I’m back from a 3 week visit to Europe. The time was spent in Genoa (Italy) for NIME and Albi (France) for a Jamoma development workshop, with some sightseeing in between.

Alexander has posted some photos and other info from the NIME conference here:

• http://www.arj.no/2008/06/08/nime-jamoma-workshop/
• http://www.arj.no/2008/06/16/nime-paper/

Yannick has posted some really nice photos from Albi, where we worked for 2 weeks on moving Jamoma over to Max 5 and started to address future plans, usability, and other topics.

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/yhancik/sets/72157605754235826/

It’s taking a bit of time to get caught up with everything. It’s time for work to resume on finishing Tap.Tools 3.

http://www.lightningfield.org/

A couple days ago I checked some code into Jamoma for managing automated unit testing. It is written as a Ruby script that uses the ‘rosc’ library (which was mentioned to me by Trond Lossius) to set up an OpenSoundControl server, launch Max, and then start running a series of test patches.

I’m hoping that we can create library of test patches in the coming weeks, and then run this script regularly after we make changes to the Jamoma source. This will be a tremendous help to improve the quality-control of the Jamoma releases and the Jamoma development process.

The information and scripts can be found in the active branch of the Jamoma SourceForge repository.

The Teabox decoder objects for various objects have been orphans for a while. Some hosted here, some there, some just floating around from home to home. Now they have a proper home at Google Code:

• http://code.google.com/p/teabox/

Currently the source and binaries are host for various versions of Max and Pd. I’m hoping we can host the SuperCollider decoders here too, though I haven’t received permission from the author to do so yet.

It’s nice to have this stuff centralized, and properly accessible to the open-source community.

The next beta is now available on the registered users pages. There are quite a few goodies in this one. Here are the highlights…

• new feature: tap.applescript is no longer copy protected. It will work after the demo expires, and will work in standalones without a ‘pro’ license
• fixed bug in the Tap.Tools Builder extra that caused some resources to not be properly copied into the standalone application
• problem with copying and pasting registration numbers for authorization should have been fixed by the Max 5.0.2 release
• Misc bugs fixed in tap.decay_calc
• Max 5 version of the tap.windowdrag object is now present (both platforms)
• New tap.filter~ object is now present (the help file still stinks, but the inspector is cool :-)
• Fixed crashes in tap.phasor~ (old bug from Tap.Tools 2)
• Fixed problems where tap.limi~ didn’t actually limit the signal
• Fixed crashes in tap.pulsesub~ (old bug from Tap.Tools 2)
• The tap.adapt~ object no longer posts spurious (and harmless) messages to the Max window * Fixed crash in tap.delay~ (bug from Tap.Tools 2) when setting the delay time higher than the buffer size.
• Added the “T” key command when patching, creates a new object box with “tap.” already entered.
• All objects: the colored ring around the inlet where the mouse is hovering is now colored blue if the inlet is cold (doesn’t trigger output).
• All objects: the inspectors now have switches where an attribute is toggle, or menus where the attribute is one of a list of choices

Known Issues:

• reference pages and help patchers still need a lot of work
• software update does not work on Windows Vista due to permissions problems

The Software Update problem on Vista probably will not be solved for the actual release (if ever). That means that the only thing left on the known issues list is documentation, and the coding part of Tap.Tools 3 is “done”. So if anyone spots bugs, we need to know about it!

We have two forum/mailing lists setup now for the ObjectiveMax project:

• http://groups.google.com/group/objectivemax
• http://groups.google.com/group/objectivemax-notify

The first one is for discussion, etc. The second one is SVN commits and notifications of wiki page changes, etc.

There has been some interest expressed in the project, so hopefully this will help with the communication.

TTBlue 0.5.1 has been released over at the TTBlue project site.

It makes a few improvements to the way messages and attributes are handled within TTBlue. In turn, this fixes a bunch of crashes on Windows.

The initial version of ObjectiveMax, version 0.1, has been released over on the project site: http://code.google.com/p/objectivemax/

ObjectiveMax is a framework for creating objects in Objective-C for Cycling ‘74’s Max/MSP. It makes for a super easy way to create objects. For example, this is what the audio perform method looks like for an object doing the same thing as the +~ object in MSP:

- (t_max_err) processAudioWithInput:(MaxAudioSignal *)signals_in 
                          andOutput:(MaxAudioSignal *)signals_out
{
    short    vs = signals_in->vs;
    float    *in1 = signals_in->vectors[0];
    float    *in2 = signals_in->vectors[1];
    float    *out = signals_out->vectors[0];

    while(vs--){
        if(in2)
            operandAttribute = *in2++;
        *out++ = *in1++ + operandAttribute;
    }

    return MAX_ERR_NONE;
}

That’t all there is to make the object handle audio. Everything else that you would normally do in a C external (call the init dsp function in main, create a dsp method, etc.) is all automatic and behind the scenes.

If you want your object to handle a float message in Max, all you do is write a float method. Like this:

- (t_max_err) floatMessage:(double)value
{
    operandAttribute = value;
    return MAX_ERR_NONE;
}

The documentation is currently weak at best. There really needs to be a tutorial or something. This is an open-source project though, so perhaps someone will write one and contribute it to the project!

TTBlue version 0.5 is now released!

It still has warts, but the foundation is in place and it has proven to be stable over the last month. The details can be found @ http://code.google.com/p/ttblue/wiki/ChangeLog.

Having solidified this code over the last couple of months has been really good. Not only because of Tap.Tools 3, but also because it sets a good foundation for the upcoming Jamoma workshops following NIME.

If contributing to TTBlue is something of interest, please check out the resources at the development site, and/or join up on the TTBlue forum/mailing-list.

• http://code.google.com/p/ttblue/
• http://groups.google.com/group/ttblue

Currently TTBlue is being developed by a group of 3 of us, and it would be nice to grow the group a bit.

Electrotap used to have a mailing list back when the server was held together with bailing wire and duct tape. The list was low-traffic, but still semi-active, and had a good signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately, that fell apart a couple of years ago and when we pushed everything onto a new server the mailing list never made it back.

So we’re reviving the mailing list in the form of two Google groups: one for discussion about sensors and sensor interfaces, and one for discussion related to everything else (which is mostly Tap.Tools).

Here are the two URLs for the new lists:

• http://groups.google.com/group/electrotap
• http://groups.google.com/group/electrosensor

Using Google groups does a few things for us. First, it gets us up and running fast with the new lists. We’ve been meaning to do it for a long time on our own, but it takes some finagling. It also gives a wealth of features and options, like a forum interface and a mailing list interface. Google also has really good spam filters and such. Finally, it gets us out of having to do real server maintenance tasks on it in the long run. These are all good things.

It feels really good to finally have a list back!