* There’s been an update a while ago bringing TouchOSC to version 1.4.2 and the Editor to 1.1.1. A couple of problems have been corrected, like some characters in Label’s texts corrupting layouts, a global switch to turn off the previously added “z” messages (seemed to cause problems with certain software) and proper handling of strings sent to TouchOSC as UTF8. Be sure to grab the updated Editor as well if you download the update from iTunes.

* 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@hexler.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

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.

I’ve uploaded a new version of qcOSC, my Quartz Composer OSC receiver plug-in.

As promised the plug-in now supports multi-parameter messages (for which it creates “Structure” outlets) and can receive strings (for which it creates “String” outlets, duh!). You might want to remove all outlets in your compositions that already made use of the first parameter of multi-parameter messages to let the plug-in re-create an outlet with the new type.

I’ve tested it on both Leopard and Snow Leopard and it’s all hunky dory as far as I can see. Enjoy and grab it here.

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.

I fixed some bugs, improved some things and wrapped it all up neatly in version 0.4…

There’s now a list of all auto-created outlets in the Settings page of the Patch Inspector with a handy little button that lets you remove any of them. Also it shouldn’t crash anymore (stress on should) and it should definitely be possible to create more than one instance. It’s now also a completely and utterly untested Universal Binary(TM), as my trusty old iBook G4 is about a 1000 miles from where I am now, so if someone could let me know if this is PPC ready, that’d be nice.

I wish I would have had enough time to also finally make it deal with input other than numbers and let it handle multi-parameter messages (so it could handle TouchOSC’s XY and Accelerometer data), but that’ll have to wait ’til the next version.

Hop on over to the new qcOSC page to download.

rob.

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

So I thought it might be fun to write a little custom patch for QC right there and then as a kind of challenge. So I did, and because it didn’t take too long I thought about some goodies I could throw into the mix like Bonjour/ZeroConf advertising of the listening port and auto-outlet creation a la Camille’s amazing OSCulator application. This should make setup of TouchOSC with Quartz Composer a breeze, just select your machine in the list of found hosts, outlets are created automatically when messages are received by QC.

This thing is far from perfect or finished and was constructed in a couple of hours, but I thought it might be worth seeing if anyone’s interested in this, and if it indeed happens to be so I might think about developing it further, so drop me a line/comment if you tried it and let me know what you think.

Get it here, this is for 10.5/Intel:
qcOSC-v0.2.zip

New page here

The .plugin file should go into :
HOME/Library/Graphics/Quartz Composer Plug-Ins

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