First and foremost this release adds support for the much talked about CoreMIDI and Line 6 MIDI Mobilizer ways of communicating with MIDI hard- and software. Back to the future indeed. The TouchOSC Editor has been updated to version 1.5 to account for that fact, and adds a new MIDI properties panel to configure MIDI messages for controls. The default layouts have all been modified, adding MIDI messages to all controls, but if you are upgrading from a previous version, your existing layouts will not be overwritten, so you can download an updated zip file with the new versions.
All downloads here, as usual.

There’s a ton of bug-fixes and little improvements in there too, and whole parts have been re-written from the ground up as well for improved stability and speed. Sadly what didn’t make the cut is a dedicated OSC-to-MIDI bridge for windows users, but it is nearing completion so expect some news on that very soon.

But wait… There’s more!
The site has undergone a major overhaul to prepare it for its future as a much more community-friendly platform. A forum has been added and there is now <drumroll> the first version of a complete TouchOSC documentation available. It’s all brand-new so if you find any broken parts, please report.

Next up will be a library section for TouchOSC layouts and presets, open to all users, but I’ll report back on the status of that after some rest…

You can now use the USB cable and iTunes File Sharing to transfer layouts from/to the device. In iTunes select your device in the column to the left, switch to the tab labeled “Apps” and below the App management screen you’ll find the File Sharing section with a list of apps that support it, which now also includes TouchOSC:

Click the image to see the big picture.

Additionally the app icon has received an update to give it more of a 2011-ish look, hope you like it. Also another great annoyance has been eliminated, the TouchOSC Editor now does not mess with custom OSC addresses anymore when copy/pasting controls, so transferring whole pages won’t result in RSI-inducing customization sessions. Grab it here. Furthermore, the touchosc2pd helper app has been updated to reflect changes in the layout format.

Next up is a whole lot of MIDI support everyone’s been requesting and there’s a lot of changes planned for the website that should make it a better platform for exchanging layouts and discussing features and problems. And that’s only the beginning. 2011 will be a good year for TouchOSC. I can feel it.

Here’s the complete changes for both TouchOSC and the editor:

TouchOSC 1.6.3
===========================
- Support for iTunes File Sharing: Layouts can now be managed via the USB-cable connection using iTunes
- Basic multi-tasking support
- Multiple controls with the same custom OSC address now receive the same message
- ControlPush and ControlToggle now turn on for any received value greater than zero
- Added z message sending to all controls
- Fixed a bug where it wasn’t possible to enter a custom editor host address
- Various minor bug fixes
- New icon

TouchOSC Editor 1.4.2
===========================
- Copy and paste retains controls’ custom OSC addresses
- Renaming a .touchosc file no longer corrupts it
- ControlPush and ControlToggle are now rendered using the right color
- New icon

But careful now, before you get too excited let me put a couple of things straight considering this version. First of all, this port is in no way feature-compatible with the iOS versions at the moment. In particular, without beating around the bush:

• No importing of custom layouts
• No ZeroConf/Bonjour publishing/browsing
• No multi-touch support
• No support for resolutions higher than 320x480
• Some other minor features missing

In brief that means that this version basically represents the feature set that TouchOSC version 1.0 for the iPhone supported when it was first released. Minus the bugs of course. There’s a couple of reasons that led to the decision to release the application in this form. First of all, I didn’t want to make all of you wait any longer. Constructing a full port would have probably taken me another 12 months of trying to play catch-up with the original which is constantly improving. Secondly there seems to be an endless stream of new Android devices coming out every other moment, so testing the more advanced features on every possible configuration is basically impossible. Keeping it lean and simple will probably help in making it work for most of the available gadgets right now.

All that said, I also decided to make the application available for free. There don’t seem to be a lot of (successful) paid applications available on the Android Market right now and from my research the general user-base is also not exactly used to actually pay for apps. The ad-supported model that a lot of developers go with is also something that I wouldn’t even consider at my most delirious. Call me crazy.

Anyway, what it comes down to is that I decided to go with the Donationware model. If you like it and you want me to make it as fully-featured as the iOS version, please consider donating whatever you feel is worth contributing. Also, for testing-purposes, I would be more than happy to accept any kind of Android device you can spare. Hell, if you meet me, shake my hand, buy me a beer/warm glass of milk/classic coca-cola. Just don’t send me any hate-mail please. I am getting enough of that from the “iTribe” (j/k).

Yours truly,
rob.

Today’s update of Apple’s excellent music production suite adds support for TouchOSC as a control surface on both iPad and iPhone/iPod touch and TouchOSC’s update comes with Logic-specific layouts for both form factors plus auto-detection and configuration of a host computer running Apple Logic Pro or Express.

All one needs to do is to start up Logic Pro or Express, make sure the iDevice is connected to the same WiFi network as the music production computer, go to TouchOSC’s network configuration page and select the name of the machine running Logic. Voila! Everything should be set up and ready to go in perfect harmony. As usual firewalls might prevent this miracle from happening, so if you run into any trouble, try disabling your network security software temporarily and try again.

Thanks to everyone at Apple involved in making this happen, and special thanks to Adam Charon for creating the LogicPad and LogicTouch layouts.

In other news there will be a workshop held dealing with all things TouchOSC in the course of the Berlin Music Days on 5th and 6th of November. I will be demonstrating some popular setups with Ableton Live, Native Instruments Reaktor and of course the new Apple Logic connection and also helping participants to achieve whatever it is they are trying to squeeze out of TouchOSC. Head on over to the signup page if interested or drop by and say hello if you are around.

Last but not least a lot of voices are asking for a release date for the Android version of TouchOSC. Don’t despair, it is in the making, it’s just that the rate at which new Android devices sporting various features, capabilities and OS versions are spawned has delayed the release multiple times. Proper and thorough testing is definitely required in this kind of gadget jungle. I will post more news on this when there is any so please don’t hold your breath. We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt waiting for a piece of software, now would we?

Brace yourself! There’s a flood of updates coming your way. Exciting times indeed.

First off, a little thing called the Apple iPad has been released and we’ve been working like mad here at the hexler HQ to get TouchOSC ready for it first day. The effort paid off and TouchOSC was available April 3rd for everyone as a free update. There was little time for anything else back then, not even posting about it, so let it be known: TouchOSC’s current version on the iTunes App Store is a universal application that runs on all Apple handhelds!

Next up is a new version of the TouchOSC Editor that adds some much requested features:
- Horizontal editing of layouts
- Zoom
- Customizable layout grid plus snapping

We are also releasing a plain “jar” version for the first time which should run on anything with a proper Java runtime but was tested on Linux only. Grab it here.

As hinted earlier, this is only the first of many updates to come in hopefully rapid succession. There’s a new version of TouchOSC ready to go that adds even more of the things you have been requesting and another update to the editor to go with it. The Android port is coming along nicely and will be released shortly thereafter. There’s also work being done that should make everything a lot easier on the MIDI and Windows fronts and of course there’s so many doors that the computing power the iPad brings opens, that we can’t even begin to describe what’s going on down in the labs…

So long. Will report back soon]]> http://hexler.net/news/news-round-up http://hexler.net/news/news-round-up#When:11:08:44Z Fri, 18 Dec 2009 12:08:44 +0100 rob Here’s a little update on all the things going on that didn’t really justify a blog post individually:

* There’s been an update a while ago bringing TouchOSC to version 1.4.2 and the Editor to 1.1.1. A couple of problems have been corrected, like some characters in Label’s texts corrupting layouts, a global switch to turn off the previously added “z” messages (seemed to cause problems with certain software) and proper handling of strings sent to TouchOSC as UTF8. Be sure to grab the updated Editor as well if you download the update from iTunes.

* I’ve been working on an Android port of TouchOSC, which turned out to be much easier than I expected. But wait, TouchOSC will not show up on the Android Market anytime soon… One of the things that sadly does make it more complicated to program for Android is the existence of many different devices running the platform and there will have to be extensive testing on as many as possible, so if you are interested in helping doing just that drop me an email at dev AT hexler DOT net and let me know which phone you use and which version Android you are running. If your world revolves around iPhones exclusively please tell your Android owning friends/enemies about this.

* TouchOSC now has a Facebook page at http://facebook.com/touchosc where I will post all news parallel to here and also all the little things like cool videos and interesting projects that I find online and that get sent in. So if you want to stay up-to-date and don’t want to subscribe to the newsfeed on this page, you can check for updates there. Of course you can post on that page as well so show off your experiments or let us all know about tutorials or custom layouts you found to be useful.

* Another apology for being very slow at answering email the past month, I am in the process of moving countries (again) so I have little to no time/means to deal with my inbox, I promise I will work double-shift as soon as everything’s taken care of, but hey, maybe you should be eating ginger-bread and singing christmas-carols anyway and not controlling some obscure software with a wireless touch-screen-phone-control-surface anyway

Ok, that’s about it, will be back in action soon, there’s of course another TouchOSC update in the pipeline which will concentrate on making the connection/sync between editor and phone/pod a bit more reliable and thereafter I will finally start adding all the missing features that have been on my list since this project started.

Merry X-mas and an OSC new year!
rob

So to make the process a little more painless I decided to make the little utility presented here to automatically generate a custom-tailored PD patch from a TouchOSC layout. The tool generates routes for all controls found in the layout (except for those using custom OSC messages) and (optionally) creates MIDI CC messages for each of them. Obviously the output is not going to look pretty as even hand-made PD patches tend to get messy quickly, but even if you are not interested in MIDI translation, using this tool definitely beats connecting hundreds of multi-toggle messages and gives you a quick, fully-mapped patch as a starting point for whatever it is you want to do today…

Alright, before you grab this, take note that this is probably not the most polished piece of code in this world, it is implemented in pure Java so you need a Java runtime 1.5+ (which you already have if you are running the TouchOSC Editor) and that it creates the PD patch in the same directory as the input layout using the same name plus a .pd extension added.

The zip file contains a jar bundle which on most platforms can be launched by double-clicking:
touchosc2pd-v1.2.zip

Enjoy.

I’ve uploaded a new version of qcOSC, my Quartz Composer OSC receiver plug-in.

As promised the plug-in now supports multi-parameter messages (for which it creates “Structure” outlets) and can receive strings (for which it creates “String” outlets, duh!). You might want to remove all outlets in your compositions that already made use of the first parameter of multi-parameter messages to let the plug-in re-create an outlet with the new type.

I’ve tested it on both Leopard and Snow Leopard and it’s all hunky dory as far as I can see. Enjoy and grab it here.

Adding labels should be pretty straightforward, added bonus of TouchOSC’s receiving capabilities is that you can send OSC messages of type string or any kind of number to the control and have it displayed. There’s some more new stuff in this release like a new “z” message that is sent from Faders, XYs, Rotaries and Multi-Faders when touches begin/end (which people tell me allows to emulate the popular KaosPad) and a new “/vibrate” message you can send to the iPhone that will make it, well, vibrate.

Hope you enjoy this one and PLEASE, if there’s any problems/questions/etc do EMAIL me at dev AT hexler DOT net and DO NOT comment here with your questions. And for the love of technology DO STOP sending me all this nasty hate-mail telling me how f(#(#$ed up it is that this and that feature is not included yet or that my piece of s&$^t software doesn’t work, it’s not like I am trying to piss off people with what I do so I suggest you try the same. Any constructive criticism welcome though. KTHX.

I fixed some bugs, improved some things and wrapped it all up neatly in version 0.4…

There’s now a list of all auto-created outlets in the Settings page of the Patch Inspector with a handy little button that lets you remove any of them. Also it shouldn’t crash anymore (stress on should) and it should definitely be possible to create more than one instance. It’s now also a completely and utterly untested Universal Binary(TM), as my trusty old iBook G4 is about a 1000 miles from where I am now, so if someone could let me know if this is PPC ready, that’d be nice.

I wish I would have had enough time to also finally make it deal with input other than numbers and let it handle multi-parameter messages (so it could handle TouchOSC’s XY and Accelerometer data), but that’ll have to wait ‘til the next version.

Hop on over to the new qcOSC page to download.

rob.