Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Fingerplay & Control

qrcodeThought I'd write a little about what's going on in the development branch of Fingerplay. So what's new compared to the Market version? Well, at the moment, the dev branch is still the only place to get a build with sensor support (there's still work to be done before prime time). In addition, I've just finished a little feature that sends the maximum values for all widgets in the loaded layout. The idea is to make it easier to use custom layouts - eg. I've made a module for vvvv that listens to incoming OSC messages and automatically creates an input module from them. The same "OSC learn" idea could be implemented in many applications.
Speaking of custom layouts, there is now the option to convert layouts made with touchOSC editor to the FingerplayMIDI format.

I've also done a little coding on Control , another MIDI/OSC control app. The main differences to FingerPlay:
  • It's multiplatform (using Phonegap for platform-to-JavaScript bindings)
  • It uses JSON for interface files instead of XML
  • It can load new interfaces from any URL 


Intro to Control: Free MIDI / OSC software for iOS from charlie roberts on Vimeo.

So right now, they're pretty much neck to neck, but I'd like to see development from the various platform-specific apps gradually move towards a cooperative, omniplatform effort. There are currently some drawbacks as not all useful native APIs have been exposed, but it's getting there.

3 comments:

  1. Hi,
    I'm trying to create a layout for FingerPlay. Do you know if it's possible to get the finger size (finger area in contact with the tablet) ?
    Thanks for your help,

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  2. Hey,
    In the present version of Fingerplay, support for the size of the pressed area is not implemented. However, it would be possible to do so: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEvent.html#getSize(int)
    Source for Fingerplay: http://code.google.com/p/fingerplaymidi/

    Hope that helps some!

    ReplyDelete