Dan Lipert

My crazy interview at Sakuracon

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 22:40:40 -0700

My crazy interview at Sakuracon

Cupify!

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 15:39:12 -0700

Cupify!:

Add cute and expressive faces to objects in your photo with
the ultimate purikura and anthropomorphization mashup.

About Me

Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:52:00 -0700

I’ve been developing iOS applications the past 4 years out of beautiful Portland, Oregon. I’m a co-founder of The Ministry of Apps, where we provide lean development, design, and marketing services to our clients. My passions include Augmented Reality, cutting edge web technologies, and geolocation.

To find out more about me, check out my :

Github or Twitter

Contact me at danlipert@gmail.com

Chromocam: Modernist iPhone Photography

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:22:06 -0700

You can check out my latest project, Chromocam over here, and be sure to check the blog and gallery which are both powered by tumblr. I am really excited about the app, and having the webpage up, the twitter up, and a new youtube video up is really inspiring to see. On this project I am a one man band, doing the web design, the iphone development, video editing, and graphic design. Phew… I have been putting in alot of time, but it has been worth it, and I find the inertia on this project overwhelming! I’m not the type to usually put in all-nighters, but I rocked out the youtube video for an entry in the Appsfire Appstar awards in a 10 hour video editing session. :)

Anyway, I can’t wait to share this project with everyone. It’s been really fun to work on, play with, and now promote, and I can’t wait to start work on the next iteration.

The Making of Chromocam: Hi-Res iPhoneography

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:29:04 -0700

Over at the iPhoneography blog, as well as at Life in LoFi, the authors are lamenting the fact that many iPhone apps save at a low resolution. And they are puzzled, as they should be. Why would some apps like CameraBag or MonoPhix save at nice resolutions, and yet others save at 320 x 480, the iPhone screen resolution? Well, the answer is… lazy programmers.

I can’t say that I blame the programmers though. Apple has not made it particularly easy to play with large image buffers in memory. Actually, they’ve made working with images extraordinarily easy, as long as you are just displaying them and maybe moving them here and there. But rotating, applying filters, working byte by byte with them gets a little trickier. I blame a particularly enticing line of code:

[view.layer renderInContext:UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext()];

What this does, in one shot, is take whatever view and dump its display to a coregraphics context. Then, you can use UIGraphicsGetImageFromCurrentImageContext() and you have a UIImage of whatever view you want. The problem with this, is that the maximum view size on the iphone is… 320 x 480. So that’s why you have tons of apps saving at that low resolution.

I will cover how to efficiently and safely deal with large images in another entry, but suffice it to say, it is hundreds of times more complex, and rotating, translating, and eating bytes of an image is pretty memory intensive, so special care must be taken not to crash your app. Interested developers should check out all the great info out there on coregraphics contexts. Or just wait for an upcoming entry…

Japanese Lighting and Denki Advertising

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:43:00 -0800

If you’ve ever been to Tokyo, or seen it in movies, you know that areas like Shinjuku and Shibuya are completely awash in light almost 24/7. There are huge neon structures peddling everything from pachinko and pornography to coffee and the iPhone. One might think that this incredible amount of advertising would be maddening, but for several reasons, Japan has managed to gracefully incorporate new technologies into their advertising while overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time.

Many of the signs you see away from the center of the city are strictly rainbow colored neon affairs, with multi-minute long sequences of various elements blinking and following in various rows and columns, often changing the typography and message of the signs in interesting ways. Here’s a music store:

As technology advanced, many stores went for LED matrices, mostly of the plug and play variety. They often had little SD slots to pop in whatever programming you had done up, and would play multi-color, multi-typeface messages with dozens of delightfully cheesy scrolling and flipping effects. Mostly, these are left outside all night, which is amazing because I think here in the US these probably wouldn’t last a few days.

Anyway, what I want to write about is the most inspiring thing I saw in Japan, and perhaps one of the best instances of the new forms of advertising and how effective they are. Outside of Shinjuku station there is an art installation called MYLORD Box, in an alleyway called Mosaic Street. It is a huge array of RGB LED’s combined with some simple infrared sensors to crudely detect touch. It is combined with an amazingly beautiful set of reactive visualizations, updated to reflect the seasons.

What’s amazing about this installation is that it is both truly a work of “new media art”, as well as an amazing advertisement. The name of the nearby department store is ‘MyLord’, and the amount of traffic gained from this thing is incredible. There are 2 or 3 people constantly with their hands all over it, as well as countless onlookers. And there are some small stickers proclaiming the name of the installation, a simple advertisement for the sponsors of the work.

MCRP v2 Track - Spoiled Fruit Basket

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:15:00 -0800

The MCRPv2 is kind of over, and here is my track:

MCRP V2 ayuh aka the easterislandhead - spoiled fruit basket by easterislandhead But although it seemed like a good idea to have this available to work on during the holidays since people typically have off and that sort of thing, it turned out nobody had time to work on it after all, so its being extended by a week. I might do some more work on mine but for the most part I think its done. I used completely new production techniques, so while I’m not super thrilled with how it came out, I have lots of ideas for future tracks. I’ll post again when all the tracks are in! Also I’ll do an ‘article’ post later since I am signed up for project52.

Monome & The Arduinome

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:58:00 -0800

In several of my videos and entries I have already made reference to either the monome or the arduinome project, without saying much about what it is all about. So, with my participation in the upcoming Monome Community Remix Project (v2), I thought I’d share some thoughts on the monome and my experiences.

First of all, the creators of the monome are amazing. They have designed an amazing project, and helped build a strong community of musicians and designers, financially supporting themselves in the process. Not only that, but they have shared their hard work with the world, open-sourcing the design and the software, enabling others like myself to DIY and save about $250 off their (totally worth it) $500 hand-made instrument. While I lean toward the more hacktivismo open-source anti-capitalist side of things, I have appreciate the quality that they have been able to achieve, and if anyone deserves to profit off of a creation, its them.

But, I can only speak from others’ experiences as I have yet to hold a ‘real’ monome in my hands, instead working with an arduinome that I assembled last summer. I think I was one of the first few to have a completed arduinome up and running, although there aren’t a whole lot of them in existence yet. And why? Because building this thing is not easy! It probably took me over a hundred hours total, including the time I had to resolder half the breakoff board connections because I read an old diagram, and having to try and reglue the boards twice (never did get them to stick together right, anyway). But all in all, it was worth it.

Now I get to participate in a truly unique community. There are some seriously geeky musicians out there, and they have been writing amazing code, all of which I can use for free. Unfortunately, with the advent of Max for Live, this might not be true anymore. Nonetheless, I stand on the shoulders of giants when I load up mlr and soyuz and polygome.

In about of week the MCRPv2 will be over, so I really need to get on mangling those samples up. I’m probably going to try for a non-monomey sounding track, instead chopping up the clips to make some tech-house style music. I’ll post the results here, as well as another entry on the monome and my workflow.

Monomix 1

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:44:00 -0800

I did a short “tenminmix” for YouTube today. Since I’m kind of staying indoors alot in this Toledo winter, it’s tough to keep up on music for me. Usually I’ll put a couple of albums on the iPod and try and digest them away from the computer before I start mixing them. But anyway, this mix was recorded live with my arduinome interfaced with the pages app and Ableton Live.

Thump Session: Electro

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 00:10:00 -0800

Marek Bareza created an amazing, free groovebox app for both the iPhone and for Mac OS X 10.5. It’s a really fun little program named Thump, reminiscent of a Korg Electribe stripped down to the bare essentials. I made a screencast of me playing with some really simple patterns in a Detroit Electro style.

easterislandhead monomemix typhoon season 09

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:00:00 -0700

Easterislandhead monomemix typhoon season 09 by easterislandhead

My latest mix, made in Japan around the typhoon season that kept us locked indoors for a good week. Recorded live into ableton with the monome app Pages.