I am participating in the EyesWeb Week in Genoa this week. This morning Nicola Bernardini held a lecture about Free Software. I have heard him talk on this topic several times before, but as I have now some more experience on participating in a Free Software project (i.e. Jamoma), I got more out of his ideas. Some main points from the talk: Use Free Software! Freeware and shareware may have nothing to do with Free Software....
I am updating the GDIF messaging in the jmod.mouse module in Jamoma. Trond suggested to use the OpenGL convention for ranges and coordinate systems, which should give something like this: {width=“414” height=“270”} This means that values on the vertical axis would fall between [-1 1], while values on the horizontal axis would be dependent on the size of the screen. For my screen (1280x800) this gives a range of [-1.6 1....
The concept of “mapping” is frequently used in the computer music community these days, and has also been used over the last couple of days during the Jamoma workshop. This reminded me about the distinction between mapping and conditioning, as frequently pointed out by Marcelo Wanderley: Conditioning: filtering, scaling and normalizing signals in a 1-to-1 mapping Mapping: creating couplings between multidimensional data sets, e.g. MxN. For clarity’s sake it is probably useful to separate between the two....
We have a Jamoma workshop in Brussels this week. Some of the major things we will be talking about, and working on, during these days is: FunctionLib: for handling various types of mathematical functions in a consistent manner. UnitLib: for converting between different types of units. Timing and structuring in modules and patches. Most of the time the first day, though, has been spent on general error solving and more random discussions....
We rounded up the “Jamoma week” with a workshop for a small crowd of power Max users at Ars Longa in Paris today. This time I think we were more successful in explaining that Jamoma is not just a set of ready made patches, it is really mostly about creating a systematic approach to Mac patching, in addition to improving communication in and between Max and similar environments. The week in Albi was to a great extent spent fixing bugs in the Jamoma 0....
The idea behind the current implementation of Jamoma is based on separating GUI from algorithm. Currently this is solved by having the algorithm in a separate file which is included in the module file containing the GUI. This is better than having everything in one patch, but I don’t think that we could say that the GUI is separated enough from the algorithm. We have discussed this a bit over the last couple of days, and I have been trying to think about various ways of dealing with this problem....
I have been thinking a lot about GUIs, namespaces and control parameters over the last couple of days. One of the big challenges we are facing is how to make technology more human-friendly. Often it seems that technology controls us more than we control the technology. Creating a user interface of any kind is very similar how we think about mapping in musical instruments. In essence, any type of control is one, or several, layers of mapping between one set of parameters to another....