Apple today, alongside beefed-up iMacs with quad-core and Mac Pro towers with twelve, introduced a $69 Bluetooth trackpad accessory with multi-touch gesture support. http://www.apple.com/magictrackpad/ I’m not a huge fan of trackpads over mice, but yes, this does give you a cheap multi-touch input to play with. And we haven’t seen much in the dirt-cheap, under-$100 […]

Speaking in Hamburg to a terrific group of assembled locals from a variety of design backgrounds. And yes, this is the other part of my life behind me. I just seem to generally skip the years 1700-1985. Go figure. The history of music and the history of music notation are closely intertwined. Now, digital languages […]

Argos Interface Builder, v0.20 from Dimitri Diakopoulos on Vimeo. You know the game: you decide you want exactly 8 knobs and 10 faders. But your hardware interface has 8 knobs and 8 faders. And then you realize you could use 4 more knobs. The appeal of touch interfaces is clear: you get controls that grow […]

What happens when an interface is no longer locked to the screen? What about making control simply work from your hand, on a different screen, with awareness of the world around it? Simple as the early implementations may be, that’s really the vision behind mobile control applications for music and visuals. c74 is a lovely […]

RFID tags may have negative privacy associations when they’re used without someone’s knowledge. But embed these simple identifiers intentionally, and they can be a cheap, flexible way of tagging the world around you. Add OSC support with a free tool, and you can make anything into a basic music controller. That’s what Martin Kaltenbrunner – […]

Ready to evolve past the mouse and keyboard? Squidy helps bind together all the possible “natural” user interfaces by putting touch, ink, speech, and vision and tracking together in a powerful set of libraries. In other words, if you’ve got a novel interface, Squidy will help you not only make sense of it, but use […]

Software doesn’t have to mean virtualizing everything and letting go of physical objects. On the contrary, it can create all sots of imaginative, new ways of mapping musical ideas to the physical world. And that’s how we wind up with a walnut drum sequencer. There’s something about virtual drum machines and snacks. We’ve seen bubblegum […]