Laptop musicians, had enough of people saying you look like you might be checking your email? Try actually checking your email. That’ll show ’em. David Battino (who also runs O’Reilly’s Digital Media site) did an “advertorial” for Electronic Musician on Frontier Design’s AlphaTrack. He goes into lots of details as far as assignments, but as a quick “because it’s there” gimmick, assigns a function key to an AppleScript for checking email. This being CDM, I’d want to go further, like assigning the contents of your email server to a wild visualization in Processing or something. But David does have some great tips for using the AlphaTrack, beyond just silencing (or encouraging?) laptop music critics:

Frontier Alpha Track:
The Sound of One Fader Sliding

And yes, it will make this t-shirt into a lie.