Apple giveth and Apple taketh – again. FireWire, back on the whole line. First, off, the good news coming out of Apple’s hardware refresh today: FireWire is again on the 13” MacBook, which is now confusingly called the MacBook Pro. It’s a FW800 port, too, which can be nice for fast storage. That means you […]

Apple giveth and Apple taketh – again. FireWire, back on the whole line. First, off, the good news coming out of Apple’s hardware refresh today: FireWire is again on the 13” MacBook, which is now confusingly called the MacBook Pro. It’s a FW800 port, too, which can be nice for fast storage. That means you […]

C4D CamGripTools from Cinema 4D Tutorials on Vimeo. Deride the mouse as you will. When it comes to two-dimensional control, the device is pretty amazing. It’s a reasonable way of amplifying small hand gestures into bigger gestures on a 2D plane. But what about 3D interfaces? Suddenly, the mouse becomes like playing charades, telling someone […]

I really have no words for this one, other than there’s a hilarious APC40 meme happening on the Ableton forums. Is it love? Disdain? The APC as the new “All Your Base” for the Live warping set? Does it really matter? http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=116396 It’s good to know that, even as Ableton Live use has spread, us […]

As inspired by mememamo‘s Visual Space Music, I bought some Ikea Saxan curtains last year for DIY rear-projection experiments. Initially these were used for a series of pixel-cloud shaped screens at the Game On opening night. The Saxan curtains (US$4) were great for this kind of shaped, temporary screen. The white PEVA material is bright […]

The translation of music from something largely invisible to a physical object is oddly beautiful, even when imperfect. That’s part of why we’re working on the Tangible Interface Hackday – less than 48 hours away now. Here are a couple of additional sources of inspiration as we prepare. At bottom, Guy John has made a […]

  So, you’ve been looking at that Akai APC40. And it’s appealing. It’s got lots of lights and a huge array of buttons for triggering samples or video or what have you, and plenty of knobs and faders. Now the APC40 has some serious “indie” competition, though, in the form of Livid’s Ohm64. Let’s compare: […]

Shamus Young’s “Pixel City” feels like flying in a helicopter into the art from Ghost in the Shell, or discovering a metropolis inside your computer. The latest work from an undiscovered YouTube talent, the software itself will be released under an open source license. I don’t need to tell you this could inspire other experiments […]

Squarely in the “because you can” category: YouDisco is a research project at New York’s Eyebeam that simultaneously streams up to eight YouTube videos onto a rotating virtual disco ball. Frame rate is … well, impressive given what it’s doing. The project is the work of Jennifer Jacobs at Eyebeam “with the help of Jeff […]

Indaba Music, a community and suite of online tools for musicians, announced today they’ve revamped their online recording and production tool using Java and JavaFX. The result: a platform-agnostic, online interface that allows you to record music “directly to the Internet.” And the band Weezer is excited enough about it that they’re giving their official […]