Brace yourself! There’s a flood of updates coming your way. Exciting times indeed.

First off, a little thing called the Apple iPad has been released and we’ve been working like mad here at the hexler HQ to get TouchOSC ready for it first day. The effort paid off and TouchOSC was available April 3rd for everyone as a free update. There was little time for anything else back then, not even posting about it, so let it be known: TouchOSC’s current version on the iTunes App Store is a universal application that runs on all Apple handhelds!

Next up is a new version of the TouchOSC Editor that adds some much requested features:
- Horizontal editing of layouts
- Zoom
- Customizable layout grid plus snapping

We are also releasing a plain “jar” version for the first time which should run on anything with a proper Java runtime but was tested on Linux only.
Grab it here.

As hinted earlier, this is only the first of many updates to come in hopefully rapid succession. There’s a new version of TouchOSC ready to go that adds even more of the things you have been requesting and another update to the editor to go with it. The Android port is coming along nicely and will be released shortly thereafter. There’s also work being done that should make everything a lot easier on the MIDI and Windows fronts and of course there’s so many doors that the computing power the iPad brings opens, that we can’t even begin to describe what’s going on down in the labs…

So long. Will report back soon

So to make the process a little more painless I decided to make the little utility presented here to automatically generate a custom-tailored PD patch from a TouchOSC layout. The tool generates routes for all controls found in the layout (except for those using custom OSC messages) and (optionally) creates MIDI CC messages for each of them. Obviously the output is not going to look pretty as even hand-made PD patches tend to get messy quickly, but even if you are not interested in MIDI translation, using this tool definitely beats connecting hundreds of multi-toggle messages and gives you a quick, fully-mapped patch as a starting point for whatever it is you want to do today…

Alright, before you grab this, take note that this is probably not the most polished piece of code in this world, it is implemented in pure Java so you need a Java runtime 1.5+ (which you already have if you are running the TouchOSC Editor) and that it creates the PD patch in the same directory as the input layout using the same name plus a .pd extension added.

The zip file contains a jar bundle which on most platforms can be launched by double-clicking:
touchosc2pd-v1.0.zip

Enjoy.

Adding labels should be pretty straightforward, added bonus of TouchOSC’s receiving capabilities is that you can send OSC messages of type string or any kind of number to the control and have it displayed. There’s some more new stuff in this release like a new “z” message that is sent from Faders, XYs, Rotaries and Multi-Faders when touches begin/end (which people tell me allows to emulate the popular KaosPad) and a new “/vibrate” message you can send to the iPhone that will make it, well, vibrate.

Hope you enjoy this one and PLEASE, if there’s any problems/questions/etc do EMAIL me at dev AT hexler DOT net and DO NOT comment here with your questions. And for the love of technology DO STOP sending me all this nasty hate-mail telling me how f(#(#$ed up it is that this and that feature is not included yet or that my piece of s&$^t software doesn’t work, it’s not like I am trying to piss off people with what I do so I suggest you try the same. Any constructive criticism welcome though. KTHX.

It consists of a set of custom TouchOSC layouts, PureData patches and a manual to get it all going. It does feature bi-directional communication between the device and TouchOSC so be sure to get a hold of this if you are using the VJX16-4.

Get it here:
vixid_vjx16-4_touchosc_layouts_v1.0.rar

As I stated in my last post, next up is a proper manual, which is almost ready to go, and the next version, which will add labels and which will be submitted soon as well, but of course will probably be stuck in review for a while again… SIGH. Anyway, have fun customizing and drop me a line at dev AT hexler DOT net with feedback/bugs/flames/marriage proposals and all the crazy stuff you’d like to see in future versions, which I know there’s plenty of :)

Cheers,
rob

Next on my to-do is finishing a proper manual for both app and editor… thanks by the way for not flaming me as much as you could have for the absence thereof with the current version :)

Also about to be finished is of course the addition of labels, which still needs some work and has been cut from this release for the sake of making it available sooner and also the addition of a tasty multi-touch control a lot of people have been asking for. Expect some news on these matters soon after the release of this update.

Thank-you’s go out to all my beta testers and all people taking the time to write encouraging e-mails full of input, feedback and videos of their very inspiring applications.

Cheers,
rob

I decided not to give every control a “show label” option but to make a label its own control for maximum flexibility. You can choose where to put them and also stack them on top of other controls. I am also planning to let labels receive text values over the network and might offer an option for linking them to other controls’ values for local feedback. As you can see they come in horizontal and vertical versions, can have colored backgrounds and an optional outline. All configurable in the editor of course.

The only drawback with the current implementation is that I chose to implement the text rendering as an old-school bitmap font instead of native iPhone text-rendering, for maximum portability and pixel-perfect preview in the editor. Because of this the font size cannot be adjusted and labels will have a fixed “height” for now, but I might just include some more font options in the future for all of you who think this is way too small. I am just a sucker for monospaced, aliased 10pt fonts though :) What do you think? Too small for you?

On a different note, thanks to all the people who replied to the call for testers in my last post. I will get back to you all in the next couple of days and hopefully push out the editor to you soon thereafter. I also have been very slow answering email, sorry, don’t despair, I will get to that as well, just putting the priority on the software right now – I hope you understand. I am planning to host a forum on this site in the near future, hope that will bring somewhat quicker replies from me and others to all of your questions and problems.

Til then,
rob

So I moved the site from a relatively unknown wiki-engine called Nanoki over to the almighty WordPress. The reason I used Nanoki for so long was because it is written in Lua which I have deep affection for, having used it as my embedded scripting engine of choice for many years. Anyway, I hope this move will enable me to keep everyone up to date more easily, mostly regarding progress of TouchOSC development …

I have received and enormous amount of email containing questions/suggestions/feedback/etc concerning TouchOSC, and on one hand I guess that is a good sign of having a healthy, decently-sized user-base, on the other hand because of my “real” life being extremely busy since last year, I have been virtually unable to answer every single message in my inbox as I wish I could have. So if you’ve written to me and haven’t heard back from me at all, please write again to dev@hexler.net as a reminder.

As I hope most of you know I am working on an editor application to allow customized TouchOSC layouts, and even though the release has been delayed many times because of the aforementioned life being extremely hectic, it is progressing nicely lately and will be released next month if everything goes as planned for a change, fingers crossed.

Which brings me to the point that I would really like to sign up more testers which will be receiving preview versions Real Soon™, specially if they are working on Windows or Linux. Drop me a line at dev@hexler.net if you’re interested and let me know what platform/software you are using.

Yours truly,
rob