SteamSHIFT

A while back, I was doing some work with Arduino, passing serial data to the mac to a small application written with Processing which converted the serial data into MIDI data and pushed it out into other apps. Now Processing is a Java thing; and the standalone applications it creates are Java applications.

All fine, but a mere few days before an assessment, I couldn’t get the Serial to Midi application to work; I recalled an article on createdigitalmotion.com which I admit, I didn’t read fully, which said the following:

On the music side, Apple dumped its com.apple.audio.midi java package with 10.4.8. Result: not only do you lose all the features that make the Mac great for MIDI, like the IAC bus for inter-application MIDI routing, but your external devices also spontaneously disappear. Nice.

Now at this point, I put 2 + 2 together and got 5 … Apple have broken my app… Ahh what to do - revert my entire computer to 10.4.7?

So, I sat down and over the next few days and with much help, I managed to build (read: hack together) a serial to midi converter in Objective-C and Cocoa. Works perfectly (now!).

So, no more problem. Indeed. And not 1 day later, I remembered that I had bought an Java extension from Mandolane, which was needed for my original app. I reinstalled that and bingo, that worked too. Doh. Doh. Doh.

Oh well; I wanted to start learning Cocoa etc!

SteamSHIFT out.

Technorati Tags:
midi, mac, osx, art, experiments, developing, cocoa

I decided to create a new blog for my MA work - you can find it at http://mdatblog.steamshift.com. Alternatively, just grab the feed.

As part of the Invisible Architecture module for m.i-dat, one of the practising artists we are looking at is Shaun Murray; but is this the same person as Shaun Murray? Actually no, but Google is no discriminator of what you are looking for (only you can try to enable that by your search); but the latter is more connected in readership than the former and is therefore at the top. It inevitably raises some questions as to the nature of (projected?) identity in the web sphere.

So, some time after I first decided I would do an MA, I am finally enrolled on a course. I am doing the Masters in Digital Art and Technology at Plymouth University (m.i-dat.org). Very excited. Much to post over the next few days.

Technorati Tags:
digital art, technology