[read also the review on CreativeApplications.net]

ReBirth faithfully emulates dance music’s three backbone devices: The Roland TB-303 Bass synth and the Roland TR-808 and 909 drum machines. Combine these with FX units, fully featured pattern sequencers and a quick-acting, scalable iPhone interface and you’ll soon be making techno on the train, trance on the tram or beats on the bus.

Rebirth is one of the reasons that made me switch to macs, more than ten years ago. It was an incredibly user-friendly piece of software with which you could easily create all sorts of electronic tunes, from the most acid-sounding techno lines to drum and base tracks. It was still the age of OS9, iMacs and the colorful iBooks.. then with the advent of osX Rebirth wasn’t supported anymore, and it turned into a museum.

So now seeing it reborn into an iPhone app is just amazing. It’s available on the Apple Store for 3.99 pounds (link). I bought it and had a go: the sound is as great as the original, but unfortunately controlling the interface is not as much fun. The iPhone is just too small in my opinion… but I guess that if you could run it on the iPad that would change everything (I don’t have one, but I suppose it just should scale up as needed).

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A couple of related audio&iPhone links:

– GravSynth: an analog synthesizer, fun to use.

– MobileSynth: a google project providing foundational open source iPhone code for building synthesizers.

For some reasons the excellent slides and other course materials that used to be available on the CS 193P iPhone Application Development website have been removed..

Too bad: download all the 2009 course (including videos) from here, or check out an exact copy of the site here.

If you’re after the 2010 material, there’re plenty of places to find it here…

The web is miraculous!

Nanoloop is a mobile music software that provides all functionality you need to create nice electronic music. With its clear, minimalistic interface it plays almost like a game while still allowing for complex musical structures as well as sheer noise.

Nanoloop for iPhone combines sequencer, synthesizer and sampler in one package. Features include:

– Six channels, each can be synth or sampler
– Fast and easy to use stepsequencer
– Synthesizer with envelope, filter, LFO and other parameters
– Sample external audio or nanoloop’s own sound output
– Song editor with loop function
– Save function
– Works on 1st gen iPod touch and 2.2 software
– Send and receive projects via e-mail, using the iPhone’s / iPod’s e-mail program

I found out about it via creativeApplications.net, and I loved the simplicity of the interface straightaway!!

What is processing?

The Processing language was created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab and was originally intended to be used in a Java run-time environment. In the Summer of 2008, John Resig ( inventor of jQuery ), ported the 2D context of Processing to Javascript for use in web pages.

Mmm how about processing.js then?

Processing.js is an open programming language for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions for the web without using Flash or Java applets. Processing.js uses Javascript to draw shapes and manipulate images on the HTML5 Canvas element. The code is light-weight, simple to learn and makes an ideal tool for visualizing data, creating user-interfaces and developing web-based games.

Processing.js is explicitly developed for browsers that support the HTML5 <Canvas> element. Processing.js runs in FireFox, Safari, Opera and Chrome but will not be supported in Internet Explorer.

There’s more: some people in London created iProcessing, which lets you develop iPhone apps without touching objC (at least, that’s what they say). Seems a bit of a revolution to me…

iProcessing is an open programming framework to help people develop native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for iPhone. The iProcessing downloadconsists of a set of example XCode projects that demonstrate many of the Basic Examples from the Processing web site (originally written by Casey Reas and Ben Fry unless otherwise stated) as well a number that demonstrate the use of various iPhone features such as multitouch, accelerometer, orientation, location, sound play/record, app state saving and so on.

I listened to the first episode of CS193: iPhone Application Programming and it’s just amazing. Please check out the various other things offered at Stanford, really high quality material!

Which obviously takes longer and longer with each new application you download .. I tried to disable the ‘sync applications’ option in iTunes but then a scary message appears:

Who wants all the applications being removed?????? Surely not me.

So, I’m just reporting the instructions as posted by this nice fellow who published them on the blog above:

1) Quit iTunes.
2) Open a Terminal (Applications > Utilities > Terminal)
3) Type or copy the following command:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true
4) Open iTunes.
5) Connect the iPhone.
6) Make Sync without backing up.

To enable automatic backup in iTunes again use this command instead:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes AutomaticDeviceBackupsDisabled -bool false

That should do the trick! I tried it and the following sync took less than a minute.

Only thing to remember: making backups is not at all a bad idea, so make sure you do it manually every once in a while!

…

Shrook does have a complementary iPhone reader, but unfortunately it lacks two important features:

1) it doesn’t remember the history of your ‘mobile’ rss readings

2) more importantly, it doesn’t let you ‘tick’ a news item for later reading (so that I can check it out better on the computer, with a normal size screen)

Well the guys at NewsGator have done it all!!! You can download the free RSS reader they provide that has all the features I was talking about (and of course it also syncs with a free online version of the software) Neat!