Argos

GSoC Continues! New this week is the beginning of the ofxArgosUI toolkit. It’s using some of the base classes developed by Todd Vanderlin for his ofxSimpleGui API. One of the core elements of his API is the fact UI elements lay themselves out on a grid (thus the ‘simple’ in its name). ofxArgosUI ritually sacrifices all of this simplicity by specifying that core parameters need to be defined by the user, e.g. width, height, location, and so on – things that are more common to most GUI toolkits.

As some of the base GUI widgets are developed, the InteractiveObject is being iteratively refined. For example, a developer will be able to specify behavior under different multi-touch conditions (one finger, two fingers, etc). More to come on this front later.

A large source of inspiration for this part of the project is from an open source UI framework called Clutter.

Clutter aims to be non specific — it implements no particular style, but rather provides a rich generic foundation that facilitates rapid and easy creation of higher level tool kits tailored to specific needs.

While a lot of their base framework mirrors the task of openFrameworks (that is, to abstract a lot of the low-level openGL code), some of their higher level functions are quite useful. For example, their code to draw rounded corners is great.

The SVN has been set up as a project at GoogleCode entitled ofxArgos. While the majority of work has been completed on the InteractiveObject, integration into a little sub-framework called ofxTouchAPI is still underway. InteractiveObject will be a major component of ofxTouchAPI, and will form the basis of the GUI toolkit Argos will use. Check out the SVN early next week — most of the progress to date will be available in an initial commit.

In other news, Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music has posted a recent writeup describing some of the other recent multi-touch inspired musical applications. Also of note is an article posted a few weeks ago detailing a musical interface builder on the iPhone, TouchOSC. The Argos project aims to expand on this idea by introducting a similar form of control, but in an operating-system and touch/input independent fashion. The idea is that since we use the open source TUIO protocol (and an implementation for C++/oF called ofxTUIO), that any multi-touch capable hardware and operating system that supports the common UDP network protocol can be customised for musical input using Argos.  Hooray for standards.

The first steps of Argos are being made. The notion of an interactive object that can tell whether or not it’s being used (touched, clicked, etc) is at the heart of the GUI system that’s being developed. Heavily influenced from ActionScript3, Memo has already done much of the legwork to create a class for oF, the ofxMSAInteractiveObject. Mirroring parts of the Lux multi-touch framework for ActionScript, the InteractiveObject will  be re-designed to listen to TUIO events and keep track of active touches on an object.

Soon (once I work out some naming issues) I’m going to set up the GoogleCode project where we’ll be hosting the SVN.  In the meantime, check out the NUICode project where I’ll (try to) document much of the progress during development.

More to come later…!

As my first post, let me introduce the “About Argos” page, a brief description of the background, motivations, and future goals for this project.  As time permits before GSoC  ‘officially’ starts, I will be posting information on contributing, a link to the SVN, and other little tidbits.