arbi.trario.us

(via dropular)

2009-10-03T14:45:04+01:00

I' m trying to recreate a good Hendrix/Woodstock rhythm type of sound...

2009-09-19T14:32:43+01:00

I' m trying to recreate a good Hendrix/Woodstock rhythm type of sound with Garageband's amp and effects models, but it's a bit tricky. I'm slowly getting there, but I still find it much too muddy and a bit cheap sounding. Nevertheless, it's amazing how far you can get with Garageband – considering its price.

Also, the interface design for the amp and effects models is just delicious. Fantastic when you're more used to analog stompboxes than digital recording/effects trickery.

The iPhone 3GS's Oleophobic Goodness

2009-08-17T21:53:43+01:00

The iPhone 3GS's oleophobic screen is most likely its biggest innovation in the sense of what will still be relevant about this device ten years from now. As crazy as this might sound at a first glance, it might dawn upon you once you have used a 3GS for a while.

The screen getting disgustingly greasy might be one of the most inherent flaws in the designs of the original iPhone and the 3G. Ask any user about this, they will agree that the way their finger grease builds up on the screen is not only repulsive to look at, but also makes it difficult to read the screen if the incident light comes at an unfortunate angle.

Not only that, but the original/3G screen also poses considerable friction against your finger as it slides over the touch panel. In fact, it is not uncommon for your finger to get "stuck" temporarily, especially during quick motions with dry fingers. You know what, even Bill Buxton cited friction as one of the prime problems with touch input devices in a paper published in 1985. Yes, 1985.

The 3GS's oleophobic coating alleviates both issues considerably: By covering the touch panel with a special layer that prevents fat and oils from bonding with it (this is what "oleophobic" means - literally "afraid of oil"). Also, you can clean the device by simply wiping the the screen once with a piece of cloth - since there's no bonding with the surface, the grease comes off immediately, no scrubbing and rubbing necessary.

Similarly, the natural fats on your fingertip form a little "cushion" upon which your finger can glide smoothly across the screen, rather than making it stick. Especially if you try both a 3G and 3GS side by side, you will be amazed by how much the difference is noticeable. In fact, you won't want to use an iPhone without this coating ever again, believe me.

Bonding the oleophobic layer to the screen was apparently not an easy task, which explains why the iPhone hasn't have this feature right off the bat. Nevertheless (or maybe even because, since this gave us better means to compare it) the oleophobic screen is the one iPhone 3GS innovation that might still be remembered in ten years from now: I suppose such coatings (and their future derivatives) will be ubiquitous on touch screens 10 years from now, and the 3GS will be remembered as the device that started it.

App Update & Widget Update 1.6.2

2009-08-10T23:21:19+01:00

I just pushed another update to App Update and Widget Update, which (among other minor fixes) restores the ability to check MacUpdate.com.

This time, the search method is officially sanctioned by them, so it shouldn't break again so quickly!

App Update
Widget Update

Now this doesn't look like what a computer vision monochrome camera...

2009-06-02T00:18:26+01:00

Now this doesn't look like what a computer vision monochrome camera should output, right?

Well, I'm working on it!

(via Fex)

2009-05-28T23:21:53+01:00

(via Fex)

(via Maniacal Rage)

2009-05-27T23:02:55+01:00

(via Maniacal Rage)

Everyone knows the screeches of audio feedback, but do you know visual...

2009-05-18T22:35:08+01:00

Everyone knows the screeches of audio feedback, but do you know visual feedback?

I took one of our computer vision cameras (with a wide-angle lens), launched Touché, and filmed the tracking preview window showing the video feed of the camera.

What I got is a hypnotic vortex of visual feedback. Enjoy!

App Update & Widget Update 1.6.1

2009-05-17T23:52:46+01:00

Just real quick: I released an update to my widgets that should fix searching at MacUpdate.com, now that they've remodeled their search again.

App Update
Widget Update

That's me presenting at Adobe Germany last Saturday. The picture was...

2009-08-17T21:53:09+01:00

That's me presenting at Adobe Germany last Saturday. The picture was taken with an iPhone, so the quality is not the best.

Additionally, the photoset of my presentation at the Metalab last Friday is finally on Flickr, and thanks to @dChris' fantastic photography skills, the quality is amazing!

@dChris shot a couple of nice photos during my presentation at Metalab...

2009-05-14T23:55:46+01:00

@dChris shot a couple of nice photos during my presentation at Metalab on Friday.

I'll upload the whole set to Flickr once he sends me the high-res versions.

Edit: The full photoset is now on Flickr.

Public Babbling

2009-05-10T22:22:55+01:00

Some busy days are up ahead. Tomorrow evening at 8:00pm, I'll be speaking about multi-touch at the Metalab, which is a Viennese hackerspace.

Afterwards, I need to get home quickly, get a bit of sleep, and then fly to Munich in the morning to speak again at the NUI/Adobe Multi-Touch Summit.

While the latter is already sold out, the former event is completely free, so if you're interested to hear me talk, be there tomorrow!

(via k-l-e-v-o)

2009-04-28T23:57:33+01:00

(via k-l-e-v-o)

Cocotron and Third-Party DLLs

2009-04-28T00:32:57+01:00

As you might have noticed, Touchsmart TUIO uses the amazing Cocotron in order to use parts of my Cocoa tracker code on the HP Touchsmart PC, which runs (yuck!) Windows Vista.

While Cocotron has its quirks and is far from a full-fledged drop-in replacement for Apple's frameworks at the moment, one issue that drove me particularly nuts was not a missing class or method, but the way the Cocotron toolchain links Nextwindow's API in.

I'm really not an expert on Windows internals, let alone their DLL library format. Nevertheless, I understand that in order to link the DLL properly, you do not link directly to it, but rather to LIB file, which seems to contain symbol addresses (or something) for the DLL.

Annoyingly, I couldn't get this to work with Cocotron's toolchain at all. No matter what I linked in (either the DLL or any of the multiple LIB files bundled with the API), the linker would happily succeed, but the application would crash on launch when calling a DLL function. Firing up GDB only told me that my code tried to call a function at a garbage address.

Now, I don't really have any ideas what's going wrong here. I already find the idea of cross-compiling a Windows app on a Mac pretty amazing. To come to the point, there's a pretty simple solution: Determine the address at which a DLL function is loaded dynamically at run-time, using Windows' GetProcAddress function.

Here's a simple code snippet to show you how this is being done rather elegantly in Touchsmart TUIO (explanation below).

static HMODULE _dllHandle = NULL;

#define NWAPI(funcName, ...)    ((GetProcAddress(_dllHandle, (funcName)))(__VA_ARGS__))

void initDll() {
    if (NULL == _dllHandle)
            _dllHandle = LoadLibrary("NWMultiTouch.dll");

    if (NULL == _dllHandle)
        fprintf(stderr, "DLL fail.\n");
}

void sampleDllCall() {
    NWAPI("GetConnectedDisplayInfo", 1, NULL);
}

Even though most devs will get the idea from the code alone, here's a quick run-down. First, we define a static variable to hold the DLL handle. It's static because we don't need the handle to be visible outside this source file.

Second, we define a macro that takes a function name and an arbitrary amount of arguments. The macro will expand to a code block that dynamically determines the function address and funnels all the arguments into a call to this address. Sweet. Third, we need to define an init method that has to be called when our app launches (actually, just before the first use of our macro). If you want to get fancy, you could a check whether the DLL is already loaded into the macro, so you wouldn't have to think about calling the init function explicity.

Fourth, we simply have a demo DLL call here, which shows you how to use the API. Of course, I don't know how expensive a call to GetProcAddress is, so you might want to cache function addresses for functions that you call repeatedly or that are in the critical path of your application.

Nevertheless, I think this is a somewhat elegant solution if you're having the same issue with Cocotron.

kissmkb.jpg

2009-04-26T01:04:10+01:00

Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want.

2009-04-21T23:59:34+01:00

Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want.

Garrett Murray, and I couldn't agree more.

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube

2009-03-14T22:25:47+01:00

What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create ThruYou. In other words - what you see is what your hear.

Touchsmart TUIO 1.0b1 released

2009-03-09T02:54:55+01:00

I've just uploaded Touchsmart TUIO, my bridge application between the HP Touchsmart's screen and TUIO multitouch applications.

Actually, this should not only work with Touchsmart PCs, but with any PC equipped with a Nextwindow touch screen.

Contrary to my usual focus, this runs on Windows XP/Vista (because that's what the Touchsmart ships with).

As usually, the source is available, too.

More info about this project (as well as a video) is available here: http://gkaindl.com/software/touchsmart-tuio

By the way, this project is (partly) responsible for the unusual silence on this blog lately!

We're All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence

2009-02-19T00:50:35+01:00

An old NUI community update showed up in NetNewsWire today for some...

2009-02-10T23:19:19+01:00

An old NUI community update showed up in NetNewsWire today for some reason (probably changed GUUIDs). However, I haven't noticed this video before in which Touché is being used as a tracker. Nice stuff!

While Touché isn't explicitly mentioned, you can tell it's being used by the second demo app being the Coverflow demo that comes with it, which uses the Touché embedded framework, which in turn means that it can only be used with the Touché tracker.

I particularly like the Youtube comment about the fast response time of the tracker. This will get even better soon, since I have purchased a copy of Intel's C/C++ Compiler as well as their Math Kernel Library and Performance Primitives, which will be integrated into Touché in the near future (some quick testing has already shown considerable speed-ups just by compiling libdc1394 and OpenCV with icc instead of gcc and some compiler flag magic!). Don't worry, though, Touché will still be a 32/64-bit universal app that runs on PowerPC Macs as well. Stay tuned for more news about this!