First off, apologies for the absence of updates for so long. I’d like to take a moment to explain, as this was (partly) due to circumstances beyond my control.

With the release of the iPhone 5 and the iOS 6 SDK, support for building applications for anything below iOS 4.3 was (sort of silently) removed. I’ve always aimed for TouchOSC to be a rather useful application to ‘recycle’ older devices and give them a new life as multipurpose remote-controller, so this made me rather unhappy. That unhappiness turned into a slight shade of rebelliousness when I DID manage to produce a binary that would support BOTH the iPhone5/iOS6 combination AND run absolutely fine on my ‘legacy’ testing devices (iPod touch 1st gen and iPhone 3G) and would make EVERYONE happy, but was subsequently rejected for trying to work around this ‘issue’ in the first place. Long story short, since 1st of May 2013, it is officially mandatory for all application updates to add support for the iPhone 5 (with all the consequences for older hardware). End of rebellion.

If you are running TouchOSC on a device that does not support upgrading to iOS 4.3, please make a backup copy and hold on to it! It’s now impossible for me to provide you with updates or even restore the application package for you in case you lose the file!

Let’s move on to the good news then, shall we!

TouchOSC for Android

It’s been a long time coming, and here it is. Today we’re releasing the first fully-featured port of TouchOSC for the Android platform.

After much testing, hacking and cursing we’re rather confident this version will play nicely with most devices and existing layouts out there, and fully support the feature set offered by its iOS brother and the TouchOSC Editor/Bridge applications (minus some Apple specific features like CoreMIDI, that sadly have no Android equivalent). The definitive plan is to keep both versions as close to identical as possible from this point on.

As the attempt to fund the development (and the metric ton of testing devices) using a donation model was plainly unsuccessful, and the common response seemed to be ‘I’ll donate when it’s finished’, the app is being released as a new, paid application on the Google Play store and we’ll try to keep pricing (just as much as the feature set) identical across platforms. That being said, both versions will be reduced in price for a couple of days to celebrate, to say thank you for the continued support over the years and to apologize for the long wait!

Please bear with us while we update the documentation to reflect the slight differences between platforms.

TouchOSC 1.9.0 update

Please make sure that you also download the updated Editor and Bridge applications to get access to the new features.
Here’s an excerpt of the changes that went into this update:

+ Support for iPhone5
+ Support for custom layout sizes
+ Support for more MIDI message types (All controls now support Control Change, Note, Program Change, Poly Pressure, Channel Pressure and Pitch Bend messages)
+ Added XY control MIDI mapping mode (Placing 2 or 3 fingers on the control will send only x or y messages)
+ New iPhone5 layout: “Automat5”
+ Fixed handling of UTF-8 encoded strings in both application and editor
+ Fixed naming issues with virtual CoreMIDI connections (iOS)
- Removed support for MIDIMobilizer Mk I (Please use a CoreMIDI compatible accessory, i.e. MIDIMobilizer Mk II, instead)

For the full changes head on over to this forum post.

A new section has been added to the TouchOSC documentation to help you get started. Good times indeed.

Also my last blog post seems to be from almost about a year ago and my forum activity has been rather scarce, both of which I will do my best to change as well. Of course there’s reasons for this seeming inactivity, which will be revealed in due time.

Oh, and one more thing™

I AM WORKING ON A VERSION OF TOUCHOSC FOR ANDROID THAT SUPPORTS CUSTOM LAYOUTS AND IT WILL BE RELEASED WHEN IT IS READY!

There’s a ton of bug-fixes and little improvements in there too, and whole parts have been re-written from the ground up as well for improved stability and speed. Sadly what didn’t make the cut is a dedicated OSC-to-MIDI bridge for windows users, but it is nearing completion so expect some news on that very soon.

But wait… There’s more!
The site has undergone a major overhaul to prepare it for its future as a much more community-friendly platform. A forum has been added and there is now <drumroll> the first version of a complete TouchOSC documentation available. It’s all brand-new so if you find any broken parts, please report.

Next up will be a library section for TouchOSC layouts and presets, open to all users, but I’ll report back on the status of that after some rest…

Click the image to see the big picture.

Additionally the app icon has received an update to give it more of a 2011-ish look, hope you like it. Also another great annoyance has been eliminated, the TouchOSC Editor now does not mess with custom OSC addresses anymore when copy/pasting controls, so transferring whole pages won’t result in RSI-inducing customization sessions. Grab it here. Furthermore, the touchosc2pd helper app has been updated to reflect changes in the layout format.

Next up is a whole lot of MIDI support everyone’s been requesting and there’s a lot of changes planned for the website that should make it a better platform for exchanging layouts and discussing features and problems. And that’s only the beginning. 2011 will be a good year for TouchOSC. I can feel it.

Here’s the complete changes for both TouchOSC and the editor:

TouchOSC 1.6.3
===========================
- Support for iTunes File Sharing: Layouts can now be managed via the USB-cable connection using iTunes
- Basic multi-tasking support
- Multiple controls with the same custom OSC address now receive the same message
- ControlPush and ControlToggle now turn on for any received value greater than zero
- Added z message sending to all controls
- Fixed a bug where it wasn’t possible to enter a custom editor host address
- Various minor bug fixes
- New icon

TouchOSC Editor 1.4.2
===========================
- Copy and paste retains controls’ custom OSC addresses
- Renaming a .touchosc file no longer corrupts it
- ControlPush and ControlToggle are now rendered using the right color
- New icon

• No importing of custom layouts
• No ZeroConf/Bonjour publishing/browsing
• No multi-touch support
• No support for resolutions higher than 320x480
• Some other minor features missing

In brief that means that this version basically represents the feature set that TouchOSC version 1.0 for the iPhone supported when it was first released. Minus the bugs of course. There’s a couple of reasons that led to the decision to release the application in this form. First of all, I didn’t want to make all of you wait any longer. Constructing a full port would have probably taken me another 12 months of trying to play catch-up with the original which is constantly improving. Secondly there seems to be an endless stream of new Android devices coming out every other moment, so testing the more advanced features on every possible configuration is basically impossible. Keeping it lean and simple will probably help in making it work for most of the available gadgets right now.

All that said, I also decided to make the application available for free. There don’t seem to be a lot of (successful) paid applications available on the Android Market right now and from my research the general user-base is also not exactly used to actually pay for apps. The ad-supported model that a lot of developers go with is also something that I wouldn’t even consider at my most delirious. Call me crazy.

Anyway, what it comes down to is that I decided to go with the Donationware model. If you like it and you want me to make it as fully-featured as the iOS version, please consider donating whatever you feel is worth contributing. Also, for testing-purposes, I would be more than happy to accept any kind of Android device you can spare. Hell, if you meet me, shake my hand, buy me a beer/warm glass of milk/classic coca-cola. Just don’t send me any hate-mail please. I am getting enough of that from the “iTribe” (j/k).

Yours truly,
rob.

All one needs to do is to start up Logic Pro or Express, make sure the iDevice is connected to the same WiFi network as the music production computer, go to TouchOSC’s network configuration page and select the name of the machine running Logic. Voila! Everything should be set up and ready to go in perfect harmony. As usual firewalls might prevent this miracle from happening, so if you run into any trouble, try disabling your network security software temporarily and try again.

Thanks to everyone at Apple involved in making this happen, and special thanks to Adam Charon for creating the LogicPad and LogicTouch layouts.

In other news there will be a workshop held dealing with all things TouchOSC in the course of the Berlin Music Days on 5th and 6th of November. I will be demonstrating some popular setups with Ableton Live, Native Instruments Reaktor and of course the new Apple Logic connection and also helping participants to achieve whatever it is they are trying to squeeze out of TouchOSC. Head on over to the signup page if interested or drop by and say hello if you are around.

Last but not least a lot of voices are asking for a release date for the Android version of TouchOSC. Don’t despair, it is in the making, it’s just that the rate at which new Android devices sporting various features, capabilities and OS versions are spawned has delayed the release multiple times. Proper and thorough testing is definitely required in this kind of gadget jungle. I will post more news on this when there is any so please don’t hold your breath. We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt waiting for a piece of software, now would we?

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

* I’ve been working on an Android port of TouchOSC, which turned out to be much easier than I expected. But wait, TouchOSC will not show up on the Android Market anytime soon… One of the things that sadly does make it more complicated to program for Android is the existence of many different devices running the platform and there will have to be extensive testing on as many as possible, so if you are interested in helping doing just that drop me an email at dev AT hexler DOT net and let me know which phone you use and which version Android you are running. If your world revolves around iPhones exclusively please tell your Android owning friends/enemies about this.

* TouchOSC now has a Facebook page at http://facebook.com/touchosc where I will post all news parallel to here and also all the little things like cool videos and interesting projects that I find online and that get sent in. So if you want to stay up-to-date and don’t want to subscribe to the newsfeed on this page, you can check for updates there. Of course you can post on that page as well so show off your experiments or let us all know about tutorials or custom layouts you found to be useful.

* Another apology for being very slow at answering email the past month, I am in the process of moving countries (again) so I have little to no time/means to deal with my inbox, I promise I will work double-shift as soon as everything’s taken care of, but hey, maybe you should be eating ginger-bread and singing christmas-carols anyway and not controlling some obscure software with a wireless touch-screen-phone-control-surface anyway

Ok, that’s about it, will be back in action soon, there’s of course another TouchOSC update in the pipeline which will concentrate on making the connection/sync between editor and phone/pod a bit more reliable and thereafter I will finally start adding all the missing features that have been on my list since this project started.

Merry X-mas and an OSC new year!
rob

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-v1.2.zip

Enjoy.