Believe me: all comments, good and bad, are gratefully received!

Fair to say that once you’ve all used Mixtikl, you’re bound to offer great feedback that we’ll try our best to incorporate.

On the subject of UI: this is a huge issue for us, we’ve been very ambitious :) to try to support every screen format we’re actually capable of running on.

Our compromise has by necessity been towards function rather than form (neither of us are graphic designers – we do the best we can!). We’ve been working for a while to document the skinning system, in the hope that the community of Intermorphic software users might wish to contribute better skins than we can create ourselves… that information should be on our site in a few weeks.

At which point, I’d encourage those of you who are so inclined, to take a look and see if you can come-up with a better skin for the application, even if only for one particular form factor of device! :D All contributions gratefully received…

Symbian: well, this is a *dog* of a platform to write for, and we’re still assessing the effort of porting the system (we *are* talking 750K lines of code here… though 90% of that is cross-platform core code, it is still affected by the appalling Symbian C++ compiler). We’ll be sure to keep people posted, as we’ve had a lot of interest in porting to Symbian Series 60.

Why is Windows Mobile the first mobile platform for Mixtikl? many of you might not realise this, but speaking from personal experience Windows Mobile has been by *far* the easiest platform to write code for, and fundamentallly this is why we targeted it first. It supports standard C++, allows easy use of cross-platform code, it has a superb development system and debugger (called Visual Studio), and fabulous emulators. I honestly don’t know why it gets such a bad press… maybe it is simply “because it is Microsoft”. :) Devices are cheap, too; that I like. :) The only issue from my perspective is that you require the Pro version of Visual Studio to write code for it; and that is quite expensive.

iPhone – quite nice to write for, and has the advantage that there is only one screen form factor to target. Allows use of standard C++ (with some Objective C bindings). Nice debugger/dev system (albeit XCode is way less productive that Visual Studio). Major disadvantage of having no D-pad or other controller system; that space is instead taken by a button to close the current app . Biggest issues: some horrible stuff in the SDK license terms, and crazy lack of ability to easily share data between applications or desktop (presumably due to Apple trying to control access via the iTunes store); we can but hope this stuff gets relaxed soon as it hampers creativity big-time. Big benefit that you can easily distribute through the Apple store; big problem is that you can *only* sell through the Apple store (for example, what do you do if Apple reject your App for some reason?).

Symbian: good grief, their C++ variant is from the dark ages (no templates, no multiple inheritance etc.) making cross-platform code very challenging. Very clunky development system. Microsoft and Apple way, way, way ahead of them here.

Back to the feature list: some of you might think we’ve put too much in there; maybe you’re right! It mainly comes from us wanting to support cross-platform generative music to the best of our abilities. That required embedding a MIDI DLS engine, and a full GM MIDI DLS wavetable (!), optional use of Ogg samples to save space, a modular synth fast enough to use on Mobile (which naturally had to be real-time editable on all platforms), an FX network editor, and a file player/playlist so people could simply play compositions on the move. Why did we include Karaoke support in the player? Because we could do it pretty easily, and it is fun for some people. :) Why did we include a visualiser system? Because it is fun and interesting, and some people will like it! Why did we make it an extendible suite? Because we intend to add more apps to it in the future, as we happen to like integrated applications, and now we’ve created the foundations, adding new modes of behaviour is going to be relatively easy…!

Anyways – all brickbats and bouquets welcome, we’ll do our best to give informed answers to all questions!

A happy Christmas to one and all,

Pete

Have fun with all of that…

(Nice job Pete and Tim. Noatikl rocks — looking forward to “Mixting” it up with your new app.)

:-D

Good job Pete/Tim.

Not seeing anything daunting in the package yet. What do you think is so cutting edge? Or would i need to be 5? ;)

“Ugly? Not as pretty as the most beautiful iPhone apps, for sure; but we scale across a huge number of screen form factors. Does prettiness matter much to musicians? Who knows… shame if it does, but there you go!”

The ugliness i was referring to was in the ui and structure but since you mention it.. yep its a dog too. I don’t see a utilitarian bit of software which is above aesthetic niceties. (i hat iphone apps and would welcome that!). i see something with a load of ugly and badly chosen graphical flourishes… Not sure you can take the artistic high ground with this many clashing textures.

Pete

Thanks for taking the time to comment.

I wanted to provide some further context to Pete’s original comment… Yes, we do fully appreciate the significance of good user interfaces, and how important they are to get right. We have a particular set of constraints and challenges, as Pete outlines. That said, we know we have further work to do, and we will be improving our interfaces as we move forwards now that V1.0.0 us out the door!

From a personal perspective, I have used a good deal of software over the years. Some software I have used may not have looked pretty or even been paticularly intuitive, but it admirably did the job I wanted it to. I have also used software products that have had fantastically sexy and beautiful interfaces, but that drove me quietly mad because they never let me do what I wanted to.

Getting the balance right for Mixtikl, within all the constraints of multi-platform, multi-form factor variants, is a massive and never ending challenge! We hope you find you can enjoy using it, and get some interesting results from it.

with best wishes

tim