The beauty of using touch for controllers is flexibility. Sure, you give up tactile feedback – but you can also quickly make your own layouts, make touch controllers an ideal complement to your existing hardware gear (the stuff with physical knobs and faders and pads).

For that reason, we’re all eagerly anticipating an upcoming version of the awesome OSC-based iPhone/iPod touch controller, TouchOSC.

http://hexler.net/software/touchosc

The included layouts are already fantastic, with rotaries and virtual buttons and multi-faders and toggles and X/Y pads. But custom control would be even better. Creator hexler writes CDM with the latest:

The long-awaited update to TouchOSC that will allow for custom layouts has just been submitted for review to Apple,
so I hope that as soon as next week it will be available as a free update to all users on the App Store.

Together with this release (1.3) there will be a free editor application to visually design and upload layouts to the device. You can take a look at the last beta version I published if you want, there’s both Windows and OS X versions available, but I will also prepare a Linux version as soon as possible, of course without the new version of TouchOSC this is but a preview of things to come:

http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-osx.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-editor-0.7-win32.zip
http://dev.hexler.net/touchosc/touchosc-default-layouts.zip

And nicely enough, the editor is built in cross-platform Java, which I think makes a whole lot of sense. (Go Java, Python, etc., rather than getting stuck in hard-to-port platform-specific stuff like Cocoa.)

Thanks, hexler! I don’t have a video of the new features yet, so instead here’s a nice novelty – the beginnings of a creation using the free SuperCollider (which runs OSC natively) in combination with TouchOSC to make a custom step sequencer. Should fuel other ideas, too: