Diaspora is an attempt to build a social network that contrasts with the locked-garden vision of Facebook, one built on open source software, open exchange of information, and distributed – rather than centralized – communication. I already let slip that we’ll be rebooting our own social endeavor, Create Digital Noise, in the new year. But it’s also telling to see the first noises emerge on Diaspora.

If you wrote off this service when it was in early testing, perhaps overwhelmed by its ambition and crowd-sourced nature, you may be pleasantly surprised. As users gain invites, the service is surprisingly stable and usable – at times, indeed, more so than the offerings of giants Google and Facebook. Most notably, features like tagging make it possible to actually focus on a task. (Compare what would happen on the rivals: even Google’s Circles can be more a chore than a useful feature, and Facebook still tends to dump everything in giant, overcrowded buckets of chatter.)

I’m game for any excuse to get together and make music with people, whether at a website, a studio, or in someone’s kitchen. So, here’s this experiment – Jóhannes Gunnar Þorsteinsson kicked off the first Diaspora sound project:

Here is the initial foundation track for the #diasporanoise2011 open collaboration project. Initially the rules are the following, Once you comment in this thread and ask to join you will be assigned into a queue according to the number of your comment. Apart from that, the rules are completely freeform. You can add a layer of sound to the original recording, or you can completely remix it, cut it up or even destroy it. When you are done you upload the bounced track to your upload service of choice with the same naming scheme as the link below. (yournumber_yourname_diasporanoise2011.wav), if you decide to upload more than one tracks for some reason, zip them together but use the same naming scheme.

There is no actual time limit, (at least not for now) but try to stick to max 1-3 days per person. Recordings and work at this nature is usually done improvised (and that’s usually where the magic happens) so more time shouldn’t be needed. Of course if more time is needed for some reasons then just let us know and I am sure we’ll understand.

I refer affectionately to many kinds of music as “noise,” but this certainly fits the bill – some experimental soundscapes going on, like this one (I enjoy it!):
04_juredimec_diasporanoise2011 by sundrdisko

Diaspora users can find the whole thread – and lots of tracks to hear – at:
https://joindiaspora.com/tags/diasporanoise2011

If you’re really, really desperate for an invite, explain why in comments and perhaps one of us can hook you up.

You’ll find in this thread that what happens for many musicians is various places to host sound, from Dropbox to self-hosted files to the increasingly-ubiquitous SoundCloud. Diaspora itself lacks audio upload features, but on the other hand, there are some limitations to what even a sound-focused service like SoundCloud offers in collaboration features. (For instance, I recently ran up against the inability to run private groups or easily download bunches of stems on SoundCloud, which makes even a simple remix collaborative easier on other services. More on that soon.)

The developer-friendly crowd also talk about how to roll your own player, taking on the primary advantage of services like SoundCloud. For instance, one contributor hosts their own files and uses a JavaScript-based solution (with HTML5 and Flash) on which some projects on other services are themselves based.

http://www.schillmania.com/projects/soundmanager2/

I’ll be continuing this conversation with readers over coming weeks and in more formal ways, but why not kick it off now: what would you want in a social website, or in collaboration? Leaving out fancy real-time collaborative environments, how would you most want to come together with fellow music lovers and geeks and make some stuff? Having used online communities since the days of BBSes, CompuService, and GEnie, I find often it’s basic, elemental communication that makes things work, so if you had only a select feature or two, what would they be?

(thanks, jure, for the tip!)

Behold the power of the Web: composition ideas become a tool, a tool becomes a means for even casual users sharing musical sketches, and a browser toy can be a window into a Turkish sound artist breeding musical DNA like some people breed strains of flowers.

Otomata is a simple generative online grid-based sequencer, owing to a number of step sequencers and Toshio Iwai’s Tenori-on, with some beautiful circular visualizations of the resulting sounds. I’m late in posting it, but in a way, that’s a good thing – in the time that this sequencer has spread around the Web, it’s spawned a small army of casual musicians producing their own videos and patterns.

And that brings me to an observation. In all the discussion of “apps” versus the Web – a discussion as old as the network itself, having appeared as “cloud computing” and various other forms before – people may be missing the point. Right now, Otomata is not an app, though iPhone/iPad and Android versions are reportedly in the works. It runs as a Flash file, which gives pretty much anyone access to it (including the majority of people on the planet who still don’t have either an iOS or Android device).

But it’s Web sharing that’s already making it powerful – people sending around links, sharing creations, and showing friends. App or not, the Web is what makes software successful these days, through YouTube views, blog posts like this one (ahem), and even casual “look what’s on my screen” sharing that results in the exchange of a URL anyone with a browser can run. Flash may not be the best rich tool the Web has ever seen, but it’s only the means to an end – the end being getting things in a connected browser.

Want further evidence? Look no further than the Facebook page, or better yet, open discussion on Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/otomata/

Great design, embodying musical sense in the structure of the tool itself, makes this a hit. And for that, you can thank “computational sound artist” Batuhan Bozkurt of Istanbul. His musical expression is generally procedural by nature, expressed as a set of rules in compositional form. Check out his terrific video on this work, as built in the open source tool SuperCollider.

If you can tear yourself away from playing with this wonderful toy, you can get deep into genetic code for musical composition and spectacular SuperCollider creation.

http://www.earslap.com/projectslab

Rapid iteration? Quick contagian? Generational evolution? Hmmm… sounds a bit like what’s happening on a larger level as creations like this spread around the Web. But it’s a heck of a lot more fun than genetic engineering … or the plague. So play away, Internets.

Tons of additional information and goodness on Batuhan’s site:
http://www.earslap.com/projectslab/otomata

Thanks to Max (and others) for the tip! (Max actually suggests trying this with multiple tabs open!)

A music score is, in essence, a way of making space into time: traversing notation from left to right and top to bottom, you move through a series of events. So, why not make that spatial map an actual map, as in the familiar, isometric interactive cityscape popularized by Will Wright’s classic game Sim City?

Isle of Tune does just that: lay out trees, houses, and city streets, and you sequence musical patterns as virtual islands. It’s available right now on the Web, powered by Flash – Chrome users can even get a one-click install via the Chrome Web Store. If you prefer to use a phone or tablet, mobile versions are coming, too, beginning with an imminent iPad release, seen in a video below.

Isle of Tune must have hit a nerve in this surreal pairing of imaginary landscapes and simple sequenced songs, because the YouTube nation has responded en masse.

I spoke to developer Jim Hall, who gives CDM the latest update and some background on himself:

A little bit about me: I’ve worked as an animator, flash developer and art director over the last 10 years in London, UK – mainly for digital ad agencies (some previous work here: www.happylander.co.uk). Around about June last year I pretty much quit advertising work (before my soul was lost completely in the desolate mire of micro-sites and adver-games!) and took some time out to make stuff for myself – mainly based around music and playful interaction.

Isle of Tune came from a desire to make a different kind of music sequencer along the lines of http://lab.andre-michelle.com/tonematrix or the Reactable – but with less of an abstract feel and a little more game-like and social. Since it went live in December there has been over 60,000 islands made
with some properly creative tunes in there eg. http://isleoftune.com/?id=63320 or http://isleoftune.com/?id=48359

Over the last few months I’ve been making updates from user requests – mainly to the way you can browse, search and view rated islands, it seems a lot of visitors come by just to check out the islands other people have made!

I’m currently working with a talented chap – Stuart Middleton – a developer since the days of the Spectrum (and now runs a small app dev company at www.abstractalien.com) who is converting the Isle of Tune codefor various mobile platforms and also helping me take it beyond what I could online with the limitations of flash. My far-fetched dream with the app is to be able to fund further development and allow me to make more stuff like this in the future without having to go back to the world of advertising!

For those of you with iPads, Jim says you should be able to look forward to the iOS release some time around mid-May if all goes to plan.

But for anyone, you can use this right now with Flash:
http://isleoftune.com/

And yes, even Requiem for a Dream gets the Island of Tune treatment. Hmmmm… this island seems a bit too sunny and cheery, no? Maybe the title needs a dreary, overcast Coney Island mode.

Alexander Chen transforms the steady pulse of the (actual) New York City subway system into gentle, generative string plucks in his new interactive piece “Conductor.” The visual effect as well as the musical one is mesmerizing, as the subway is viewed in the abstract, sparse geometries of designed Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.

New York subway nerds and long-time residents will note that the schedule itself is from 1972, hence the appearance of the K train and the elevated along Third Avenue (the 8), one I imagine we wish we still had.

http://mta.me/

The work is also a glimpse of the Web as a canvas (figurative and literal) for this kind of work – your browser as your very own virtual chamber music setting. And it’s a window into some of the challenges (cough, buggy audio implementations!) to making that happen.

Built in HTML5′s Canvas element with SVG vector data and JavaScript, the application must rely on Flash as a back end for audio delivery, though via a very cool JavaScript tool, SoundManager (which also supports HTML5 audio if its implementation improves). There’s also some use of open source sounds of string plucks, via the freesound project.

Important as the technical details are, though, I find what Alexander says about the inspiration for music made from subways to be the most compelling.

He shares with CDM some insight into the process, technical and artistic.

How did this project come about? What made you decide to translate subway schedules into music?

I’ve been kind of interested in turning everyday things into music. I did a project in 2003 called Sonata for the Unaware, where I used security-cam style footage of commuters and generated music from that.

This project sort of started last September when my friend David Lu (velluminous.org) and I were having a conversation about an idea he
had for an illustrated string instrument, where drawn lines turn into plucked strings. This turned into a project (which is still in progress) called Crayong. So I had written code for that. As a violist, I really wanted to duplicate the feel of grabbing and pulling a string, how there’s more tension near the pinned points.

Once I had that string code, I started brainstorming other things I could do with it. My wife and I started talking about a subway map that you could strum. My friend owns a print of the 1972 Vignelli map, which is really beautiful.

I liked the idea of the trains being the performers. And with all of the realtime location-sensitive information we can get now, I thought about a website that starts off feeling realtime, but then time starts unraveling.

How it was put together — good notes on your site, but want to share any tips that you learned in the process? You had to give up on HTML5 audio, it seems; was that in all browsers or just some of them? With Flash for sound and Canvas for visuals, seems the results are at least largely compatible, yes?

I’m excited about HTML5. The graphics went pretty flawlessly, but unfortunately there definitely were limitations in the audio layering. There’s an in-detail post at my site:

Limitations of layering HTML5 Audio

I ran into problems layering multi-shot triggers of the same sample. It could layer a handful of sounds (seemed to cap off around 8), but would increase load time unnecessarily. This was at least happening in Safari, where I could see the HTTP requests. I tried some workarounds but every approach had its trade-offs.

So all in all, I think Flash still performs better for the audio portion of these types of experiments. But I’m hoping that will change, as it would be nice to not rely on any plugins.

For projects where I am triggering say, 30+ samples, I often compile them into one audio file and manually store the start times of each sample in the code. Seems to load faster overall, because each HTTP request has some overhead. (But I didn’t have to do that here, because I only had 20 notes.)

I also think it’s nice to work with technical limitations. For example, Flash has a limit of how many sounds can be simultaneously layered. Instead of trying massive code fixes, I decided to simply use samples with shorter sustain. That’s why I ended up going with cello pizzicato instead of say, a sustained harp. The samples are from the http://www.freesound.org, recorded by user corsica_s.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

About me – Besides doing interactive work, I’ve released three albums as Boy in Static and one as The Consulate General. I’ve toured on-and-off the past
few years, usually performing on viola and vocals. I’m currently working at Google Creative Lab in New York.

Besides various new art and technology projects I see everyday, my wife and I recently found a DVD of Al Jarnow’s stop animation from the 80′s. Incredible mathematical grid-based animation experiments done by hand, frame by frame.

More on Alexander:
chenalexander.com
presentcompany.tv

Music:
theconsulategeneral.com
boyinstatic.com

His day job is at the Google Creative Lab.

First Augmented Reality Music CD :: Latrama :: Love & Projects :: from musikame on Vimeo.

Want the CD as object to come alive again? Here’s yet another approach: make it into an input for webcam-based augmented reality.

The album “Love & Projects” by Latrama uses the packaging to trigger augmented reality “DJing” of the playlist. Put the CD in front of your webcam, head to a browser-based tool, and you get turntable controls for playing the album live, complete with scratching, pitch, delay, filter, and volume controls. There are more downloads available, as well.

Of course, this raises the question of why you actually need the CD, given the experience is online – but then, it’s the problems with this concept that are to me interesting, themselves; working out the tension between the old (CD) and new (Web, webcam augmented reality) is where a number of opportunities lie.

The “augmented reality CDj” was developed by Madrid-based interactive shop Musikame. Musikame has been busy, re-imagining a clock face as a DJ tool and building a browser-based tool for DJing with SoundCloud tracks:

Clock DJ from musikame on Vimeo.

For SoundCloud DJing and mixing (via Sonic State, over the summer):

http://soundcloud.musikame.com/

And here’s a project that mapped Facebook faces to a wall of photos for a festival. (Take that, new Facebook profile page!)

musikame @ REC Madrid 2010 from musikame on Vimeo.

Updated: Via comments, here’s what Theo den Brinker (SoundCloud) did with that player app:

SoundCloud for iPhone from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

While it’s easy to focus on one platform or another, a profound trend in 2010 has been toward sharing media in the cloud. The basic concept is as old as the Internet, but from applications like Instamatic for photographers to syncing storage to tote around documents on iPads, this has been a year in which the server-shared media seemed to become a bigger part of our lives.

Sound could be next. Aptly-named service SoundCloud has added a big, red “record” button both to an updated iPhone app and the Web browser-based dropbox. That means you can tote an iPhone or iPod touch with the SoundCloud app, and record and upload, say, a field recording or rehearsal set all in one go. Or someone could leave a voice greeting or record a quick demo for you right on your site.

The service didn’t have to do anything to make this possible; it’s just a clever interface around recording, using native iOS features on mobile and Flash in the browser. (To me, actually, seeing HTML5-based support would be even bigger news, but a lot of HTML5 goodness requires waiting.) When you hit record, you use the same recording function that was always there; the app just takes care of the upload so there isn’t an extra step. SoundCloud confirms to CDM that there’s no change to the underlying APIs. For developers, there’s really nothing stopping you from building SoundCloud “recording” into any mobile or Web-connected tool.

The main questions for developers and users is, when is this the right choice? I had to explain to SoundCloud why I preferred Dropbox connectivity in mobile apps to SoundCloud – for me, the hierarchy and file system integration in Dropbox trumps the sharing features in SoundCloud for certain apps. I might want to record a bunch of samples to manipulate later in Dropbox; I don’t really need to share with anyone. Conversely, though, if sharing is your main goal, SoundCloud is easier. I expect we’ll see more of this kind of differentiation – and head-scratching about the best workflow – in the future. (Cue someone in comments mentioning free, old-fashioned, no-subscription-required tools like rsync.)

For the same reason, it’s worth noting that there’s more to the recent iPhone app and API SoundCloud updates than just recording. Apps will in the near future will be able to more easily connect to services like Facebook and Twitter. Those tools have been the “glue” that have made things like the faux-Polaroid and Holga apps for iPhone become so viral. It’ll be interesting to see if sound can make the same impression.

Then again, I think it’s worth noting that the biggest news this week came out of plain text you could copy and paste. The Google Translate beatbox, defying any rational explanation, became perhaps the biggest sound and music meme I’ve seen all year. And maybe that proves the point: the familiar copy-and-paste means of spreading it was something anyone could understand. There’s a lesson there, certainly.

In the meantime, SoundCloud is looking a lot more useful. Now, it’s just a matter of finding the most productive way to use it – and, oh yeah, finding some sounds.

The SoundCloud iPhone/iPod touch app is free on Apple’s App Store.

Sharing Note by Weatherman

Capture And Share Your Sounds [SoundCloud Blog]

Party like it’s 1991 – your browser’s invited. A full-blown music production tool has been directly ported from the desktop to the browser using Flash, modeled with a tracker-style interface for fast, precise music editing. (In fact, a tracker, thanks to speedy entry from a QWERTY keyboard, seems to me an ideal interface for browser music. Trust me – it looks arcane at first, but trackers can be extremely friendly music interfaces. Just be prepared to look like a total geek once you’ve worked it out, because it’ll look even more arcane to everyone else)

The resulting tool comes with all the modules you’ll need, and it’s completely free to use. There’s even an included sample library.

Now, the next time you’re stuck in an Internet cafe, you can compose a song.

Creator Ruben Ramos says this is the first tracker on the Web, and shares his development process with us:

The sourcecode of the application is the same than the desktop version, it’s C++. I used a research project from Adobe Labs to build my sources for the AVM2 (ActionScript Virtual Machine 2), which is the last virtual machine used in Flash. This way, I got a binary version as a .swf of my original desktop-based application.

I wrote some parts code for this version, but only a few. For example the graphic rendering: in the desktop version was using the graphic card acceleration; for this version I implemented a software renderer.

After it, I added some special features for this version. For example, I implemented a filesystem with remote access to allow the load of resources stored on the server. With this feature songs and samples can be loaded from the webserver, which is good to have a base sample library available on the server.

Try it out for yourself:
http://www.skale.org/

Cellular AutoMidi is a generative music making app, making use of a modified version of the ever-popular Cellular Automata algorithm – a simple evolutionary model on a grid that works nicely for sequencers. (See, among many others, Lazyfish’s legendary NEWSCHOOL for Reaktor, and Audio Damage’s Automaton.)

Cellular Automata is nothing new, but here, you get to see it as an AIR/Flash app, which means a modular CA-based creation you can drop anywhere. (More on the cross-platform details after the jump.) And hey, if we can have countless step sequencers, why not countless cellular automata step sequencers? The project is developed by Leeds, England-based Flash developer Lawrie Cape.

It also deserves special mention for some nice sounds made with NI’s Massive synth, using FL Studio as host; see the video.

Cellular AutoMidi – Generative Audio Flash AIR App from Lawrie Cape on Vimeo.

Lawrie writes:

Each cell can be alive or dead. Once in a generation, each cell looks at it’s surrounding cells, and dies if it is lonely or overcrowded. If a dead cell has an optimum amount of neighbors, it will come to life! Each generation, all the cells which have come to life will sound a note. The notes are assigned based on the cell’s y position, and are all in the pentatonic scale.

There’s a few controls at the bottom which change how things work too.

Start/Stop – Starts/Stops the automation.
Load – Loads a pattern from the text box.
Export – Exports the current pattern to the clipboard. You can send it to friends, or save it for later, then load in with the load button.
Clear down – Stop and clear the current pattern.
Law Mode – An error when coding the cell rules gave this other odd mode.
Skip Audio – Just show the cell animations.
Sing Dead – Instead of singing the recently revived notes, sing for the recently deceased.
Note duration – Alter the system speed.
Also, along the top there are banks of preset systems. Click play to start a saved pattern, and click assign to assign the pattern currently displayed to that button. You can also trigger each pattern with the keyboard keys 1-8.

When you press Export, your pattern is automatically copied to the clipboard, so you can save it, or share it with people. Here’s a pattern I made – you can load it by pasting it into the load box, and pressing Load!

I’ve written a post about it on my blog here – http://www.lawriecape.co.uk/theblog/index.php/archives/735

And you can download the app there too.

What about MIDI function on different operating systems (Mac, Windows, Linux)?

Flash Midi Server is Processing based, but I’ve packaged it as Win and Mac apps in the Google Code download at – http://code.google.com/p/flash-midi-server/downloads/list
In the next couple of days, I’ll put together and test a Linux version, and hopefully release the Processing source code too – although as my first Processing project, I’m sure the code is pretty ropey.

So, give it a try, and maybe someone with some Processing MIDI skills can recommend some tweaks to MIDI operation. I think this will be particularly welcome on Linux, where the toolset is a bit leaner.

If you use it, let us know what you think or what you create!

Generative: the rhythmic frontier. These are the voyages of the starship MicroTonic. Its online mission: to explore strange new grooves, to seek out new beats and new musical cultures …

Yes, Patternarium, by software scientists Magnus and Fredrik Lindström of SonicCharge (Synplant, µTonic, Reason’s Malström), have built a server-based rhythmic generation tool. You, the human, don’t have to do much: reality TV show-style, just vote up or down patterns you hear, and the generative scripts will continue spawning new, evolved rhythms. I suppose if you believe in the power of democratic action, eventually this could lead to some sort of new replacement for the “Amen break.”

I actually am more in love with the interface than the thought of servers making beats for me. The results play as a lovely, radial arrangement of rectangles. As for the accompanying starfield and Star Trek: Wrath of Kahn The Motion Picture typography, well, that’s just a bonus.

http://www.soniccharge.com/patternarium

These aren’t just beats for your browser, though. You can download the results to SonicCharge’s fantastic synthesis-powered drum machine (VST, AU/PC, Mac). And that brings us to the real news hidden in this story: SonicCharge are cooking up a new version of MicroTonic, which is good news, indeed. They’re not saying much, but they are willing to reveal that the new version supports drag and drop of patterns as MIDI files, meaning that you’ll be able to easily create a bank of pattern-triggering clips in something like Ableton Live. (A recent update to Native Instruments’ Maschine did the same, suggesting drag-able grooves are something we’ll see more often.)

Always delicious, always rhythmically nutritious, µTonic aka “MicroTonic”:
http://www.soniccharge.com/mtonic

Can’t be bothered to try it yourself? Need a narration? Here’s Torley with a video, via Synthtopia.

Pictured: Looks native, but this app is built with a cross-platform library. And really, for music making – or great, immersive development, in general – does it matter?

The iPad has inflamed plenty of passions online. On this site, I’ve gotten a little flak from iPad lovers and haters alike. It goes something like this: “wait a minute, you’ve got all these criticisms of the iPad’s restrictiveness, but then you’ve got all these amazing music apps.” Or, on the other side: “why do you keep covering all these iPad music apps?”

In a word, yes. They’re not the same issue. I’ve talked to plenty of developers. The business draw on iPad is a big deal for independent, creative developers, so to the extent that Apple strategy makes the store a good place to sell apps, there’s some overlap. But the iPad has also been attracting plenty of music developers because of the quality of the APIs – developers who often aren’t pleased with the restrictions. Does the person who writes the audio drivers and APIs have anything to do with the lawyer who writes the developer agreement? Of course not.

The problem is, just as iPad/iPhone critics sometimes conflate issues in their rush to criticize the platform, some of the defense from the Mac community is getting a bit carried away, too. We’ve seen this with design issues, not just ideological or business issues: you go from “touch can be an expressive way to interact with a computer” to “throw out your QWERTY keyboards! They’re dead!” or “you’ll never read a magazine again” or “multitasking was a terrible idea in the first place.”

In this case, Apple made a fairly specific change to a developer document. That resulted in some criticism that was over the top (namely, people claimed it’d stop specific developer tools before they had verified whether that was actually the case). But it also resulted in some Apple apologism that was downright surreal:

All cross-platform development is bad? Wait – what?

And for that matter, is the mark of great software design now exclusively using Apple’s developer toolkits? Wouldn’t we sort of hope that, beyond those slick Apple UI widgets, someone somewhere might be developing the UI of the future? For that matter, do people not realize that a lot of what makes Apple’s quality exceptional is stuff you can’t see – things like multitouch firmware, high-quality audio drivers, and other fit-and-finish on the plumbing?

So, I invite you, dear reader, travel with me. I think we may actually have something on which iPad critics and fans alike can agree. It’s relevant to music, because music apps (along with games, incidentally) are the ones that are most intimate with this issue. And I suspect a lot of you use cross-platform tools to develop code for your day job.

The Catalyst: Apple’s Legal Change

Apple surprised many in the tech world last week by making a change – mandatory to all developers – that requires that applications for iPhone “must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++ or JavaScript [running in the WebKit browser engine].” More specifically-worded, “Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited.” Because of the timing, and because of the further clarification, conventional wisdom suggests this is aimed at Adobe CS5′s tool for making native iPhone apps from Flash code. I don’t think it should be any surprise that that would get developers upset, not only those who use Flash, but even some loyal developers who don’t like being told what to do by Apple. (And I know at least some fairly big fans of the iPad weren’t fans of this change.)

Had it not coincided with Adobe working on CS5, I don’t know that this would have been big news; Apple already restricts the languages used to develop on their device. But I think what set people off may have been that very problem: people don’t know what it means, and that (rightfully) makes them nervous. While online debates have devolved into idealogical extremes “All control is good! / Apple just killed Adobe!”, what the press has missed is a sense among developers that they can’t predict or entirely interpret Apple’s developer agreements. I suspect Apple did aim this at Adobe, but that means even non-Flash-using, native-developing software makers now have to face some serious ambiguity in a legal document they have to sign.

That said, if Apple would further clarify the statement, that could be resolved.

I didn’t personally get worked up over this, because it’s consistent with what I and many, many others have been saying about the platform all along. Apple’s control over distribution and desire to control the development process means this is the sort of thing they can do. There are reasons to endure it: they make a really well-engineered platform, and there’s a terrific market and installed base that has a voracious appetite for creative software. There are also clear reasons to look elsewhere if you’re not comfortable with the restrictions. This is the very definition of trade-offs and choices.

I’m going to avoid the debate not because I don’t think it’s important – I think it is – but because I think enough words have been written in service to one side or the other. What seems to be missing, however, is a shared understanding of what cross-platform development actually is.

The Trend: “All Cross-Platform Development is Bad”

Whatever Apple’s thinking, it’s caused some people apologizing for Apple to say really weird things. John Gruber at Daring Fireball, for instance, begins by making an entirely reasonable argument for Apple’s strategy and where they live in the market. I don’t agree with all of it, but it is a well-reasoned, well-argued point. Then, almost as a footnote, John makes this claim:

Cross-platform software toolkits have never — ever — produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms. Not for the classic Mac OS, not for Mac OS X, and not for iPhone OS. Such apps generally have been downright crummy.

[emphasis mine]

Why Apple Changed Section 3.3.1
[Daring Fireball]

That argument has gotten picked up all over the Web by other Mac fans. And that, to me, is dangerous – because, as worded, this statement appears to be to be entirely indefensible.

John doesn’t say “cross-platform compatibility layers” or “meta-platforms” like Flash and AIR. He says “cross-platform software toolkits,” and I think he means it. (Now, John, if I’m wrong, please correct me – but please stop making statements like this, because “cross-platform” is what many of your readers are coming away with.)

This would likely come as news to those who use music software. Cross-platform software frameworks are at the heart of most of the tools we use. One small but lovely example, specific to the iPhone/iPad and absolutely kosher under Apple’s new developer rules, is LibNUI, a C++ framework for building UIs. (In fact, after playing with this a bit, I may pick it up for a project on a completely different platform.) Popular iPhone apps like bleep!BOX and BeatMaker use it, but it also keeps tools like MOTU’s MachFive plug-in compatible with multiple platforms, without sacrificing native features like drag-and-drop.

If you use Ableton Live, Max/MSP, Cubase, or countless other apps, you’re using software created in cross-platform frameworks – some in-house, but using the same basic technology. Indeed, few of these applications would work the way you expected if they used exclusively “native” features and design patterns, like UI widgets that don’t fit musical applications or don’t work in live music performance.

In fact, John’s statement is so broad and over the top, I think it might even apply to tools like CodeWarrior, the developer tool and, yes, cross-platform framework that was the dominant toolset for developers in the pre-X “Classic” Mac OS era.

This matters to users, too. Sure, you may never write a line of code, but you rely on the community of people who do. Part of what gives you the freedom and flexibility to run great software on a variety of platforms, rather than being locked into just one platform, is the fact that these tools make the differences between those platforms fall into the background. Any developer who thinks this happens automatically without effort or testing is likely to give you a terrible app, but odds are, they’ll give you a terrible app regardless of what tools they’re using.

Develop Once, Run Anywhere?

Macworld editor Jason Snell also picks up the old argument about cross-platform development being inferior. (The title, I think, may be the most insightful part of this piece, but I’m not an Apple employee or investor, so I’ll let them worry about that.)

Apple against the world [Macworld]

…the develop-once-run-anywhere philosophy is something that makes more sense to bean counters and development-environment vendors than it does to platform owners and discriminating users. In the ’90s we were told that Java apps would be the future of software, because you could write them once and deploy them anywhere. As someone who used to use a Java-based Mac app on an almost daily basis, let me tell you: it was a disaster. Java apps didn’t behave like Mac apps. They were ugly and awful and weird, but hey, at least they ran on the Mac.

Ah, yes – this argument again. (It’s one of those things from the 90s that just never gets old, like Ace of Base or plaid t-shirts and pleated khakis.)

Okay, I kid, but Jason – I feel you. Actually, I feel you even as a fan of Java; the language and platform have some real power, but because of some questionable tooling atop them and questionable development practices with them, it produced some really horrible products. Such is development. (Actually, arguably, the folks in the 90s were right – it just turns out to be the browser itself, not Java applets, which have nothing to do with modern Java development anyway.)

I think Jason is mostly hung up on things like UI widgets; he refers specifically to the lack of a menu bar, odd preferences dialogs, and other usability issues in the AIR application TweetDeck. (Part of the reason we don’t nitpick these things in music, of course, is that we’re using extraordinarily complex interfaces for doing other things.)

Jason misses some critical points, however – in this case by omission; he doesn’t make the same, sweeping statement Gruber does. (Jason told me via Twitter that he wasn’t set to write another 2000 words, so Jason, I’ll try to do that for you.)

In regards to Java, the reason Java apps don’t feel like native Mac apps is at least in part because of Apple. It is actually possible to do all the things Jason is describing; Apple themselves touted the feature. You can read the documentation, and the fact that it was deprecated way back in 2005, on Apple’s legacy Mac developer documentation site. I can only speculate about the decision there, but my guess would be that it was practical more than strategic. There’s a new open source project to replace this functionality, Apple themselves recently made interfacing with native code easier for Java developers, and whatever language preferences Apple has on the iPhone, they continue to support projects like Ruby on the desktop Mac.

Generally, I think you’ll see more native feel in apps for Mac, Windows, and Linux from Java, Ruby, Python, and other languages. It’s an area of active development, and it’s improving. It may also benefit from these communities breaking off from big corporate parents, because the developers themselves seem to understand the perspective of the users better than, erm, companies like Sun and Oracle. Bottom line: don’t be surprised if some day soon you again run a Java app (or another language, not necessarily Java) and don’t notice. Those “discriminating users” on the Mac do notice when it’s wrong, and very often want to get it right.

Art, Tools, and Cross-Platform Frameworks That Don’t Suck (Or Break Apple Rules, Maybe)

But it’s not just about the standard Mac widgets. Jason, definitely check out Processing and the fantastic art made with it? It’s Java, though that doesn’t matter and isn’t immediately apparent, which is good.

If you design became only about widgets and preference bars, even nice Mac ones, we’d have a generic, bland, look-alike future for software. I know that escaping bland, cookie-cutter software is what drove a lot of people to the Mac in the first place, so it’s worth reiterating.

Tools like Java aside, though, somehow lost in this debate is the fact that cross-platform development is wildly popular and largely transparent – just in the language C/C++. From games to serious software, a whole lot of software is written in cross-platform C++, with the bulk of the code compiling on different operating systems and even hardware architectures. Developers typically make use of various frameworks to ease this compatibility.

Furthermore, while I still think there are reasons to be wary of Apple’s policies and this decision in particular, it would likely be inaccurate to claim that the recent change blocks these tools. In fact, several specific examples all use native code to link against the official Apple APIs, meaning they should be safe. These applications are exceptions that prove the rule: they’re great cross-platform tools that can produce great apps, they’re allowed on the iPhone/iPad OS as near as I can tell, and in some cases they’ll also be cranking out great apps for non-Apple platforms. Adobe’s big sin may have been allowing development from Windows, meaning you don’t get all those designers buying new MacBooks. Here are some examples of tools likely to be safe:

iPhone Wax uses Lua, but it still uses Xcode templates.

Corona, an awesome development tool for OpenGL-accelerated apps, has a specific response. Oh, and it’s coming to Android, too.

Unity is producing fantastic games and should likewise be safe under the new rules.

OpenFrameworks, a brilliant framework for artists that allows them to produce creative, interactive applications with music, visuals, and media for Windows, Mac, Linux, and platforms like iPhone/iPad is written entirely in C++ and appears to be okay. (Again, you use Xcode and Objective-C to link against official Apple APIs.)

Not incidentally, each of these tools (and LibNUI, above) could make some amazing music apps, some likely developed by readers of this site.

Let’s be clear: critics of Apple’s change likely overestimated how many frameworks would be impacted. That meant people were making an argument that may have been divorced from the facts. That said:

Just because they got the argument wrong doesn’t mean criticism (or defense) isn’t warranted. Apple did make a major change to the developer agreement, and they made it – apparently – as a reactionary response to a particular technology, in a way that could threaten other, unrelated technologies. The debate may have gotten overheated and inaccurate, but it’s understandable that the underlying cause is cause for concern. In fact, I think there’s no reason that Mac-centric media outlets couldn’t point that out. And developers really should consider leaving a platform if they don’t like it. (If it’s Apple’s right to make the rules, it’s certainly likewise the developer’s right to vote with his or her feet.) I think there’s an argument to be made in defense of Apple – I could certainly make that argument if someone dropped me on a debate team and put me on Apple’s side, even if I happen to disagree.

The jury is still out on just what apps are impacted – which should be further cause for concern. In fact, I’m still not entirely sure what the status of the apps above may be. On the blog /dev/why??:

In my opinion this is not purely aimed at Flash, but it is certainly precipitated by Flash CS5. I can’t imagine Apple is happy about environments like MonoTouch, Unity3D, PhoneGap, Appcelerator, or Corona, but I am doubtful they would have changed the license in this way just to stop developers using those environments …

He apparently thinks, however (though even the developers of Corona do not), that these frameworks could become verboten. Furthermore, he notes the case of “interpreted code” and why it’s important (it happens to be useful in music apps, too), though my understanding was that that was already a violation of the agreement. (Perhaps it’s clarified here.)

The more interesting thing from my standpoint is that this makes it a license violation to include a language interpreter inside a game. If you aren’t a game developer you might not be familiar with how large games are structured, but most games consist of a game engine, which is high performance code for doing things like rendering graphics, and an interpreter which runs the game logic (determining how sprites move, determining when to pop up in game text boxes, etc). This is how practically every commercial RPG works, as well as many (most?) other types of games. This affects major app store publishers, like EA, Gameloft, Tapulous, and ngmoco:). Looking at the top ten lists on the app store right now I see several titles that I know have embedded Lua interpreters. In this case I think these apps are genuine collateral damage, though I honestly doubt Apple would attempt to enforce the clause against them. In fact, using an interpreted language for game logic is already technically in violation of section 3.3.2 in the current agreement, though many developers may not realize it because under the original agreement it was okay, and the change that made it verboten was very subtle (changing an “and” to an “or”). I am actually not sure exactly when that changed, and only noticed it myself while I was researching this blog post.

See comments – ultimately, the language question is the big one. It could have a negative impact on developer flexibility, and specifically could impact DSP code. As Richard notes in comments, it’s all a matter of what Apple chooses to enforce. It’s possible that the letter of the law makes all of these things illegal, but in practice, Apple just wants to block Adobe’s tools.

But let’s also be clear:

Major voices in the Mac community are advocating against cross-platform software, even without a complete understanding of what that means. And you can actually defend Apple’s rule change Others (like Jason Snell at Macworld) I think just don’t get the opportunity to be clear. But let’s be clear. Let’s makes sure that idealogical discussions on both sides of this debate don’t obscure the facts.

Digging into Apple’s own, platform-proprietary tools can be a great thing. My friend vade, a sometimes-contributor on Create Digital Motion, has done great work with Quartz Composer, for instance, as an artist, and knows Core Image backwards and forwards because it allows him to express himself.

But that’s just one avenue. I know other developers who have found that working across multiple platforms ultimately makes their software better. Jason Snell unfairly, I think, characterizes this as “lowest-common denominator” development. If that’s what you’re doing, well, yeah, that would kind of suck. But I’d call this “highest-common denominator” development: the more you need to make code work on multiple platforms, the more, very often, you have to optimize all of the platforms, the more you discover opportunities to improve your code and make it a more general solution to a problem.

The truth is, you can use the cross-platform tools above to make fantastic iPhone/iPad apps, apps that feel entirely “native,” but apps that will also – by Jason’s description:

…[create] a world where App X for iPhone and App X for Android are indistinguishable from one another.

When it comes to games, to music apps, to creative applications with alternative interfaces, to immersive applications, to rich media interfaces – developers are creating that world, period. Apple can’t stop developers from doing that. Given that they tout availability of apps for their platform that were built with that model, I’m not even convinced Apple always has a problem with that development model.

The cross-platform world is here already, and it’s growing. And, honestly, I think it’ll be a good thing.

For further reading…

This post is really rhetorical, but it hilariously takes the legal clause to its logical (if not practical or likely) conclusion:
Apple bans modular programming

It’s amusing reading, but as author Jeff Erickson (“Ernie Pan”) responds to comments, the real bottom line comes out: “But it doesn’t matter what Apple means. The license is a legal document; the only thing that matters is what it actually says.” Of course, that leads to still more unpleasant revelations: it doesn’t matter what the document says or Apple means, but what Apple actually does. And Apple can change what it does at any time.

Tao Effect notes, as I do, that cross-platform toolkits can be made to look like native apps, or even that it may not matter what they look like (because as a game, or in my example of a music app, they all look different by necessity). It also responds to what I think we could now call the Jobs Doctrine:

“We’ve been there before, and intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps and hinders the progress of the platform.”

My issue: I”m not sure what Jobs means by the terms “intermediate” or “layers.” In fact, I’m not entirely certain what he means by “sub-standard.”

The blog notes that – while I suggest that maybe some of them are safe – things like MonoTouch, popular apps that feature Lua scripting in their development, and the widely-used Unity 3D game framework may well not be allowed in the store, which could mean more unpredictable rejections.

Ah, to be using a game console, where almost everything is rejected and you only have to worry about the few apps that make the cut…

Whatever the implications for the iPhone platform, though, these stories underly the point I’m really trying to make here – whatever Jobs may seem to be saying or Apple advocates are arguing, the notion that cross-platform development creates bad apps is one that is seriously open to debate.

In the meantime, we have several groups who don’t speak the same language or technical understanding:
1. Apple lawyers.
2. Apple end users / customers / advocates.
3. Developers.

And then we have Steve Jobs making sweeping, provocative generalizations that are themselves enigmatic, because he’s, well … Steve Jobs. (So make that category #4.)