Friday 25 January 2008

Graphics libraries and scripting

In case you're interested, in addition to adding Lua-based scripting to noatikl, I've been using the same scripting engine in prototyping optikl, the generative visual art program we hope to release some time.

To help optikl and our other products go wherever we want, including maybe to mobile, I've written a common graphics library adaptor layer that sits on top of SDL, Juce and what have you. So this will let us, in future, write our apps once and simply recompiling them for whatever the target platform might be, without the need for any major rewrites. :)

Pete

Low-latency audio IO on a MacBook!

My brother (Tim Cole) has tried using Asio4All to get low-latency audio on his Mac Book, but ended-up having various problems with it.

Well, I’ve found the easiest solution on my MacBook and Mac Mini was to get a really cheap Firewire low-latency audio box, that works with both Windows XP and Mac OS X. This was the Behringer FCA202. There are lots of really cheap offers for this in the webstores right now, and it is a tremendous piece of kit!

I’ve been using this to work on ideas for the noatikl hyperinstrument and MIDI-control features.

For that matter, I wonder if we should use the term “hyperinstrument” or “hyper instrument”. I’ll stick with the first spelling, unless anybody can tell me otherwise! :)

Pete

intermorphic - at the start of 2008

For those of you who are keeping up with developments at intermorphic Towers, we sure had a lot of fun getting our new web store live - believe it or not, we finally got it running late on Christmas Eve. :) It was nice to be able to enjoy Christmas with that out of the way…!

Since then, we’ve been working hard to continue to improve and extend noatikl.

We’ve been trying to keep updates for noatikl coming every couple of weeks, and keep on adding new and interesting stuff. The next update will feature support for build-in trigger scripts and MIDI control of noatikl, which is very exciting as it takes noatikl into the realms of being a customisable hyperinstrument!

It has also been great to be able to work again with Tim Didymus, who authored two new Generative Drum template packs for noatikl. These are tremendous fun to use, and are proving a big hit.

We’ve also been working on behind-the-scenes ideas for optikl and liptikl (some of which have fed-in to noatikl, including the scripting engine).

It is lovely to find that past users of our previous software creations (such as Koan Pro and miniMIXA) keep on discovering the intermorphic site, and start playing with our new software. Welcome back to you all!

Looking forward to another innovative and exciting year,

Pete