Apple users may not know the name – FL Studio, formerly Fruity Loops, is a favorite on Windows – but FL is a favorite music making tool of the bedroom computer producer everyman. (Everywoman?) So, its imminent appearance on the iPad tablet is eagerly anticipated, even in the aftermath of GarageBand. Developers Image-Line, an independent software house from Belgium, delivered the first hands-on video today.
It’s worth pointing to the work of stretta, to compare the sorts of things people imagined the iPad would do before it did anything. Formerly of MOTU, and best known as the creator of wonderful patches for the monome grid, he imagined the product demo below before the iPad had even shipped:
The software is a functional prototype running in MaxMSP which I recorded with a screen capture program. I composited this onto a foam core cutout of a picture of an iPad with After Effects. The finger touches are a complex choreographed dance that I had to memorize and perform in one take.
See his blog post today. The video is striking. Of course, I still wonder – what’s the next big idea?
Update – since I seem to be potentially misinterpreted here – yes. These are all ideas seen elsewhere, seen regularly on the Lemur. I’m not making any claim on the novelty of stretta’s original mockup – actually, I’m more amused by how hard it was to try to fake an iPad without one in hand! If there is a lesson here, I’d say it’s ship your ideas, and consider what sorts of ideas other people won’t ship.