someone who's doing some things
Everything is about apps at the moment. A lot of what I mention under the apps tag is around iOS and mobile music, but there’s other stuff too, and not just iOS, but Android, Palm OS and Windows mobile.
So this is the second year I’ve been at the Liberty Festival with SoundLab. This year was a bit damp and wet, but fun nevertheless. We still had a lot of people come along and play and enjoy themselves, so it was a good day all in all. I’m glad that I was able to be a part of it.
Even though it was wet we had a steady stream of people wanting to try out new ways to make music, and experiment.
I really like Tydlig, it’s a little calculator app for iOS and it has a great design, but it needs to do a few more things to be truly great. Here’s my current wishlist:
If it could do the first three things that would be amazing. A real step forward.
I just often don’t really get games. I can play for a while then I just get bored. I don’t think it’s the fault of the games of their designers, I just think that I don’t get gaming anymore. I used to (a very long time ago) like some games. Titles like Doom, Myst, Riven. I enjoyed those games, but in recent times I’ve found very few games that have taken my fancy.
However, that seems to be changing a little. Mostly I tried out music based mobile games, and some of these I got on well with, but not always. Now I’m starting to find a few apps / games that I am getting on with, so I’ll be posting my thoughts on these soon. I thought that someone might find that useful, or at least interesting.
Now that would be super useful. I’m sure that it was promised a long time ago, possibly when the first Pebble watch came out, but it never really happened. Well, it didn’t happen at all.
The nearest thing to it is an app called This Button for Pebble, which allows an HTTP push from your Pebble. That’s really useful, but I’ve only been able to get it to work intermittently so far. Perhaps I need to persevere with it.
Of course, a real IFTTT channel would be better. Ideally for me it would have:
That lot would do for a start anyway. That would be fun to play with and create recipes with on IFTTT. I’d like to see that.
I wonder if it’ll come about?
So it seems that we’re getting audio units on iOS, and more than that we’re getting audio units that go across both iOS and OSX. All in one go. Now that will be interesting, or at least it could be. The down side from my perspective is that I think it makes mobile more and more like desktop computer music. I’m not entirely sure that’s a good thing.
I’ve liked IFTTT (or IF as apparently they’re now called) since right back when they started. They’ve gone from strength and delivered some really interesting and useful functionality for connecting the internet in simple ways. They’ve also supported a lot of IoT (internet of things) devices, and now, with the new Maker channel they’re supporting anything you want to use to connect to the internet.
This is a big deal I think. It means all manner of devices can use the IFTTT service with an HTTP post request. I’ve already tried it with my twine device and it works really well. I’m thinking about how to use it with my Pebble Time too. The possibilities are limitless. However, for me, what will be really important is how to make it truly useful. Without that, it is just tinkering for tinkerings sake, and whilst that’s fun, from my perspective it doesn’t get you anywhere.
So, whilst I’ll be trying it out, I’ll mainly be looking for some really useful ways to use the new channel. If I find any that I think are worth sharing, I will.
I am Ashley Elsdon 