a little, the eeePC 900 is a fun little slice of computer.

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Well, looky what we have here.

Mike Propst — 2010-01-09T17:32:00+00:00

It's a blog! I almost forgot I had one. I redesigned (if you're in an RSS reader, go check it out - it's ugly), threw in some new Blogsmith features (and by "new" I mean newer than a year old), and voila. World's fastest relaunch. I might even write in it this time.

New feature: Flickr in the sidebar. I take a lot of pictures from my iPhone and post to Flickr, so it probably qualifies as a blog as much as this one. Give it a look every now and again.

More later...

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Free advice - New startup idea

Mike Propst — 2009-04-30T19:48:00+00:00

Filed under: Fail, LOLTOMINO, ET Phone Home

So I had a bizarre dream last night. I was carrying around a notebook that, while apparently magical or something, was totally useless. I would write tiny little journal entries on its lined paper, and then move 10 pages or so before writing the next entry. Seemed really inefficient, except that when I'd turn back to older entries, there'd be more written in the space between. Not from me, either. They were @replies. Did I really just dream Twitter for paper?

It'll never top AdSense for print.

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The best thing I missed at SXSWi

Mike Propst — 2009-03-19T15:30:00+00:00

Filed under: Win, LOLTOMINO, Fry me to the moon

I arrived in plenty of time to park and get a good seat, but managed to forget my badge at home. Thankfully, the slides for Leah Buley's (of Adaptive Path) presentation "How to be a UX Team of One" are on Slideshare. It really is a lot more than what the name implies, so have a look.

UX Team Of One @ IA Summit 2008

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Let's get big

Mike Propst — 2009-02-16T10:02:00+00:00

It's been obvious since the dawn of time that small fonts are harder to read. It's also been the tendency of designers to work small. Thankfully the days of those aliased 6-point fonts in Flash-based sites of the 90s are gone, but as this this site proves, indulgence is still there.

Lately, the IM window has started to look too small so I'm reducing my own personal stress by talking to Celly in a massive 24px font. I've started using 14px (80%) myself in some design cases, but here's a great justification for using up to 16px/100%. A picture says a thousand words, right, and the photo of the magazine held next to the screen at comparative reading distances says a lot in this case.

Along with that rule, there are plenty of other great ones, most of which we should remember from design school but tend to forget when working on the web with all those limitations to rebel against.

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Empathy is the best yardstick

Mike Propst — 2009-02-09T17:04:00+00:00

There are plenty of rules and principles to basic usability of applications or websites. But experience is important, and watching your test subjects is important, because nothing is set in stone. On a case by case basis, you never know what principle you'll be going against, what rule you'll have to break because it doesn't make sense to stick with them.

In those cases, what are you left with? The only thing that matters, which is your judgment. Not your judgment as an experienced designer - sure, that factors into it - but your judgment as a user. Nothing's better for the designer than having to use his own software. And not just using the software, but using the software under the same circumstances as everyone else who has to use it. In a practical sense, that can mean anything from performance goals to screen resolution.

That's empathy. Walk a little while in your users' shoes. A little bit of empathy for the user up front saves the need for sympathy later.

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There goes another one

Mike Propst — 2009-02-03T17:55:00+00:00

Every few months or so, someone comes along and tries to play at being very innovative by taking a contradictory position. Usually that's just contradictory to logic. This self-described "CSS rant" is one such case. Try on for size the argument that it's impossible to separate content from presentation, so we should just give up. The followup really doesn't do much better, it just goes after the equally idiotic CSS proponents who can't seem to articulate their arguments in better ways than "you're an idiot."

The reason this was so easy is that tables have the correct semantics for doing layout. CSS doesn't. When you do layout you want to be have things adjust their sizes and positions based on not only their containers but also on their siblings. When the leftnav content grows you want the center div to grow to compensate, and vice versa. Table cells do this naturally. CSS DIVs do it only under extreme duress, and only by making assumptions about (and thus becoming tightly bound to) their underlying content, which undermines the whole point of CSS.

I can't even begin to point out what's wrong with this. Tables don't have any "semantics for doing layout" - or maybe they do, I can't really figure out what that statement means. I do know that tables were not meant to describe layout. Floats were not meant for layout either, at least not exactly, but valuing one difficult hack over another by trotting out an over-simplified example that shows that Mr. Garrett has very little understanding of the technology (especially the box model)... not really helping his argument.

Earlier in the page, he states that CSS is dependent on content order. Not so, as I proved today on a project where Celly insisted on having something first in the source even though it appears on the right. While Garrett demonstrates tables' "superiority" in other aspects, what does he do with the wrong source order? Nothing, because tables can't help that.

My opinion is pretty firm on the subject for various reasons, but this should explain pretty well.

I used to do things the table way.
I now do things with CSS.
My blood pressure is significantly lower these days.

Even simpler, I refute the people who say that "it's all hacks." To a tiny, tiny degree that is true. However. The basis for my opinion is this: I find it hard to believe that the language that contains such properties as "position" was not meant for layout.

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