Whilst I have been sitting at my parents house looking at various jobs, applying for various roles, etc. I have come to start my random dives into the web development world again, this was in no small part to a new project site that myself and a friend have decided to start up. This site was originally going to be running a copy of WordPress 3.0 setup as a CMS with a custom theme and some plugins to provide the functionality we required, however after some initial testing (read messing about with..) I made the decision to use a proper fully fledged CMS as WordPress whilst being amazing at what it does i.e. blogging, is not really suited to being a CMS. This is when I started to look into CMS applications for the site going on what I’d used before, which was Mambo / Joomla.

Mambo / Joomla whilst again very very good systems, were a little too complex for what the site needs and in my opinion a little bloated and full of things we just would never use. Yes I know there’s that age old saying “Never say never” but in this case I really don’t mind saying never as I think I found the answer to the CMS problems in…Drupal.

I’ve used Drupal on a site before and not really gotten along with it, thinking it was complicated and nothing made any sense, there were too many clicks to get where you wanted to be, theming was hard, blah blah, etc etc. needless to say I have since spent a little more time with Drupal in the past week and have changed all my opinions of the system around, and now think it’s actually one of the most feature rich, easy to use, and easy to theme content management systems available for the price….FREE!!!

I am currently re-familiarising myself with HTML, CSS, and PHP whilst building a custom template for Drupal which is something I’ve not done in about a year, but for some reason I don’t seem to have forgotten much and everything seems to be just falling right back into place where I left off. Now obviously theming an already existing CMS is not exactly as taxing as developing your own CMS which is what I was doing with this site originally before having too much work to be doing with uni, but I’m enjoying the design aspect as well as the development aspect of building this theme, and also playing with Drupal. We shall see where this leads, and if I get into a pickle with it, or if it turns out better than I thought.

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In the past 2 weeks I’ve also started on my fitness program again, however this time I’m following a preset program called P90X. I’m currently in the process of setting up another site for fitness related articles and information with the help of a very good friend of mine David Foley. David is the person responsible for getting me interested in fitness and working out properly, after seeing the results he got after not very long and just following a few simple rules. I will post an update on that when it’s all sorted and ready.

People who know me will know I’ve been working with a band called Ebullient on recording and producing a studio album and a live album, however due to me leaving Lincoln this is going to be an issue to keep recording. The singer of the band Ken Myers also flipped out at me for no reason after his cat got killed by a car, a few names were been thrown in my direction, blame was thrown at me for somethings that just were not under my control, and he decided that we were no longer friends and he didn’t want to work with me again. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with the entire band and am sad that things had to be ruined by such a sad issue (for what it’s worth I am sorry the cat got killed Ken but it was not my fault…I can’t even drive) however my time with the band has been fantastic, they have all become good friends of mine and I hope to keep it that way in coming years.

The Ebullient Kick-Ups Live album has been fully mixed in 5.1 surround sound for DVD release, and nearly completed in stereo for CD and MP3 release. The tracks for the studio album however have been recorded a few times now and the most recent time is the only time that really came out properly, unfortunately only one track has been mixed from the latest sessions so it doesn’t look like the studio album is going to happen which is a shame.

All in all been a pretty good month but at the same time a sad month. I am going to miss every single one of my friends here, the city, and the university (including staff). I’ll be back at some point!

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The tenancy on my house ends at the end of June which means that I’m going to have to leave all my friends here and move back to my parents in Reading, which I’m not overly happy about to be honest. Since my degree course finished I have been hard at work getting the Ebullient studio and live albums completed, the live album is currently about 90% complete, and the studio album is taking a little longer than we thought.

Im back in the studio this week with Andy Reader and Chris Sands from Ebullient tracking the guitars, which has so far been going great using two different ProTools rigs allowing the both of them to work on tracks at the same time via Wi-Fi. Things are moving along but a little slower than we need really. Chris is off in Japan at the moment for a TV follow up on his hiccups, and Andy is at Download 2010 which does give me a little amount of time to start mixing the tracks so far.

I’ve been looking around Lincoln for jobs, however I’ve been coming up short so far I really want to be able to stay in Lincoln and do an MA in Digital Media, and stay with all my mates here as we’ve become pretty close over these years. I will be back I think, unless everyone moves away from here to where I am

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When a singer comes into your studio with maybe not a fantastic voice, but they can sing pretty much in tune and time with everything else, do you get them to record and record and record until you have enough parts to make up a whole vocal from the parts? In the past this was never really possible, yes you could splice tape together which took hours and hours and was an art in itself, but artists from that era trained their voices, or their ability with what ever instrument they played to make sure it wasn’t needed. Why do we not think about this anymore? Where has the performance gone?

When we use a DAW such as ProTools we have the ability to use plug-ins for all sorts of things, EQ, compression, gating, effects, you name it there’s probably a plug-in for it. One such plug-in that has become more and more widely used in recent years is the pitch correction plug-in whether it be Antares Auto-Tune, Celemony Melodyne, or just Logic’s built in pitch correction. These plug-ins are used most often to correct a vocal line to bring it to “perfect pitch”, which is normally done by the engineer during the mixing stage. Why do we as sound engineers feel the need to fix everything? I had a copy of Antares Auto-Tune a while ago and I don’t think I actually used it on a final mix once, why you may ask, well personally as a musician I think it takes the human out of the human. Correcting something to be “perfect” to me takes the character out of the music, and surely that’s what it’s all about, the character, the essence, the performance.

Imagine you had a permanent Auto-Tune or Melodyne built into you with no way to turn it off, would you really be happy walking around day after day talking in perfect pitch, singing in perfect pitch, and even sounding exactly the same as every one else out there? I think not some how, so why oh why is it done so often these days, when back in the 60′s-80′s, even the 90′s to some extent was it ok to be slightly out? I think it’s because it kept the human factor in the music, and that is what has changed about music today, it’s nothing to do with the audience wants to hear that in perfect pitch, or that it’s more pleasing to the ear, in fact it has nothing to do with what the audience want at all I don’t think. I think it’s more to do with what we as listeners have been brain washed into thinking is the right way for something to be heard and personally I think that’s wrong.

As a ProTools engineer, and as a musician with everything I record whether for myself, or for other artists, I never take that human factor out of the music unless they say to me that they want the vocals correcting, or the drum track in perfect time the entire way through, or maybe that guitar didn’t quite come in on the beat so can it be nudged slightly, but with every edit I make I always try to keep as much of the way it was played as I can. That way it keeps that character, that essence, the performance of it being played by a human player and not just a sequencer. Humans make mistakes, machines don’t when it comes to timing, you ask a drummer to keep a 4/4 beat going playing 16ths on the hi-hat, and at one point, they WILL go out of time due to fatigue, they loose track, or because they are just human. Computers can’t do that, they can’t purposely go out, they are designed not to, and yes you can put swing on something, but that’s still programmed, it doesn’t quite sound natural.

Where am I going with this? Well You could see this as a stab at Auto-Tune, or Melodyne, but it’s really not, they are great bits of software, or “tools” don’t get me wrong, but in my opinion they are not used as “tools”, but more of a way it is done and has to be done. Why are rock, jazz, or blues all but dying out? I think it’s because artists are not as good as they used to be in the past, artists rely on these so called “tools” to fix their problems, “Oh it’s ok, that can be fixed later with Auto-Tune” I hear all to often by singers, and I think to myself, well no wait a minute your meant to be able to sing that part, it’s your vocal after all, why can’t you sing it right in the first place? Most of the time, the answer is simple, we have the “tools” to fix it so why bother getting it perfect in the first place.

Music as a true art is dying, and it’s a sad state of affairs we are moving into when artists rely on these “tools” to give them that “perfect performance”. So is the true art of music dying? Well I think so yes. Welcome to the digital era I guess…..

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I came up with a few ideas along the way but something I’m constantly needing while at the gym is a weight calculator for my warm-up sets. Normally I would use the built-in calculator in iPhone OS3 and workout each weight individually as I needed to, so I thought that surely it would be easier and quicker to have all those individual weights in one place, and only have to enter one weight for them all to be calculated at the same time.

Working out these weights is a straight forward enough process as they are just percentages of the max weight I managed the previous session starting at 50%, and increasing 10% up to 90%. I needed this displayed in a logical way, and decided on the 100% weight being at the top, and then the warm-up weights going down the screen from 50% to 90%, with a button at the bottom of the list to make the magic happen so to speak.

I fired up Xcode and got to work on this little utility app. I am so used to developing using the cocos2d-iPhone framework that I accidentally fired up one of those templates and had to go back and start again with a standard View-based Application. This would require me to actually make use of Interface Builder which I’ve not used since I first looked at iPhone development back in November whilst working through the “Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK” book, which is fantastic by the way!

First stop for me was building the UI for the app so I fired up IB and got to it. The app uses one text field, some labels, and a round rect button so as far as interfaces go, this is pretty simple. Some labels are there specifically just to indicate weight percentages, whereas others hold the values of the weights and only become visible when the user has input their 100% weight.

As you can see in the screen shot it’s not the prettiest looking thing in the world, however it does the job it’s meant to and that’s what I care about at the moment. If your an iPhone developer you may have noticed the UIView has been changed to a UIControl which allows actions, that allows me to fire off stuff from touches to the view.

So that’s the interface built and ready, now for the coding of the actual thing. I spent about 10min thinking about what actually needed to happen to get everything to happen at the same time, I didn’t want to have one value update, then the next, then the next, and so on, I wanted everything to happen at the touch of the “Find Weights” button. This needed one utility method and a main method which did the updating, which wasn’t too much work to muddle through.

-(void)udpateLabels {

 float full = [fullField.text intValue];

 if (fullField.text.length > 0) {
 fiftyLabel.text = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"%2.1f", [self findPercent:50 :full]];
 sixtyLabel.text = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"%2.1f", [self findPercent:60 :full]];
 seventyLabel.text = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"%2.1f", [self findPercent:70 :full]];
 eightyLabel.text = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"%2.1f", [self findPercent:80 :full]];
 ninetyLabel.text = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"%2.1f", [self findPercent:90 :full]];
 }
}

-(float)findPercent:(int)percent : (float)full {
 float divide = full / 100;
 float result = divide * percent;

 return result;
}

The code for these methods is pretty simple, I first set a floating point to the contents of the text field then using an if statement check that a value is present, if there is no value then I do nothing and nothing is changed on screen, if however there is a value in the box then that value is run through the findPercent method. This utility method just runs the calculations on the 100% value to get back the value of the given percentage, for example if the percentage was 60% the method would look like this.

-(float)findPercent:60 percent : (float)full {
 float divide = full / 100;
 float result = divide * 60;

 return result;
 }

Doing things this way enables everything to happen at once as far as the user is aware, however the program will actually run through the if statement until each of the values is filled.

I’ve already found a few things I’m going to change with this app even though I’ve just built it and they are, in no particular order -

• Custom keyboard with a decimal point as the current numeric keyboard doesn’t offer one
• An alert window if the user hasn’t input a value for 100% but clicks the button
• Possibly removing the button completely and running the updateLabels method on the keyboard closing
• Much prettier UI

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So that’s the breakup and new year, onto January and things were sort of ok. I didn’t really want to waste any time in getting moved into the room where my studio currently was, which shocked Claire but I have a lot on my plate this year as far as uni goes, and can’t really waste any time in messing about with something that’s happened. I’m now pretty comfy in the room and getting on with work, finding it very productive in the setup I have now which is great!

My dissertation work is well and truly under way which is fantastic and I’ve also had the opportunity to go and work with the guys from The Pavement who I am doing my dissertation project with. I had a great time while in London during January and have already planned my next trip down during this month which I’m really looking forward to. The iPhone application I’m working on is coming along nicely I feel, and I’ve had to learn an awful lot along the way to getting it this far but it’s been great fun the whole way!

I think I’m getting a real liking of iPhone development, I haven’t really used IB (Interface Builder) all that much as I’m using cocos2d-iPhone game framework which pretty much requires you to get right down to the code and do everything in Objective-C2.0 which I’m really loving. I’m looking at making a few utility apps for my gym sessions with IB, however I need to re-read a few parts of the book I got to remind myself on how to actually use IB properly, it’s been a while since I used it I did however purchase my own iPhone Developer Program subscription finally so I can release apps to the store if I like, and also I’m free of having any uni obligations with the apps I develop (not that I had any anyway but hey), I am still a member of the uni developer team if they need me however.

The gym has become another important aspect of my life, which I now go to nearly every day and do either weight training, or cardio training. Since starting to do this in November and then stopping during December only starting again late in January I’ve felt so much better, not tired all the time, not as stressed, and much fitter. It’s also great to get out the habit of eating junk food, etc. I can’t remember having a McDonalds, or Burger King since October 2009 which for me is fantastic, I always used to use them as fast easy meals when I was hungry, sorting my nutrition out has been such a great thing.

So I think that just about brings me up to present day where I am sat in front of my MacBoook Pro typing this having a rest from coding during having my lunch. I’ll be posting more non uni related things up soon when I get the chance, however with all the work I have at present it’s hard to get any time to do anything of my own for fun. I will be making a special note to get at least one app at least developed of my own this month though, even if it is just a gym utility app!

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We have to find and enter a remix competition that actually exists. This means that by entering a contest of our own choosing we are in effect making our own brief to the assignment by using the conditions for the contest as the parameters of the brief. Along with creating the brief from the contest another advantage is that most, if not all of the available contests supply raw audio files, AKA stems, of the original track to work from. These could include the drum parts, guitar parts, vocal tracks, synths, or whatever else the original artist used in that track.

I had already chosen to go down this route of using an existing contest as the vehicle for my remix. Being a big fan of Celldweller (Twitter user name in the title) I have known of FiXT Remix for a while which hosts regular remix competitions for Klayton’s (Celldweller’s) work. I have worked on a remix for “Switchback” in the past which is an earlier Celldweller track, and recently with the release of the “Wish Upon A Blackstar” album chapters new competitions have opened up, one being the “So Long Sentiment” contest which is what I think I will use for my remix.

During the process of doing this remix I plan on making use of SoundCloud to host my remix when it is in a state I’m ready for the world to hear, and will most probably embed the audio into a post on here also. I’m really looking forward to doing this project however I am still debating whether to use ProTools, or Logic Pro 9 as they are both very capable DAW systems however I’m sure once I look into the features I will be using the most it one will win over the other, currently my bets are on Logic Pro 9 which I’m not as familiar with, as it has a much larger selection of instruments out of the box.

I will most likely be making use of my Spectrasonics virtual instruments rather heavily as I’ve been waiting for the opportunity to really get to use them, and possibly actually get around to using the Native Instruments Komplete 6 pack I have had for a while and still not installed. Throw in some weird and whacky effects such as vocoders, time stretching, and whatever else I can think of at the time, and this could turn out to be pretty interesting.

So until next time….

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I’m certainly glad I did as I’ve learnt so much this week, met some great people, and realised how much fun development of software is, even if it does have it’s plain irritating moments too.

When I first arrived on Monday at 10am I was introduced to everyone again which was great as I’d completely forgotten every ones names, and no doubt will forget a few again. I got a desk next to the main iPhone developer there and started to continue working on my app. It wasn’t before too long that Max the developer there suggested I work on the actual game logic and forget about the GUI for now, I took his advice and began working on the logic which in this case is a version of Conway’s Game of Life which will run the GUI and the sound engine when that is implemented.

Luckily I had access to an Open Source version of the game logic I was going to be using, however this was written in Objective-C and for a desktop platform so my first job was to re-write this into Objective-C 2.0 and also port it across to the iPhone platform. This took the best part of a day and a half as I’ve never used Objective-C in any way so this was a great learning experience for me!

Once the logic was coded I had to prove that it still worked. Before I started working on any of this I had already begun working on a test GUI for the app so was going to use that to test the logic, however this was advised against by Max and it was decided to test the logic I would use good old printf to output to console and forget the GUI elements for now.

For some reason my brain just would not engage on how to output the grid which is stored in two arrays to the console, my dad sat down with me one night and helped me to think logically about things again, when he did I realised pretty quick what I was doing wrong and had the output going to console.

The next job was to get a simple GUI working with a sample set of cells which I wrote some utility methods to do some of the work for me. These utility methods take a grid location and then convert those into screen co-ordinates for determining the location of some sprites on the screen. Up until this point I had been using a single sprite object and either add it to the layer or removing it, the problem with this way was that each time the sprite was placed each sprite used another chunk of memory, which there is precious little of on the iPhone and iPod Touch. Max told me about the AtlasSpriteManager in cocos2d-iPhone 0.8.2 and said that I should use that instead.

While saying this he also suggested I upgrade to the cocos2d-iPhone 0.9-Beta 2 framework to work with as AtlasSprites had been integrated with Sprites. We had a chat about it and I decided to give it a go. This began the headache of re-writing about 30% of the code I had worked on to make use of the new changes between the frameworks, I started a new project to do this just incase things didn’t work as planned ao I didn’t have to revert my code back to the previous version.

After spending a morning converting all my code it was working as before so I started to work on the sprites. This took most of the afternoon as I was pretty much on my own as Max didn’t know what did what in the 0.9 release the documentation for cocos2d definitely came in very helpful at this point! By the end of the day I had a working prototype working with the test cell setup method I had written when using console.

My next task was to make each cell in the grid I’d created respond to touch events. This required me to subclass CCSprite in my own sprite object, there was very little documentation about creating touchable sprites in the documentation or on the wiki site so I was going it pretty much alone on this, with only help from the forums for the older AtlasSprite way of doing things. I hit a lot of stumbling blocks along the way and after a day of trying to get this working and even with Max’s help still could not figure out what wasn’t working, I decided that the best course of action would be to revert back to using cocos2d-iPhone 0.8.2 as there are a lot more resources available for help, and if I need to ask Max for help he has used the framework.

As I had a copy of my 0.8.2 code on SVN I checked that back out and got about to re-writing it using my 0.9 code as a guide, this didn’t take too long as after a week of developing I was getting a much better understanding of the way things were working and what did what. After about an hour I had the code to the same point as my previous 0.9 code and everything was working. I tested everything was still working on both my iPhone 3GS and The Pavment iPod Touch 3rd gen, which to my joy everything worked with no problem.

At this point it was Friday evening, I had made a lot of progress and then gone backwards, then forwards again. I don’t see this as a bad thing as I was using a BETA framework which has not been adopted by a lot of people so I really was working on the breaking edge of things, the decision to revert back will hopefully mean that things can progress much faster from this point onwards. When the 0.9 framework has been used more widely I will look into moving my app back across to that as it was marginally faster.

My next task on the app is to create a few variables to store the previous state of a cell, then only redraw the AtlasSprite for that cell if it has changed from it’s previous state, as currently every cell is being redrawn in every step of the grid which will start to cripple the frame rate when there are a lot of cells in the grid at one time. I’m currently working with a 16 * 24 grid which is splitting the iPhone screen into 20 pixel cells, while this is ok for testing the eventual goal is to have a much finer cell size making the GUI look more impressive as generations increase.

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I have started to get the hang of using Xcode after using it for a longer time now. I’m not overly keen on the Interface Builder however as I’m using Cocos2d-iPhone I shouldn’t need to make much use of Interface Builder. I feel that after really learning how it all works and what does what then it is a really powerful tool, however currently it just seems to be quicker for me to hand-code what I’m trying to do. This could be a stupid idea on my part but only time will tell.

My application has started to take shape finally after a few weeks of sitting in a state where I could register taps on the screen as screen co-ordinates in console, which seems to be pretty much game development 101 sort of stuff. Now moving on a bit from that I have (with a bit of back down to earth help from my dad) managed to get a virtual 20x20px grid working in my touch layer of the game so that a touch within a certain 20x20px cell is registered as one location on screen, for example, if a user touched the screen at screen co-ordinates (3,19) then that would be cell (1,1) in the console, however if a user touches (25,19) then that would be grid cell (2,1).

This has taken me a while to get working as for some reason I completely forgot that screen co-ordinates are only numbers, and there can only be a certain amount of pixels on the screen, once my dad had reminded me of this fact I was away and could finally get my grid working. Currently the only thing it can do is log the start location, end location, and also track a drag through the grid cells to the console.

The next step for me is to get a 20x20px sprite to stick to the location where the user has tapped but to use the grid cell as its reference, for example, if cell (1,1) is screen co-ordinate (0-19, 0-19) and a user touched (13, 5) then the sprite would not use (13, 5) as its anchor point, but instead will use (0, 0) as its anchor, sprites should anchor from the bottom left corner using this method. Once I have a single sprite working I will then look into getting multiple sprites working at once, and then onto tracking a drag work either placing a sprite or removing an instance of one depending on where the user has dragged their finger.

Once I have this working I’ll actually get around to posting some example code in a short post soon.

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I’ve had a pretty decent time this Christmas, I’ve met up with a few old friends, still need to see one of them, done a bit of work but not enough I’ve really fallen behind on that, and I’ve also messed with my server to aid in development stuff. So I shall address these things in order (if there is such a thing).

Christmas

I suppose it’s only fitting to put this section first as it is probably the biggest thing that’s going on at the moment. I returned home to Reading to my parents house for Christmas on 17th December, I had a meeting in London on 18th December with The Pavement to discuss an iPhone app which went pretty well, I do think I shall be around London a fair bit in the coming months. I got back to my parents finding it had snowed while I was away which was great but it did play absolute havoc with traveling which was great fun!

Moving on a few days I met up with a few friends, spent a day in Reading in Starbucks which was probably a mistake as I came home with a coffee high which I admit was great fun.

Along came Christmas day and I come downstairs a little late I admit due to going to sleep later than I wanted, open the usual presents of clothes, sweets, and some cheques which is good, and then while tidying up my dad turns around to my mum and said that he was certain there was another present for me, I was confused to say the least. He runs off upstairs and then comes back with a moderately large sized present, I was just lost at this point, start to unwrap it and notice a bar-code with the code A1297 under it, I knew I’d seen that code before and it suddenly hit me that it was an Apple code the brown box confused me but I was sure.

I opened the box to find a brand new Apple 17″ MacBook Pro which just took me completely by surprise. I was not expecting to get a new machine for Christmas but it turns out the my parents took pity on my MacBook Pro slowly dying on me. After all that surprise we sat down for a meal later that day which was awesome, I want another one!

Development and server

During this holiday I left Lincoln with the intention of doing as much of my uni work as I could, as it happens I’ve done nearly nothing towards my uni work. This has annoyed me as I had it all planned out, and I have a lot to get done including my first two chapters of my dissertation, and my live production writeup, oh for the want of more time to get this done!

I have started to re-read my “Programming in Objective-C 2.0″ book to try to get around my head how certain things work in the language. I have also bought another iPhone development book called “iPhone Game Development – Developer Reference” which is a Wiley book. I’ve had a read of a few parts of it and so far I’m pretty impressed with it, we shall see if it actually helps me or not however, I am thinking about getting a few more of their books as they are pretty good.

To make sure I don’t loose any of my development work I’ve spent some time on setting up Subversion on my server along with Mantis issue tracking software, this should enable the guys at The Pavement to help me out with some of the stuff to do with the project, and also so I don’t need to constantly make sure I have all my code with me wherever I am. If I can access my SVN server then I can access all my code. I’ve managed to setup Xcode 3 to work with my SVN repos so I don’t even need a separate SVN client.

I’ve also had a bit of a mess about with updating the server, but for some reason updating Apache, and PHP managed to break the entire server so I had to restore from a backup image. All sorted again now, and all updated with a little more speed added for fun.

Well I think that about ends this stupidly long post, hopefully the next one will actually have more of a point to it

Adam

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