As computer music practice – part composition, part instrumental play – spreads, the idea of software interface as performance tool is becoming second nature. Putting those opposable thumbs and sensitive fingertips to work, multitouch controllers are growing in number, variety, and sophistication. Berlin-based artist Marco Kuhn shows off his beautiful creation, the PlayBox multitouch hardware, and its first app, PlayLive. That first software focuses on Ableton Live performance, but Live could be just the beginning – Marco has worked with Pd in the past and promises other apps to come. He’s interested in selling this device in the future, and he shares with us the tools he used to create this work for those of you doing development along similar lines.

The Project:

“Play Box” is is a User Interface for Natural User Interaction.
? allows multi-touch and object recognition (TUIO marker)
? hovering is also possible
? 22 ” TFT display , 1680 x 1050 pixel
? robust
? plug`n play

“Play Live” is a dedicated multitouch controller surface for Ableton Live.

- GUI Elements support multi-touch interaction
- easy to setup , just load the “Play” Control Surface
- you need no controller assignment
- you can control 32 tracks and 127 scenes, that are 4064 clips
- track controls are mute, solo, record, send1, send2, pan, level
- scene feedback name and state
- clip feedback color, name and state
- Transport control
- 2 Returns
- Master
- support bidirectional communication
- display track level meter, name

The whole app is coded in python.
- use Python Ableton Live API
- and libavg www.libavg.de for the GUI and Trackingengine
- PyPortMidi receive/send Midi Messages

“Play Live” Future plans:
- FX View per Track
- subpage for abstract clip controlling

I tested it with my mac book pro, “Play Live” and “Ableton Live” is running at the same machine. It should work on all platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X). That Project started with my Diploma Thesis in Applied Computer Science 1 year ago.

Everything is coded and built by myself. The GUI – elements has been designed by Gösta Wellmer.

In this work, I created a GUI-Controller Library which allow me to Develop very rapidly Multitouch Interfaces for other Audio Environments.
More Apps coming soon ;-)

I [plan] to sell the” Play Box” and Apps like “Play Live” if anyone is interested.
The price is yet not specified.

That`s not my first multitouch Interface. 2 Years ago I created forfour – http://forfour.hi-pi.de/
- used PD, Processing, Reactivision and OGRE.
But the “Play Box” is another level;-)

For more on the project:
www.hi-pi.de/play

I hope to have video to share soon – and yeah, it’s time to plan another visit to Berlin.

Imagine drawing an interface on paper, then being able to use it as a musical interface. Or, heck, don’t imagine it – do it. Unfortunately, the kinds of intelligence necessary to make the music video in yesterday’s post just aren’t practical yet. (That is, you could draw a picture of a keyboard, and even use the picture as a music controller, but while you or I could recognize a keyboard from a drum pad and know that line is a fader, a computer would need some sort of advance structure for any recognition to work.) But you can do some really clever things, as folks have shared in comments.

And using some basic paper interfaces, you can make entire instruments for just a few dollars.

Of course, the awesomest way to do anything is with LAZORS. Greg Kellum and Alain Crevoisier presented a paper at last year’s NIME (a conference for new interface designs for music) proposing a system for making any surface a control surface. Like the music video yesterday, you can configure your surface to function however you like – even dividing it up into pads and faders.

By now, you’e likely seen plenty of multi-touch interfaces or means of tracking hands. But, to paraphrase the NIME paper, these either require a special surface (or transparent surface), or they can’t actually detect when you’re touching. You can even use multiple cameras or an IR beam, but there are limitations to accuracy and the size of the usable surface that would result. Kellum and Crevoisier use an infrared camera and two illuminators, each built by pointing a laser at a mirrors.

Yawn, you say, been there, done that, seen Jeff Han’s video… The advantage of this system is that you can use any surface, like your dining room table. And you can configure that surface however you like. There’s even a freely-downloadable Surface Editor you can extend in Java and Processing. The creators claim they can even get input latency down to a reasonable 10 ms using high-speed cameras.

Transforming Ordinary Surfaces into Multi-touch Controllers [PDF paper, NIME 2008]
Future Instruments > Projects
Thanks, Randy Jones!

db3ll has created a keyboard out of paper, and of course it works better than those flimsy rubber “roll-up” pianos you see for sale. “Conductive ink is what I used,” he says, “painted on as traces on the non-printed side of the paper.” That’s the twist – I had assumed you’d use the top of the paper, but the trick is to use the reverse side to provide the “wiring.” He also offers advice for making a fader:

You can make a paper thin fader in much the same way, but it requires a magnet. Cut a slot in a piece of paper, color around the slot with conductive ink (I use the “trace repair” pens sold at electronics supply places… it has a very fine tip), and glue some SVHS tape (resistive side up) under it. Put a thin piece of metal beneath the SHVS tape & use a magnet to conduct between the SVHS tape & the conductive ink. The magnet will stay in position due to the metal (I use package banding) under it, and aside from the magnet, it is roughly the thickness of a couple sheets of paper.

Simon Lacelle is also working on a project I’m eager to see:

In a pad controller I’m making using a HUGE Staples calculator, I’m using strips of aluminium foil separated by a sheet of paper with holes at each button as switches merely a milimeter thick, and these are quite responsive.

A YouTube uploader by the name of DJ Mocap appeared briefly online with a project that seems to show him controlling Traktor with a drawing. There’s a camera and some sort of analog input being fed into a circuit board, but I’m not entirely sure what’s going on – though I can think of a couple of ways to make this work. It stumped DJ Tech Tools’ readers, but I have a feeling it can’t stump CDM readers, so have at it.

UPDATED – FAKE (but possible) Okay, so this turns out to be a Stanton touch controller hiding underneath a piece of paper. Of course, that’s itself not such a terrible idea – by having a drawn overlay, you have visual feedback for specific positions on the controller. But furthermore, while this is fake, the idea remains possible – and more cheaply than buying a piece of Stanton gear to toss under your piece of paper. So I call this “fake but potentially inspiring.”

Thanks to Gizmo from Scratchworx. Now, show Gizmo and Mocap by making a real version of this!

Just to consider moving in the opposite direction, I have to point to Amit Pitaru’s Sonic Wire Sculptor, an interface for drawing virtually and digitally. Because it’s digital, you can draw in 3D, do something you can’t with real-world markers. Here it is in a Tokyo gallery installation version; see more information (or try it yourself online) at Amit’s site.

And back to the realm of the imaginary – could MPCs of the future be made out of cardboard? (Oh, how I love reading YouTube comments. “Doesn’t look too sturdy.” “Why do you have your MPC in a box?” Apparently some people thought this was somehow insulting hip-hop. YouTube comments – pushing the very frontier of stupidity.)

Thanks to dyscode on comments — brilliant.

The cardboard MPC comes from theycontrol.us and our friend Elijah Torn, as seen previously on CDM.

Doing it Yourself

If you’re interested in entering the world of paper, drawing, and controllers, there are two directions I’d suggest.

One way to go is to simply start thinking about drawing as an interface. The creator of Tablet 2 MIDI, a MIDI-graphics tablet interface, suggests that using the pen you can draw any interface you like, then map it to tablet input. That concept could certainly be applied more broadly.

As far as using paper and a conductive pen to doodle your own musical creations, it turns out this is one of the easiest ways to learn about resistance in electronics.

PAiA 2 Transistor “Ribbon” Kit from Create Digital Media on Vimeo.

Learn Musical Electronics, No Soldering: Free PAiA Ribbon Controller Kit for CDM Readers

This project, which we covered at the end of 2007 and featured at our Handmade Music event, is ideal for giving young people (or the solder-phobic) their first step into electronics. The whole kit fits on a business card; you just need speakers to which you can connect.

The Drawdio project uses the same basic circuit and principle, but attaches it to a pen, making the rig a little more portable and allowing other fascinating experiments. It’s also available for purchase.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~silver/drawdio/

You’ll find countless variations of the basic circuit, because it’s so simple, and it’d be a great way to get into the more sophisticated (or at least more complex) ideas here.

Other ideas? Questions? Stuff I’ve left out? Let me know, and I’ll update the story.

It’s still anyone’s guess exactly what fruit parent technology maker Stantum may soon ship, but the JazzMutant Lemur touchscreen is getting a component update soon. Nat Lecaude points to a quiet MySpace post from JazzMutant with the details of a coming manufacturing change.

“…the next batch of Lemur will feature the latest generation of our multi-touch technology: better optical performances, higher precision, greater accuracy and responsiveness. It will be clearer and have brighter colors. We plan on launching the new Lemur in early October, and of course we will keep you updated as we get closer to launch date. We once again thank you for your patience, and look forward to sharing the excitement early October!”

It’s actually quite remarkable to me that JazzMutant remains alone in this market – and with Stantum focused on the mass market, that could be the case in the future, too. The issue is that doing multi-touch well still costs some money. There are basic implementations on computers that are cheaper, but that restricts you to a few computer models, because slapping multitouch overlays on displays remains pricey. So HP can get a few computers to the mass market, but not without cutting some corners and not even on that company’s full range. The iPhone has brilliant multi-touch control, but a mobile form factor makes this much easier.

I’ve got some videos demonstrating what’s possible with the Lemur coming soon, as well as some notes on how the software has evolved since I first saw it in its initial release. Even if you don’t want or can’t afford a Lemur, it’s a fascinating demonstration of interaction design and OSC, with lessons (inspiring and tough alike) for other interfaces.

Photo by Rainer Knobloch for CDM.

There’s plenty of rightful skepticism about the use of mainstream displays for multitouch in general purpose computing. And why not? As a full-time replacement for other input, multitouch probably doesn’t make sense. But for music, the equation is changing. Multitouch capabilities are showing up on commodity-priced PC computers like the multi-touch enabled HP laptop models – the tx2z seen here starts, incredibly, at US$850. And because computer musicians are looking for more control, having a touch-enabled display (even single-touch) just makes sense.

The screen for a laptop musician is a huge piece of real estate. Finally, instead of sitting dumbly in front of you glowing, it can become an X/Y controller or give you shortcuts for controls or provide additional parameters. Yes, using a touchscreen exclusively can result in the dreaded “gorilla arm.” The ergonomics of using a vertically-oriented screen are extremely poor – if you use it exclusively for an extended period of time. But if you look at the way people are using these touchscreens, for incidental control in combination with other things – and the ability of convertible laptops to transform into a horizontal orientation – I think this is no longer the deal killer it once was.

At top, an HP laptop ($850) plus the free version of Sensomusic’s Usine is all you need to create a multitouch interface for Ableton Live. Correction: right now this is limited to single touch only, but multitouch is supported in the hardware, in drivers, soon in Windows 7, and support is promised for a future version of Usine. The point still stands — as does the ability to optimize controls for your fingers. Being able to use more than one at once will, of course, be that much better.

Fractal (see Myspace) uses the combination to play Ableton Live with some simple controls. If you get hooked on Usine, you can get the full “Pro” version for EUR70 with additional patches and objects.

The one major remaining obstacle to multitouch, at least, is cost. If you don’t especially fancy buying a new HP laptop, add-on kits still run in the range of US$800-900 (meaning, ironically, you might as well just buy the HP instead). Laptop vendors are still slow to adopt the technology, though that could change when Windows 7 ships later this year. (On the other hand, tablet PCs, even when they were shipping in relative quantity, often were constrained in available configurations and either skimped on specs or demanded a significant premium.)

But let’s not complain too much. The simple reality is you can add an HP laptop now to a live rig as a performance instrument for under a grand.

To see something else with Ableton Live, here’s a video by Andrew Coenen from earlier this year of Pance Party’s Bartelby playing Live with the open source Max Multitouch Framework. This is a more sophisticated setup – it requires a table-style setup using the Frustrated Total Internal Reflection tracking method. But the idea is basically the same. (By the way, Max 5 is an optimal choice because of its excellent widgets, and it’s great having this choice, but it’s a little odd having an “open source” framework in proprietary software. If you want a fully open source solution, there are options like PyMT, which we recently saw on Create Digital Motion. And that said, there’s no reason you can’t try out both.)

And yes, someone has done Reason, too (poor-quality video, but gives you an idea).

Updated: As I’m posting this, I see that Oliver Chesler is writing about how effective touch interfaces can be for synthesizers – just using iPhone as the example (but the idea still holds). And, in fact, you don’t necessarily even need multitouch to make this work; single touch would be effective.

The example: an upcoming iPhone/iPod touch synth from the folks who gave us the Curtis granular synth, The Strange Agency.

Sound Scope Space for the iPhone [Wire to the Ear]

Sound Scope Space demo from strange agency on Vimeo.

Of course, I have to point out at this point, this is another reason that OSC (OpenSoundControl) support becomes essential. Whether or not conventional gear vendors adopt OSC, it’s a logical way to deal with the growing number of touch-enabled devices, from your own display to your iPhone.

I expect this could all accelerate as we near Windows 7’s release. (You don’t need Windows 7 – HP is doing just fine without it – but the presence of in-box APIs for paging through photo galleries and the like is almost certain to encourage Microsoft’s hardware partners.) Stay tuned.

More Examples

$200 Makes Your Laptop Touch-Enabled; Usine Music Demo

Sensomusic Usine + Ableton Live = Modular Touchscreen Interface

First up, here’s a demo of the new app FingerPlay MIDI, which turns Android into a simple touch controller. True, we’ve seen similar things on iPhone, and Apple’s platform has precise multitouch which Android lacks, but it’s nice to see the concept extended across platforms. Big thanks to postromantic on Twitter for the tip! (Follow cdmblogs for more.)

FingerPlay MIDI

I can’t tell yet if this will be open source – that would actually be nice, I think, as it’d allow the community of developers to have a shared set of tools. (In fact, it seems a logical model would be to cash in on general-market apps and open source the more music-specific, niche stuff.)

In other Android mobile news, Christopher Souvey continues to work on his Musical application and the Musical Pro desktop app. The desktop client works with MIDI over Wifi, and thanks to the Cupcake OS update, latency is greatly reduced after a complete rewrite and the creation of custom drawing and event handling and controls. Check out the slick new tuner and UI Christopher has been developing, too.

http://www.souvey.com/ [blog with all the latest]
http://www.souvey.com/musical/

This play-along piano is probably not something any of you folks desperately need, but it is a good demonstration of what’s possible.

Another interesting thread to follow will be the growing power of Web apps. On Android, you’re already able to combine a Web app with the Java APIs, and going another level, mobile apps with native ARM code for the processor. Translation: while phones still have a fraction of the power of your computer, it’s getting easier for developers to work across platforms and to take advantage of what power is there. That’s leading to trends that could be of use not only to a single platform (Android, iPhone), but to mobile devices in general.

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:

No doubt about it: touch is coming to more screens near you. But there’s no need to disappoint your current beloved laptop. $200 kits can turn your laptop into a functioning touchscreen.

Now, as I’m working with JazzMutant’s Lemur this week, before you get excited, this is no Lemur – or even anything like your iPhone or iPod touch. Sensitivity and accuracy are workable, but not exceptional, the overlay is pretty simple (as you can see in the video) rather than integrated with the display, and this is single-touch only — not multi-touch. Lastly, on a conventional laptop that isn’t convertible, you may miss the ability to fully extend your laptop perpindicular to your body. (Having the screen be parallel can put your arms in a fatiguing position.)

But that said, there’s a lot of potential once you have the ability to reach over and make quick gestures on a laptop screen that control a set. You might make your own instruments and effects or controller dashboards in a tool like Processing or Reaktor. And at $200, this could be a brilliant way to retrofit a machine and breathe new life into it. There’s support for Mac, Windows, and Linux; you just plug in via USB.

In this case, Sensomusic Usine is perfectly suited to the job, with an interface built just for this purpose. Their Touch Screen Edition earns major kudos for being a full desktop computer music environment built around touch, as covered here previously.

Of course, all of this potential is likely to make you want more sophisticated, multi-touch solutions even more. The outlook is improving. Windows 7 will bring native support for multi-touch gestures – not so much important news in itself so much as a sign that more hardware vendors could add support, ramp up volume and lower prices. HP is already shipping computers (including laptops) with multi-touch.

Also interestingly, the creators of the JazzMutant Lemur multi-touch hardware – specifically designed for music and visuals – have now expanded their mission to targeting general-purpose devices. The new company, Stantum, is showing off fantastic, unique technologies for multi-touch, as seen recently in an Engadget preview. Beautifully designed as the iPhone is, these offer some unique features like intensive accuracy and support for input from objects (like styluses) and not just fingertips. That could mean the Lemur is just the tip of a much bigger iceberg.

Here’s a tantalizing look at the Santum SMK screen working with Max/MSP. Unlike the Lemur, that means direct controlling Max’s widgets, rather than treating the screen like an independent controller.

Of course, that doesn’t mean the simpler, single-touch, cheap solution couldn’t be a great project right now, and a chance to get a leg up on The Future. If anyone tries one, let us know what it’s like.

For that reason, you may be intrigued to see this video of Zen Piano, a demo app for the iPhone and iPod touch. The idea: respond not only to the position of your finger taps, but also to how hard you’re tapping the phone That promises “velocity-sensitive” tapping, which would make touchscreen interfaces more powerful.

Here’s the somewhat overheated description by GreatApps, who say their “patent-pending,” “cutting-edge” technology is the result of “having gone through the research and development phases.”

TapForce^TM has been developed from the ground up to provide a completely intuitive way of interaction for users. It can detect more than a hundred different levels of force, and has an accuracy that has to be seen to be believed. And all this can now be done in software, no hardware modifications are necessary. Hundreds of millions of devices currently on the market can make use of the TapForce^TM technology today.

A whole new range of games and apps has just been made possible.

http://greatapps.co.uk/technologies/

Okay, so what is it doing, exactly?

Most likely, it’s simply reading data from the accelerometer. Hit the device harder, and the accelerometer will respond to more force. That’s actually a fairly clever combination of two sensors – it’s just not the sort of stuff you’d necessarily want to trademark or try to get patented, at least, not if you’re a normal person. (TapForce creators, feel free to explain to us that you’re doing something fancier and I’ll eat my words.)

In fact, part of the reason I suspect that’s how they’re doing this is I’ve been tipped off by a developer who’s already implemented just this. He even uses a piano-style keyboard to show it off.

Sadly, that developer and application is Memo and his MSA Remote application, which was inexplicably blocked from the iTunes store – I think because whoever would have understood the app was on a lunch break or something. See, previously:

MSA Remote for iPhone

Apple Rejects Free iPhone Tool For Artists Because of “Minimal User Functionality”

But as it happens, this is something any mobile device can do that has an accelerometer. I may try something like this on the Android app I’m developing. (No one can reject that, because Google allows any application package to be installed on the device should the user chose to do so. Perish the thought.) Accelerometer data alone is usually not very useful, but combined with touch, it could start to make more sense.

It’s another reason to look forward to MSA Remote, and I do still think that the snafu with Apple will get cleared up at some point. (Unfortunately, what we had on CDM were a lot of rants – perhaps even justified rants – but not necessarily the best way to make the argument to Apple’s store.)

The pocketable DJ tool Pacemaker is now available here in the US at $499. That price is considerably more realistic than expected pricing earlier on, though it still fits in a funny sort of slot: it’s not quite the equivalent of pro DJ gear, which costs much more, but it’s still pricier than your run-of-the-mill DJ player. For those with the pocket change (cough), I could imagine it’ll be fun.

And you do have to admire the Pacemaker for being a really unique hardware gadget idea. It’s a glimpse of what music technology could be like in the very near future. Generically, you might describe it as:

• a specialized embedded mobile gadget with sonic-manipulation capabilities
• a connection between a mobile device and a computer-based editor
• a cloud-based, online community for sharing work

Take that as the template, and I think you’ll agree there’s a lot of potential in the basic concept. The specific idea here may be a tougher sell. It’s actually like the DJ-centric “Pro iPod” I remember Jason O’Grady of PowerPage.org and I once imagined in the first months of Apple’s iPod release. Whether DJs actually want that is another question – particularly with the iPhone and other mobile devices adding this functionality in software. But in the specific, as in the generalized view, the Pacemaker is nothing if not intriguing:

• 60 GB storage
• Touch controls
• DJ playback functions: auto-beatmapping, synchronized loops, reverse, bend, pitch speed, timestretch, cue points, vinyl-style scrubbing / pausing
• Visual feedback: beat graph, graphical effects visualization
• Onboard effects: EQ, normalization decimator, filter, wah, echo, delay, key, effects crossfader for adjusting levels and beat sync on a lot of the effects
• Two onboard channels (virtual channels, though – if this thing just had a line in function, I think I’d absolutely want one)
• Independent headphone out jack, adjustable mix
• Lots of audio codec support: MP3, MP3 VBR, M4A (AAC-LC), AIFF, FLAC, WAV, Ogg Vorbis and SND (!)
• MiniUSB connection for a computer

Product page: http://www.pacemaker.net/Default.aspx

US sales: Tonium Pacemaker Pocket-Sized DJ System @ Amazon

I think that’s actually a pretty extraordinary set of specs, and it reveals just how fast the embedded space is moving forward. In fact, I think it may not be too long before the music tech manufacturers (Korg, perhaps?) start to embrace mobile/embedded applications for development. The result: even if the Pacemaker isn’t your thing, mobile music gadgets are looking increasingly like computers, which could get very interesting, indeed.

Will you use it on the beach, like this? For me, um, no. I’ll be hanging out, doing beachy things. If I tried this, I think I would trip over someone’s beach chair and make a very embarrassing scene.

And yes, if you’re getting a steady diet of DJ gigs, you can afford this. Enjoy. (If anyone gets their hands on one, I’d love to hear what you think.)

Updated:

Our friend Nilay Patel at Engadget was one of the first in the US to get a Pacemaker in for review. Now, when is an unboxing of a product actually interesting? When the packaging adds touches like this:

Each cable is individually packaged in tissue paper inside its own box, and the flaps all have different little fortunes printed on them, from "Your future is looking sound" to our personal favorite "Listen to your mother."

Tonium Pacemaker unboxing and hands-on [Engadget]

Even online, words have a tendency to linger long after you write them. And I recognize that the risk here is not only what those words mean to me, but others, too. So I want to revisit a topic today in the interest of moving forward.

I wrote a kneejerk post earlier in the life of CDM about MonoTouchLive, a single-touch interface with UI widgets inspired by JazzMutant’s Lemur. MonoTouchLive was (and is) Windows-only, standalone software for controlling Ableton Live. It’s now free of cost.

I’ll be honest: in my original post, I overreacted, and I didn’t choose my words as carefully as I should have. Some regular readers called me out on it at the time. Since that time, I’ve tried to be more careful. Some comment threads referred back to it, though, and the developer, Pablo Martin, has continued to push his tool and has been outspoken about not liking what I wrote.

It’s now clear to me that I can’t just let this go, as Mr. Martin today has posted a multi-page diatribe focused largely on my short, now nearly three-year-old blog post.

A little of JUSTICE please

To be clear: I got carried away. I have since come to the realization that copying – loosely or closely – isn’t such a bad thing. They’re a learning process, and if something really is original, it does tend to shine through.

Also, to my knowledge, Mr. Martin is correct: the layout on the Lemur was apparently a mock-up to show what the Lemur would look like if configured with the layout of the MonoTouchLive. I incorrectly said that both the widgets and layout had been copied, as I misunderstood the image I saw. Axou created that design as part of a thread with some complaints about the similarity to the Lemur widgets, but I now try to make CDM less like a quick forum post.

I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with MonoTouchLive. It may indeed be useful to some people, and I expect (as I even said in that original, ill-advised post) that the growing availability of affordable touch and multitouch screen hardware will mean many more such creations and ideas. DJTechTools even suggested a US$250 solution involving something like MonoTouchLive and a small, USB-powered external display:

The $250 Lemur

There are some of Mr. Martin’s remaining contentions, however, with which I still take some issue. First, he implies that this was some sort of ongoing thread on CDM. It wasn’t; there were two stories out of several thousand, but as is clear from the URLs he copied, they were posted on the same day, September 11, 2006. I don’t know what was going on with me that day, but I should have thought before I published. I understand his frustration, though – because I didn’t write a follow-up post, those stories continued to come up on Google. But, at least I can say truthfully, I didn’t mean for this to become an ongoing issue.

Second, while it’s true that MonoTouchLive didn’t copy a Lemur layout, it did clearly copy the look of the Lemur interface widgets. My original appeal, if poorly worded, was for creativity and variety, and I stand by that now. Mr. Martin is clearly a developer with some skill, and I’d love to see something that looks different. I stand by that criticism now as before – and because I’d love to see new visual ideas.

It’s worth noting, in fact, that I wasn’t alone – jaded, perhaps, by people copying designs instead of making their own, many in the Ableton forum responded the same way. The lesson here is, if something is a copy, you may want to acknowledge that and explain your intentions. The lesson for the rest of us is, we probably should have considered the author’s intentions before responding.

Lastly, while “JUSTICE” claims Dexter “saw the light” of MonoTouchLive’s fixed layout, I still like the idea of modular, editable layouts over fixed layouts. It’s part of the whole advantage of a touchscreen over hardware. The “JUSTICE” article also implies – intentionally or not – that JazzMutant was following MonoTouchLive’s lead, which I think is unlikely. That said, I’m sure MonoTouchLive could be useful to someone with a fixed layout, and they have their advantages – muscle memory, for one.

What Really Matters to Me: Looking Forward

I won’t say anything more about this matter. I think what JazzMutant did was really important, and I think MonoTouchLive is a worthy idea. But what I’m most interested to cover in the future is work that takes touch in new directions.

For touch and multi-touch to really catch on, I think these interfaces need to be substantially different in function and experience than conventional hardware knobs and faders. I’d aim that criticism at JazzMutant as much as I would at MonoTouchLive. I’m really eager to see more experimentation. I shouldn’t have pushed that desire on Mr. Martin and his work, though, and for that, I’m sorry.

Just complaining in this case was out of line. I believe criticism and frank criticism is part of the function of blogs – not pulling any punches, as the saying goes. But I also believe in being constructive, and I think those comments weren’t.

I expect I’ll continue to make mistakes, and I will be the first to defend the value of writing frankly on the Web – warts and all – and responding. It’s because of a few years of doing that, in fact, that I think I have a different perspective in 2009 than in 2005 and 2006 – because of your feedback. So always keep it coming.

I don’t view my role as a cheerleader, in case that isn’t already clear. But because I believe in the value of criticism, I’ll be working harder than ever to make sure it’s the right kind. Comment threads are comment threads, but I hope we’ll all consider that we’re leaving words for strangers around the world.