Archive for August, 2005

Proposed User Tasks – Levels of Mastery

Monday, August 22nd, 2005

Creating Passionate Users proposes that one way for software to be engaging is to have a number of “levels” which users naturally progress through to achieve greater mastery.

Here are some proposed level tasks for Mused users and developers. They range from Level One: Music Fan to Level Ten: Grand Collage Ninja.

1. Simple Modification – Take an existing music track and speed up the tempo, or change the key.

Sample Addition – Take an existing track, add samples from another song.

Sample Addition-Subtraction – Take an existing track, delete rhythmic or melodic material to leave holes, and add material from other music to replace it.

Harmonic Meddling – Take an existing track, and change the key of a limited part of the song.

Static Tempo Mixtape – Take a string of tracks, and modify them to have the same tempo. Cross-fade between them in the transitions.

Dynamic Tempo Mixtape – Take a string of tracks, and change the tempo smoothly from one track to the next, as well as crossfading between them in the transitions.

Power Hour – Create a beatmatched one hour mix for Jim’s Power Hour.

Stylized Mixtape – Make either a Static or Dynamic Tempo Mixtape with elements of Simple Modification, Sample Addition or Subtraction, and Harmonic Meddling in each song. Come up with a creative concept for the mixtape.

Classic Mash (Sample Addition x2) – Take two familiar but stylistically different songs and interlace them.

Cover Song (Sample Addition x5) – Recreate a musical track as in Sample Addition, but draw most of the musical material from at least 10 tracks in equal proportions.

Creative Composition – Make an original composition from 10’s of songs, using bits of vocals, rhythms, and instrument lines in new arrangements.

10. Comprehensive Composition – Create a song with a totally novel structure containing samples from 100’s of different tracks, each of them lending a recognizible style to the song, but without any full melodies lifted from one particular piece.

This approach affords several benefits. It gives a set of intermediate milestones for development. Once development is finished, it provides a clear path (like a tutorial) for a user to gain mastery in progressively difficult tasks. Also, it makes us all feel like ninjas. Which is good.

Commotion

Monday, August 22nd, 2005

Commotion is a realtime graphics system that I have been working on for
a while.  It’s Objective-C, OpenGL, and some Cocoa.  I had
started work on it in 2003 for Sha Xin Wei at Georgia Tech‘s New Media
Center
(in the LCC) as a text animation system.  We were working
on the next generation of Hubbub, and Commotion was meant to be a
replacement for ActiveText, a Windows / DirectX animation system by Jason Lewis.
Commotion has still not become as mature as ActiveText, and since Xin
Wei’s move to Canada, it has strayed from the original goal of text
animation to a more broad goal of realtime dynamic object management.

If I were to describe what Commotion does in 30 seconds or less, it would go something like this:

  • Provides a framework of bodies, properties, and services. 
    • Properties can contain any type of value, and will try to coalesce one
      value type into the type you request (obviously, this works better in
      some cases than in others) – very similar to an untyped programming
      language like JavaScript, basic, or python.
    • Bodies contain named properties, ie asking for its "color" property returns a property object.  They can also subscribe to services.
    • Services are bodies that have a list of consumers.  They tend to execute code when sent a message, like doEvent: nil named: @"update" generally does some type of iteration.
  • Organizes properties and bodies using a catalog service.  Catalogs can be nested, and know how to write themselves out to disk (in Apple’s Property List format, an XML schema)
  • Dynamically instantiates classes at run-time, based on an input catalog Property List.  Classes must be subclasses of ComService, since they’re going to be sent events.  Classes can be written in Objective-C or Python.
  • Provides a user interface for setting property values as well as organizing bodies, properties, and services

Rock Stars of Computer Music

Monday, August 22nd, 2005

Tristan Jehan

Ross Bencina

Francois Pachet

Computer Schools

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

Places where you can Learn to Get your Hack On

Universities

Georgia Tech
Depending on what kind of career you’re looking for, there are probably quicker routes. Then again you might learn something.

Morehouse CS

Non-Traditional

Big Nerd Ranch
Technical bootcamps in retreat settings.

Tech Culture

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

Fun Tech Culture that’s based in Atlanta

Homestar Runner (HR Wiki)
Beloved internet mascots Homestar and Strongbad, and the obsessive collaborative fansite that loves them. Worship the Brothers Chapps!

Lifeform Project
Hometown electronic music label that does periodic laptop shows at bars and restaurants.

Atlanta Bloggers
A group of Atlanta bloggers who get together and go out and drink once a month.

Computer Stores

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

or, Places Where You Can Get Tools for Hacking

GIM Computers
Friendly Mom-and-Pop PC store right off the Tech campus. Good for finding those extra parts when putting together a machine.

Fry’s Electronics (Gwinnett Place)
Biggest-box discount computer hardware. Wonderland.

Apple Store Lenox
The Atlanta center of Mac geekery.

Tech Companies

Sunday, August 21st, 2005

Places where you can Do Your Thing. Hunt down the ones that interest you, or start your own!

Defense and Public Safety

Georgia Tech Research Inst. (GTRI)
Applied research in computing, signals, and many forms of engineering.

Digital Media

Interactive Media Technology Center
Formed during the campaign to bring the 1996 Olympics, they created a 3D multimedia presentation that positively conveyed the Atlanta’s vision in the quest to be host. They continue to do multimedia and research presentations, as well as architecture and standards work.

Programming Groups

Friday, August 19th, 2005

Atlanta PHP
(wow… atlphp.org sounds a lot like atlhack.org)

 

Atlhack.org
Creative code, resources for Atlanta developers.

Atlanta Computing Resources

Friday, August 19th, 2005

This book contains resources that seem appropriate for people in Atlanta.  This includes public projects, groups, websites, companies, schools, stores, etc.

A list of useful Mac software

Friday, August 19th, 2005

http://www.ashwink.net/blog/mac-software-and-tips

A few of the apps that I have used that  are also mentioned on the page:

  • Quicksilver
  • Senuti
  • Growl
  • TextWrangler

There are some other obvious ones, like Firefox.  If you haven’t heard of Firefox yet, then you probably don’t know me.