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!