One of the most beloved tools in Nintendo DS homebrew has become free software, under the GPL v3. Talk about restrictive platforms – the DS requires special hardware just to get this app to run. But even with a couple of people involved in development, that could mean better, more frequent updates. I also wonder […]

CoGe 1.0 Beta 2 Teaser and interactive Quad Warp demo from luma beamerz on Vimeo. CoGe 1.0 is now in its second public beta, bringing this modular, Quartz-Composer-based visualist app to Mac users. 1.0 introduced a new rendering pipeline, new user interface, new UI, and richer Quartz Composer support. Every single element of the visual […]

You’ll hear odd cynicism about people working on free software / open source projects. Something like, “well, harumph, it’s not as though a bunch of people will make this stuff in their free time.” Not only are these folks wrong, but you can actually visualize the contributions to source trees – and the results look […]

As multitouch becomes more widely available, there’s an opportunity to re-imagine all sorts of interfaces. And yes, that includes the guitar. I’m way behind on mentioning it, but thanks to all the readers who spotted the fascinating Misa digital guitar. Strings and frets are each replaced with digital touch controls, and the soundboard touchscreen is […]

What if a competition didn’t just encourage entrants to try to make a better product? What if it encouraged friendly rivalry between makers to produce entries that were also shared across the community? That’s the idea behind Digitópia’s upcoming series of competitions, now entering its third year. Digitópia itself is based in Porto, Portugal, at […]

I’m sorry this is just a home movie of a dog and not something cooler. Yes, I’ll be making some screenshots, too, an with the less-silly-looking GNOME/GTK theme. Open source video editing, after a long, slow start, is starting to mature far more quickly. OpenShot Video Editor , free software for Linux, has just hit […]

Screenshot of an early build by goatmilk on reddit. Some open source software, fairly or unfairly, has acquired a reputation for being “poor man’s” clones of commercial projects, outside the popular acceptance of Linux servers and Firefox browsers. Video software, worse, has typically been labeled unusable, because of the primitive state of some early projects. […]

“Decode,” “Digital Design Sesnsations,” opened last night in London at the Victoria & Albert museum in a show running through April. The event was held in collaboration with onedotzero, a digital arts label, presenting organization, and production firm.  Rarely has there been this kind of blow-out explosion of interactive design creativity on this scale. Decode […]

The monome phenomenon in music making owes a lot to a combination of powerful elements: elegant, human-readable messages that describe button presses (using OSC), open software built with a patching environment that anyone can modify and customize, and sample-slicing audio playback mayhem with the popular MLR tool. In one tutorial, you can learn about all […]

Clean is overrated. If you’re ready for a little digital dirt in your synth life, powered by the open-source Arduino hardware, Marc Nostromo’s Squealer is for you. Built atop the wonderful, Arduino-based Pocket Piano kit by Critter and Guitari, it’s a full-blown, simple, digitally-gritty synthesis engine. You get a monosynth, some fixed waveforms, a resonant […]