It was only one year ago that PatternMusic was approved for sale on the iPhone App Store.

In that past year the iPhone and iPad versions of PatternMusic have accumulated 1.85 million minutes of use through 273,000 user sessions. We at PatternMusic appreciate those millions of minutes of mobile music making. We hope you have enjoyed them too.

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gi/ Creative Commons-by-sa

We want to reassure all the PatternMusic fans that PatternMusic development is alive and well. We’re actively working on exciting new mobile music creation tools for the future.

In the meantime…

PatternMusic for iPhone and PatternMusic MXXIV for the iPad are FREE for everyone!

So go out and make some music!

Thanks for your continued support.

“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” Cover by Mavie Marcos

“BLD – a movie made with iPhone Apps” stop motion animation by Jetdaisuke

PatternMusic MXXIV for iPad

iPad news!

The full version of PatternMusic MXXIV will be available as a native, full-screen iPad application with the grand opening of Apple’s iPad App Store simultaneous with the release of the iPad on April 3rd, and for a limited time PatternMusic MXXIV for the iPad will be available as a free download.

It’s as if the iPad was designed for PatternMusic. The iPad’s larger screen and faster processor allow unique looping instrument patterns to be created with ease.

PatternMusic MXXIV for iPad is free for a limited time. PatternMusic is also available for the iPhone and iPod touch.

For more information on PatternMusic MXXIV and PatternMusic visit www.PatternMusic.com

Image credit: giovanni gallucci | social media expert - Creative Commons Licensed

I read arguments that Macworld Expo is destined to go the way of the dodo. The claim is that without Apple and big-name exhibitors, and without Steve’s famous keynote that the institution is irrelevant in our non-stop twittering economy where no one has time or the funds to stop the noise for some face-to-face between product developers and actual human customers.

Macworld has never been the same as industry and press-only trade shows like CES or NAMM. It is an end-user show — it’s really the scion of the consumer-oriented West Coast Computer Faire where, one can argue, the personal computer was born.

I’ve been attending and exhibiting at Macworld since they first started holding MacWorld in 1985. First as a Mac enthusiast; then as a Mac product developer (we built a hard drive for pre-SCSI, pre-HFS 128K and 512K Macs – “K” as in kilobytes!!); then as an Apple-spawned CLARIS software developer; then as an Apple engineer. Recently, as an independent software developer, and coming full circle, as a Mac, iPod and iPhone enthusiast.

For me, the interesting stuff at Macworld was never the big booths. (Although, they were always good for providing comfy chairs.) The interesting stuff at Macworld has always been the little discoveries you find around the edges – the card table booths, the mom-and-pop startups doing something completely crazy or unique. I’ve seen many, many of those little edge discoveries go on to become pillars of the Mac and tech economy.

This year I’m going to be exhibiting at Macworld as an independent iPhone app developer. I’m quite excited. IDG has made it very attractive for iPhone developers to exhibit this year.

Clearly no one needs Macworld to see and touch Apple’s products. They have glossy stores all over the place that do a great job of that. And really do you need Macworld to see what iPod peripherals Griffin is offering this year? No, just visit www.griffintechnology.com if that’s all you need.

What we need MacWorld for is to discover those cool edge apps and applications that you never imagined existed. We need Macworld to put a human face on Apple’s world.  Just because we have news and product information thrown at us 24-hours-a-day no matter where we are, I don’t see why having a little actual contact between customers and developers or manufacturers could be any less valuable than it’s ever been.

Hopefully, this isn’t the end, and that Macworld can figure out how to continue to be an important venue for discovery and interaction like it always has been.

I "heart" PatternMusic

Creating a sophisticated iPhone app involves a lot of sweat and toil. For some reason we developers tend to convince ourselves that because the program is running on a tiny 3.5 inch screen that somehow the problems of creating the software will be tiny too. It’s just not true. Developing an iPhone app of some depth is just like any other complex software project with seemingly uncountable hurdles to overcome. The issues of quality and performance are just as prevalent in iPhone apps as they are on the desktop or web. There are no shortcuts.

I think we maybe got some impression early-on in the history of iPhone development (all 18 or so months of it) that iPhone apps were trivial due to the preponderance of joke apps like “Pull my Finger” and “More Cowbell” that were allegedly whipped out in an afternoon.

I was committed to creating a deep and quality program with PatternMusic. I was trying to tackle the difficult problem of how make music creation accessible and appropriate for a device that seemed to be getting most its attention as a platform for consuming and task engagement typically measured in seconds.

Somewhere in late spring I did an assessment of where the PatternMusic project stood. I’d been working on iPhone development for a year and exclusively on PatternMusic’s design and implementation for more than six months.  I was taking an unflinching look at everything that was problematic. What I found was a spectrum of issues of all sizes. The big issues were obvious they had to be fixed… yesterday. But then there were those little issues. There’s always a little voice telling you they might just go away. However, as anyone experienced in software development can tell you, the little problems don’t go away. They just become bigger. And that was so true. All the little problems that didn’t either get cut from the app or hadn’t been fixed as part of some larger overhaul eventually festered into bigger and bigger problems to the point they too were so obvious that the project couldn’t continue until they too were addressed.

Fortunately, I really enjoy software development. I enjoy inventing things and solving problems. But I must admit there are some days when the problems seem to be winning when I don’t enjoy it quite so much.  There are times when I can’t stand to tear that section of code apart again in search of that elusive error or figure out how in the world those process threads are stepping on each others data.

But the second thing I’m fortunate about was that the program I was building, even in it unperfected state, was the coolest app I had on my phone. After a long day of fighting with some coding glitch, I could fire up PatternMusic and create a song. And the amazing thing was it would totally redeem all the hard work.  The next day I would face that maze of code and defeat the bug.

PatternMusic is now launched into an overwhelming app marketplace. People tell me they love the app. But I’m the developer. I’ve been living with this creature for a year. The amazing thing is I still feel the same way. I fire up PatternMusic at the end of a long day and write a little song, and all that hard work is redeemed.  My favorite iPhone app is the app I wrote — PatternMusic.  Check it out.  You might think it’s cool too.

***

If you do think PatternMusic is cool too nominate it for 2009 Best App Ever. Anyone can nominate an app under a variety of pre-defined categories. One nomination per reader per app category is allowed. So you can nominate PatternMusic in all of the following categories — or any others you think are appropriate.

• Best Artistic Expression App of 2009
• Best Musical Instrument App of 2009
• Best Musical Synthesizer App of 2009

Also Mobile Orchard – the “goto blog and podcast” for iPhone development news — is part of the nominating committee.

Image credit: Greg Westfall under CC by 2.0 license

When I worked at Apple and Claris we had sophisticated usability labs with multiple cameras and one-way mirrors to record every subtle aspect of a user’s interactions. We built and tested prototypes to validated our software interface designs.

As a solo independent app developer I knew the value of these techniques, but I also knew that with my limited resources I couldn’t practice them the same way. What I needed to do was recreate as much of the iterative testing and development model as possible but make it practical for developing my app PatternMusic.

A sketch of the pattern editor from the specification. Pop-out tabs are pretty well developed, but the timeline is at the top.

A product specification was needed to manage a project with the scope of PatternMusic. Usually a specification’s primary purpose is to communicate between team members. That wasn’t a problem I had. But I also knew from experience that such a document was going to be extremely valuable six months down the line when the objectives of the product’s design would no longer be fresh in my mind.

Usability is a huge part of the iPhone and mobile experience. And I wanted PatternMusic to reflect the accessibility of the iPhone. Don’t confuse that with trying to make music making easy. I believe that’s a fallacy.

PatternMusic is an attempt to do something else entirely. What I’ve tried to do is use the flexibility and power of the iPhone device to lower barriers and foster success among music enthusiasts.

I see usability failures all over the place right now. There are a lot of very hard usability problems in both music software and mobile applications. Unless you address usability you are going to end up with a lot of junk or go through many tries before you end up with something people want to use.

The other thing you see a lot of right now is apps that assume their user base is made up entirely of experts. That’s fine in and of itself, but that was not the design goal of PatternMusic. Fortunately, experts benefit from enhanced usability just as beginners do.

So one of the challenges with PatternMusic was to figure out how as an independent developer to incorporate usability engineering into my garage shop software development craft. Obviously intuition is a big part of where you start. You go with your gut. Find patterns. Use cookbooks. User interface issues are often known problems, and many problems have been solved with varying degrees of success. You do market research, and you look at what’s been done before. You find out what works and what doesn’t. But use critical skills, and you don’t just mimic. Figure out where the usability traps are.

User-interface elements were prototyped and created in Illustrator

Those are the basics for coming up with your design specification. But then you need to have a way to validate your designs during the implementation phases of development. Most formal design processes would be completely impractical or impossible for an independent software developer. But what I tried to do was tailor usability techniques into my development by capturing user reactions through frequent and often casual testing iterations. The cost was that it resulted in significantly extending the development cycles compared to developing to a hard specification. And I ended up doing usability tweaks all the way up through final beta testing.

As an example, just the before the app was completed I determined that the pop-up tips that had been added to clarify the navigation controls would work even better if they were actual buttons rather than just label balloons. So in this case the interaction model had gone full circle. I had started with buttons. They were replaced with a pop-out tab-button mechanism to maximize screen real estate. But it soon became clear that, while effective with experienced users, the pop-out tabs were causing trouble for beginners. Beginners needed traditional buttons. So the shipping app ended up with both mechanisms. The highly efficient pop-out mechanism is available for users who are up the learning curve and the very accessible standard buttons are there for the novice. The two systems ended up gracefully complementing each other.

Early pattern editor prototype software allowed testing of basic interaction techniques.

Looking at the many aspects of PatternMusic’s design that went through multiple design iterations, one area that stands out was the instrument note pattern editor. I knew from the start that the pattern editor had to integrate music note feedback. You can’t just expect users to set notes based only on note names or the position on a piano keyboard and hope they will know how that is going to sound. PatternMusic had to have musical feedback as you touched. The app had to be an interactive musical instrument simultaneously with being a sequence editor — all that working through the same interface and sound engine. That was fundamental.

PatternMusic uses a touch-hold interface — you touch the button and it sounds the note; you hold the button and you set the note. It seems obvious, and it proves to be a very intuitive mechanism that’s easy for the user to discover. One thing that was tricky was coming up with the timing where touch-hold became easily discoverable but still gave the user a sense of being in control. In the end I added a setting to allow advanced users to fine-tune that sensitivity.

Cross-hairs provide visual touch feedback. Note also the animated red ring, the pop-up note label on the left also provide visual feedback to the note touch.

In addition to interactive musical feedback in response to touches I knew the pattern editor was going to require visual feedback. Initial designs used a small circle to communicate where you were touching on the grid. And if you held the touch the actual dot underneath would get filled in solid. I discovered very early on that some people have very big fingers, and some people just couldn’t see the circle because of the way they hold their fingers. I had to make the circle bigger so it wasn’t obscured by the actual touch. So the circle got bigger… but then it became harder and harder to see precisely where you were touching. I animated the circle to make it contract around your touch. That worked well — an added benefit was that the animation gave users an indication of how long they needed to hold the touch. That worked better too, but it was still hard for people to tell precisely where they were touching. I added a pop-up label over the piano keyboard to indicate what note you were hitting, but people still had trouble.  Finally adding cross-hairs in addition to the touch ring solved the problem. People could see and hear what note they were setting and what the pitch was. And if they didn’t want that note they could intuitively move their finger around. It was a success…  most of the time.

Even with all those touch feedback mechanisms a significant group of testers still had trouble with precision. Apple recommends 44-pixel-wide buttons on the iPhone. On a 320×480 display that doesn’t give you room for a lot of notes. I had to go to about half the recommended size in order to get a 12 note scale in one dimension and 16 notes in the other. Because PatternMusic has visual and audible feedback it’s actually more precise than that seems, but still it wasn’t working for some testers.  So I created a zoom mechanism to provide larger note targets. It’s called “big boxes”. The big boxes mode gives users a note target that is 50% larger than the default. As a consequence PatternMusic can only display an 8 note scale vertically at one time when displaying “big boxes”.  Users were losing the ability to view the bigger picture view in exchange for greater precision. It was clear that the mechanism to toggle the view from small to big notes needed to be right there on the editor screen — not hidden away off in the Settings App. The “big boxes” mode toggle button became an application-wide preference right there on the transport controls of the editor. But testing showed it worked. Users understood the mechanism, and once it was implemented they expected it to behave the way it does.

“I’ve got blisters on my fingers!”

Another pattern editor usability issue showed up with a tester who is a long-time guitar and mandolin player. The tips of his fingers are neither flat nor pointed. He actually has several points on the tips of his fingers because of the calluses that have formed with 30 years of daily guitar playing. He found it difficult to make a single touch to set a single note — always inadvertently getting accidental multiple touches and setting multiple notes. Here was an example where multi-touch (which is used in the pattern editor in order to allow you to create chords or set notes very quickly) was getting in the way. I added an advanced option to turn off multi-touch and force the pattern editor to only respond to a single touch. The user interface scales back to single-touch use without any issues except the loss of chording. Problem solved.

These examples of incremental usability improvements were rolled into the pattern editor section of PatternMusic through an iterative testing and design process. But that’s only half of the story. I won’t go into detail about the features that were removed from the app because they tested poorly, or it became clear that the feature was going to require an inordinate amount of time to refine.  Some of these almost-ran features as implemented might have worked satisfactorily in a one-off or D.I.Y. project like a Reaktor or Max patch, but they weren’t going to work across a user-base with vastly varying levels of experience, patience and skill. That’s been an important part of what PatternMusic is about from the very beginning of its design.

Usability engineering is a long process. It requires a lot more than just saying, “I’m going to built it this way.” When faced with a usability problem a developer’s gut reaction is often to say the users must be wrong, “I’m not going to change it just because they can’t figure it out.” It’s very common. But I set some very specific goals for usability in PatternMusic, and that’s the path I tried to follow. From the beginning I had rule on the design of the product, that if I was going to put a feature in, that it had to really work well. If it wasn’t going to be good enough it wasn’t going in the app.

I hope that this attention to detail shows every time you use the app. PatternMusic is designed to be environment for music exploration so I designed it for return visits.

Check out the PatternMusic Pattern Editor Tutorial to see how it turned out.

It seems Apple is lowering the boom on iPhone apps that directly access the iPhone’s digital photo media folder.

For some time now a number of iPhone app developers have used the iPhone’s DCIM digital media folder as a backdoor for transferring files between apps and to and from the desktop and the iPhone. (The DCIM folder is one of only places on the iPhone that can be easily accessed via high-speed USB media file transfer utilities.) For the most part the iPhone OS prevents apps from reading and writing to any places on the iPhone file system besides the app’s designated document folder. But the DCIM folder is a big exception. The iPhone doesn’t prevent apps from reading and writing the DCIM folder because access is needed in order to provide apps with access to the camera roll photos and videos.

Apple, however, precludes apps from reading or writing data files to any other place except the app’s “sandbox” document folder through their developer agreement.

This has all created a bit of a tricky situation for developers because we hear from our customers that competitive products support these features. On the other hand it’s not a good strategy to flaunt Apple’s developer agreement.

Apple’s rule is a bit strange. Why is it OK to store image and video files in the DCIM folder but not sound files? What are video files except sound files with moving pictures attached?

So far Apple has required DigiDNA’s FileAid and Good.iWare’s GoodReader to cease using the iPhone’s DCIM digital media folder for transferring files to and from the iPhone. On the GoodReader’s iTunes page Good.iWare declares,

“ATTENTION, USB File Transfer was REMOVED due to Apple’s demand, to avoid violation of Apple’s rules”

According to iPhone Explorer maker mypodapps.com:

November 07, 2009 – iPhone Apps in the “App Store” with USB transfer will very soon become extinct

…It is now with great sadness and disappointment that I bring you the news that our USB transfer support for these App Store apps will soon end. We have recently discovered that our current means by which we enable iPhone apps to gain USB access puts these apps in violation of the App Store rules. To avoid the boot, over the course of the next several days, App Store apps with USB access may release updates that remove this privilege… If you are iPhone App developer who just submitted an update, and you see a orange/yellow dot next to your app’s status, with the message “Waiting for Export Compliance” this may be a result of the newly apparently stance on USB transfer…

Lexcycle’s Stanza (now owned by Amazon) still supports USB to DCIM folder transfer of eBooks.

ReaddleDocs another popular PDF reader app also still supports USB to DCIM folder transfer and supplies a utility to upload your documents.

Amidio (maker of one of last month’s most controversial App Store limbo apps TouchDJ) makes a range of music and synthesizer apps that use the DCIM folder for sound sample transfer between their own apps like Noise.io and JR Hexatone and promotes the technique as a “standard” they call ioLibrary. Updates to both Noise.io and JR Hexatone are apparently awaiting approval from Apple.

Discipline

It’s at the core of things we wish to master. (Or things that master us.)

I’ve taken to using PatternMusic (a tool of my own devising) every evening to create a new song. I’ve found that a regime of regular practice in PatternMusic has lead to developing my skills and ear for creating tunes. It’s like having a personal trainer in music composition. Well, maybe not quite. It’s more like having a training machine. You have to supply your own personal training. (What I did was simply set up an alarm reminder on my iPhone.)

(Of course, there’s little scientific evidence of the efficacy of such behavior. The success of the Nintendo games such as Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Age and the Big Brain Academy has underwritten a lot of well publicized neurology studies where they look at the various brain centers involved with various puzzle and game activities. But I can’t cite any studies that have looked at the effects of music composition practice on brain mass.)

Here’s how you can set up your own regime with PatternMusic:

• Get some headphones or earbuds and pick a time in your day when you won’t be interrupted for at least 20 minutes. It doesn’t have to be at night. It can be on your commute (if you aren’t driving) or after lunch or dinner or right before bed.
• Each day you can either choose to continue the project from yesterday or start a new project. That will keep you from getting stuck. You’re not writing a symphony. In fact, you should expect to throw most of what you create away.
• Start by picking your song settings — time signature, tempo and a scale. These are a great tool in PatternMusic for establishing a framework to work within. It’s also a great way to experiment with different modes and meters with which your aren’t familiar. You can vary your song structure depending on how far from your comfort zone you want to push yourself today.
• Force yourself to work within your chosen song framework for the session. Tomorrow you can mix it up again or go back to something more familiar.
• Try to keep working on the song for at least 20 minutes or until you have something that’s at least interesting for you to listen to in the moment. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. The whole point is that you are practicing and refining skills that you want to develop, or that your are experimenting with new ideas and new idioms.

Give it a try, and let me know how it works for you.

Image credit: From the book The Human Body and Health Revised by Alvin Davison, published in 1908 by Alvin Davison copyright of 1908 by Alvin Davison and 1924 by American Book Company. Copyright never renewed.

PatternMusic is now available at a Thanksgiving special sale price of only $1.99. That’s 60% off!

PatternMusic for the iPhone and iPod touch is available on the App Store worldwide.

More information is available at www.PatternMusic.com