Argos

So they say 2010 will be the year of the tablet. It’s been about a month since the iPad has been released, and as seen on the app store, music based games and apps seem to have a pretty significant share of the current downloads… not really a surprise there. Hexler was pretty quick to get his great iPhone-based TouchOSC interface builder ready for the iPad, and I’m sure others are still in development. No word yet from the JazzMutant team — will they port their software to the iPad or release a competitively priced version of the Lemur? Hopefully we’ll see soon.

Work on the Argos codebase for portability across multiple platforms is still ongoing. The development has been following a direction of compartmentalization between the interface editor and viewer/user. While the desktop version will always be a combination of the two (for compatibility with tabletop surfaces), the precision needed to build full interfaces with complex behaviors just isn’t available on smaller devices (phones, tablets). The mobile version will consist of an interface for loading & organizing templates, with very limited capability to edit interfaces. Sound good?

Argos is also making an appearance in a paper appearing at the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) conference held in mid-June. The paper is titled “Designing Expressive Musical Interfaces for Tabletop Surfaces,” and is co-authored by myself, Owen Vallis, Jordan Hochenbaum, Jim Murphy, and Ajay Kapur. I’ll post a copy of this and the ICMC paper here a little later — it’s got some useful discussion about our experiences with home-brew multi-touch hardware and its implications for musical installations and performance.

“Argos: An Open Source Application for Building Multi-Touch Musical Interfaces” will be a paper presented at the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) held in NYC and Stony Brook, NY between June 1st and June 5th! In addition to Argos,  I’ll also be presenting one other paper based on an ongoing robotic-mediated laptop ensemble called The Machine Orchestra.  Also in later in June, Argos might be presented as part of a  NIME++ installation (being held in Sydney this year), by my good friends Owen & Jordan from FlipMu.

Argos v0.21 has been released into the wild on the SVN!  Windows users can grab a binary of this release over at http://code.google.com/p/ofxargos/ This is mostly a tech demo — not ready for primetime yet.

Some annoying things you might notice:

1. Bounds checking isn’t complete.  It’s still possible to create controls offscreen (bad) and negatively re-size controls (very bad).
2. Can’t click + drag to move controls  (but you can use your keyboard arrows). Latest on the SVN enables this.
3. Re-sizing a toggle looks terrible….
4. Can’t re-size a knob.
5. Can’t set min&max values for knobs/sliders/xypads (this will happen with the inclusion of a more complete properties system).

In addition to fixing the above problems, XML saving/loading is next on the to-do list, so it will be possible to create layouts in version 0.25 (yay!)

With the impending release of the iPad in late March / early April, it would make sense to have Argos in a stable and useful condition for users by then. The tentative plan is to complete some of the major unfinished features and perhaps use ofx-iPhone. The potential of Asus and EEE tablets are also a strong incentive (although their multi-touch capabilities haven’t been confirmed quite yet).

Another option is to re-write the rendering portion of Argos in obj-c + openGL ES natively, and let the interface/editor talk through XML layouts (Lemur style).

Some of the bigger tasks on the list include:

• Global undo/redo engine
• Implementation of a (simple) physics engine
• Improvements to the editing engine
• RGB color selector widget (for themeing).

The last item on the list is optimization. Argos is pretty heavy on the CPU currently, but it’s getting better…

About 80% of the existing Argos code is currently being refactored, with special attention to new and expanded documentation.

So, if you are interested, I’d love to hear from you at ddiakopoulos@gmail.com if you could think you could lend a hand. Edit: I’ve also posted a new video over at Vimeo. Check it out on the media page or http://vimeo.com/9175177

December is the month of Argos! Well, not really, but some major updates are in the works.  Development has been markedly slower the past few months (fall academic semester), but some major code-re-factoring is going on in preparation of a version 0.20+ binary release.

Argos as a Google Summer of Code / NUIGroup-sponsered application has now successfully come to a close. Approximately 10 weeks after initial design and development began, Argos could now be considered in an Alpha state — still in-progress and constantly changing. Many thanks to my GSoC mentor Seth Sandler for his many helpful comments & ideas.

Here’s a quick screenshot taken during development today. It shows the recent progress on the knob control, although using an older default color scheme (now updated to be a more lively lime-green).

The GSoC midterm milestone passed and Argos has made some significant strides.Though it won’t be a full feature-complete application by the time GSoC is finished, a the most important featrues (drag & drop, OSC) will have been written.  Hopefully this framework will  open the door to other developers interested in helping out in a larger capacity.  Towards the end of September or October I’d like to see a compiled binary up for actual users/testers, but in the meantime, it’ll remain a ‘compile-at-your-own-risk’ endeavor.

Here is a short schedule (PDF Warning) of activity remaining this summer.