“Mona Lisa” from Gabriel McGovern for 1k-compo at Boing Boing Gadget.

BoingBoing is having a 1 kilobyte competition, deadline will be the 1st of May 2008. You can do whatever work you want, it only should fit into 1024 bytes of digital goodness. You can win a hard-disk as competition winner, but the file-size limit should be challenging enough to go for this compo! The submitted works should be licensed in a way, that the boingers can use it freely at Boing Boing Gadgets, so GPL or Creative Commons would be fine. Some first results are shown here.

UPDATE: The final results are published!

People, who read Digital Tools will be interested in this news: Cycling 74 released today the new version of Max, that famous graphical music programming software, used by many musicians, artists, researchers, composers and sound designers. What is so special about this update? Since digital software music technology evolved in the last few years, a major update of the “old” Max system and architecture had to be done. Max was really at the time within more of the last twenty years. With this update the future of Max should be save.

“Max for the next 20 years”

A new era of Max programming is about to start. Max 5 include major enhancements and a overall new architecture below the surface: a completely redesigned multi-processing kernel and a streamlined development environment built on a platform-independent foundation. This sound like good news. The demo is free to use for 30 days. Upgrade will cost about 200 dollar.

Everyones chipmusic-darling Goto80 hits the scene with another work of glitchart he did together with Rosa Menkman. Best to see the resulting video of them both on the Goto80-blog. Here I show you the progress of Goto80, how he did processed, searching for glitchy holes in the tracker-app. He says on his blog: “I hugged bugs to compose”. I wonder how exactly he made the glitches on the tracker.

Who does not like the Tenori-On? Pingmag published today an interview with Yu Nishibori, that throws light into the story behind the Tenori-On plus technical background. Hot reading tip of the day! Yu Nishibori also releases music on the Notype-label.

Don’t forget to check this flickr-pool on the making, development and prototyping of Tenori-On.

Circle is a new synthesizer. To me it seems a little bit like the counterpart of the golden age of software-instruments innovation, done by Native Instruments and Ableton, for instance with Traktor, Reaktor and Live. The emphasis in Circle is on building software-synthesis instruments and quickly trying out things. Necessary parameters are not hidden behind windows, but are plain visible and also directly editable. Most impressive are the drag and drop features. The clear screen design without annoying graphic-elements follows the interface design tradition of Ableton Live and the Native Instrument range.

Circle is not out yet. They are planning to get it out by May, the pricing will be at 149.00 Euro or 199.00 Dollar. A video from the Musikmesse Frankfurt demonstrating features and interaction design can be found at the Future Audio Workshop blog.

Maybe some words about Future Audio Workshop itself, that is also interesting:

Future Audio Workshop is a pan european collective of engineers, programmers and designers, with the main office based near the Connemara region of Ireland. Formed in 2007, FAW’s main aim is to create and develop exciting new audio software for the international community of musicians, sound designers and live performance artists.

I added a third little tutorial on how to make first steps into the wonderful world of Actionscript with Flex. This tutorial shows how to build a custom class, that extends the sprite class. The objects in this class are transformed, in this case by a rotation, and move autonomously when the objects are created on the screen. All this stuff is foremost one: simple. Look at the code.

Feels like BASIC

You can download it as well.

It’s the mid of the month again. As always I put interesting findings into this blog, that are somehow cool or something to think about it, like todays issue. Let’s do it like theorists!

1.

Bruce Sterling needs no introduction. He is a Science Fiction author, but do not write Sci-Fi books anymore, instead design-theory and travels around the world. Sometimes I have the feeling, that he travels to all this talks, just in order to have cool videos online, like the one shown here.

2.

Crap games. An aspect of game design, that is far too underappreciated. Enjoy this video, but beware of explicit talk. Nevertheless, you have games – 52 games! – on one cartridge. Some you really can’t play or win, because the level design or the gameplay suck. Are unplayable games computing games in nature? Or are they something else? Maybe more like audio-visual artifacts, assuming you to play, but not to win. Related: the B-Games competition.

3.

What happens if you concentrate on creating new gaming ideas, instead of realizing the games? Three Hundred is such a case. It is an ongoing sketchbook of conceptional studies and ideas of realizing new forms of games. He did not manage all 300 sketches, but there are about 80 online. We hope to have more things to come.

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