Seed: email-for-download element preview from CASH Music on Vimeo.
This is a really exciting platform for musicians, I can’t wait to try it out.
Category: Tech
At times wonderful, and at times totally frustrating too. That’s technology, my experience of it anyway. I do a lot of stuff with technology and I suspect I will continue to do that.
ZX81 Museum
I used to have a ZX81 and I wish I hadn’t got rid of it now. What an amazing little computer, and how much you could do with 1k of memory!
I’m glad to see that the ZX81 museum is a really well curated little site. I found quite a lot of stuff on there that I’ve had in the past.
These days I only have a ZX81 emulator on my Android phone. I must do some more bits and pieces with that soon.
An experiment with iBooks may solve a problem
On New Year’s Eve I decided to experiment with iBooks. I’d never actually bought anything through iBooks so far although I’ve downloaded sample books. I decided that I wanted to give it a go and see if it was worthwhile so I bought a book on Apple’s Dashcode which I’ve been meaning to get into for ages and ages. I’ve made a few widgets in the past but I know you can do loads more with it.
Anyway, having read just a few pages into the ebook I realised that Dashcode might be able to solve one of the issues I’ve been having with Palm Sounds for a while now. I won’t tell you what it is because if I can’t get it to do what I want then I don’t want people’s hope’s up, but if I can it’ll be great.
Messing around with wordpress plugins
It has been one of those days to really do nothing very much, so I’ve been investigating new wordpress plugins that I might want to use. There’s some great stuff out there for doing just about anything you might want to.
I’ve been playing with DB Toolkit today for making little database applets that sit inside your wordpress site. Very cool indeed. Or at least cool if you’re into that sort of thing anyway.
The Trouble with Android
One of the things I intend to do more of (a sort of new year’s resolution but starting now), is to get into using Android a lot more as I think there are loads of things I can do with it or use it for that iOS just won’t offer.
Great, so far so good. I’ve looked at a variety of newer Android devices and just couldn’t decide what to go for. So I eventually decided to try and root my old G1 and upgrade it to 2.1 or 2.2 as a start and then decide what to do next.
So last night I started trying to tinker around with my old G1, trying to root it etc and I’ve run into nothing but trouble already. It appeared to be bricked for a while, but now it will run but I can’t get past the google account screen! I’m going to persist with this device in an attempt to make some use of it.
I think I might need to visit a t-mobile shop soon to get a new SIM and see if that helps.
I’ll keep you updated on how I get on with this.
Excellent blog
From the maker of that Processing plug in I mentioned earlier. Really worth a look if you’re into processing or pure data. The blog is here.
Annoyed by iWeb
When Apple recently updated their iLife software suite they decided not to update iWeb. I was really annoyed about that. What a huge missed opportunity in my opinion.
Here’s what I think they should’ve done with it:
- Create a free iPhone app that allows you to update iWeb blogs.
- Make iWeb sites mobile friendly so that they play nicely with mobile safari and other mobile browsers.
- Update the software so you can do more straightforward things like add little forums and stuff to your iWeb sites.
- General updates etc
My guess is that Apple will eventually get rid of iWeb, which is a big mistake in my view. I hope I’m wrong.
So I’m on the look out for another iWeb type bit of software. Any thoughts?
Platforms
I’ve been thinking about putting a couple of other projects onto platforms I’ve never tried before. I use WordPress for this blog, and blogger for other stuff, but I’ve never tried things like hubpages or Devhub before and was wondering about trying them out for stuff.
It seems to me though that you can end up with a really scatter gun approach to your content on the web, which isn’t really very useful at all. And do some of these platforms actually work at all for your content? They make lots of claims about you getting money for your content and that sort of thing, but I remain skeptical about them.
Perhaps I need to move on and actually try them out first.
Messing around with Processing
I’ve been messing around with Processing JS for a few days as it seems to be easier to put .js sketches into a web site than standard Processing sketches, and it is. But, whilst it makes a lot of sense to use processing.js with WordPress, sadly processing.js isn’t so good at audio, and a lot of my processing stuff is audio related.
So I’m going back to straight Processing for now as I know I can get the audio librarys to work with that.
Never mind
Messing about with App Inventor
I’ve been playing with Google’s Android App Inventor site, and it is a lot of fun to mess about with. However, at the moment, it is unlikely to be useful for any kind of serious musical application building.
There is talk of being able to introduce extensions to App Inventor so you could do more with it. Things like using Pure data would be useful if you could integrate that into what App Inventor is about, and maybe that will come at some point, but at the moment musical applications will be somewhat limited and toy-like.
Still. Good fun to play with.
Pythonista 2.0 is a massive leap forward
There’s loads of new things to explore in the latest version. Here’s what’s new: Pythonista is now compatible with all iOS screen sizes — from iPhone 4 to iPad Pro, and everything in-between. For larger projects, you can now use multiple editor tabs to switch between related files more quickly. The Pythonista app extension allows…
Processing 3 and the new sound library
The last time I used Processing I was messing around with the minim library for sound. Now, in version 3, there’s the new sound library and it looks (and sounds) amazing! I’ve only played with it a little but so far the example code looks really straightforward to read and understand. I might even start…
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I am Ashley Elsdon 