Argos

In music creation and performance, the relevance & usefulness of mobile interfaces has exploded over the past two years. As of late 2010, there is no shortage of musical multi-touch apps (and games!) on mobile devices — just take a look at the number of posts tagged with iPad on Create Digital Music. In respect to the available tools for interface building, TouchOSC and Mrmr stand out as highly usable applications in their current releases. Other frameworks like urMus have also been popping up as developer-friendly alternatives to accelerate the creation of musically-inspired apps on mobile devices on iOS.

The research gleaned from the ‘mobilized’ development of Argos has evolved into an idea such that it doesn’t make sense to continue development, especially when there are a number of other stable frameworks and applications which are ideologically similar to Argos. Late in the project, the question became, “how is it possible to homogenize the interaction and experience of an application which has multiple target platforms and operating systems?” The current answer is that it’s near impossible to have the same codebase targeting everything from Windows to OSX / iOS to Android — but it should still be possible to standardize and regulate the interaction.

The excellent report on iPad usability by the Nielsen/Norman Group outlines how user experiences on the iPad are terribly inconsistent and are, in general, a usability nightmare. Interactions on mobile devices like the iPad are fundamentally different from the desktop, but it does not mean that a user should be subjected to a horribly different and inconsistent experience, regardless of the mode of input or screen size.

A few projects already come to mind which attempt to tackle the question, though mostly from a technical angle:

• PyMT - a Python-based multi-touch SDK, and
• QT - Nokia’s C/C++-based application & UI development framework.

For now, Argos is being discontinued (a stable release might come along for desktop use), but the initial research will continue in a new vein over the next year. Many thanks to all the people who contributed ideas, bug reports, and helped with testing!

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