Love mayhem? Love metal music, throttled all the way up into a “War Cry”? QWERTY keyboard ain’t quite gonna cut it. You’ll want to build your own airplane throttle force feedback controller to transmit MIDI. Hint: it might help if you’re a skilled artist and sculptor in the Visual Arts MFA program at the University […]

As musicians, it matters to us, I think, how music is consumed and distributed. Dave McLauchlan of the Windows Media Devices Group at Microsoft had plenty to say about the technologies that drive their devices. As a member of the team behind PlaysForSure, though, he also had some mythbusting to do on the Zune front. […]

Portable music player technology isn’t as simple as it once was. With digital music files have come new restrictions from the music labels on how music is played and transferred, as well as discussion of various specifications for connecting devices to computers. In a June 16 story on Platform-Agnostic Drag-and-Drop Music Listening, I suggested lovers […]

I’ll be teaching a new course, based on Mac interactive tech and featuring Apple’s free developer tool Quartz Composer, at the new 3rd Ward space in Brooklyn (East Williamsburg aka Bushwick). 3rd Ward is an enormous “workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals”: think the artist equivalent of a gym membership plus enormous […]

I’ll be teaching a new course, based on Mac interactive tech and featuring Apple’s free developer tool Quartz Composer, at the new 3rd Ward space in Brooklyn (East Williamsburg aka Bushwick). 3rd Ward is an enormous “workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals”: think the artist equivalent of a gym membership plus enormous […]

I’ll be teaching a new course, based on Mac interactive tech and featuring Apple’s free developer tool Quartz Composer, at the new 3rd Ward space in Brooklyn (East Williamsburg aka Bushwick). 3rd Ward is an enormous “workspace and studio facility for artists & creative professionals”: think the artist equivalent of a gym membership plus enormous […]

We’re long past the days when we believed running screen savers would stop phospher burn-in (though there are days when I miss After Dark). Now we can run screen savers that imagine, through genetic algorithms, our computers “dreaming of electric sheep.” Electric Sheep is software that produces evolving paintings that can be synthesized by distributed […]

As ActionScript has gotten more powerful, some simple animation operations in Flash have gradually required more code, as opposed to the “shorthand” of earlier versions. Meanwhile, the open source Processing project has built a simple, elegant language based on Java that’s powerful, yet surprisingly accessible to non-programmers — and free. Brevity is sort of “Flash […]

Steve Jarvis sets a new speed record for providing impressions of new software. Here’s how Ableton Live 6 is working for him on his Macbook (pictured): A few impressions from about an hour of playing around with the Live6 beta last night: It’s BETA. Still lots of bugs (mostly small) and missing features (e.g., no […]

There’s nothing quite like the razor-sharp, analog vector graphics in games like Asteroids, Tempest, Battle Zone, and (my personal fave) Star Wars. They’re difficult to emulate using standard computer software. Our friend James Grahame notes that these fantastic graphics have now made their way into the PCI slot of your computer: ZVG Vector Arcade Interface […]