Feed, as with most projects like this, took a strange developmental route.
It was originally called elemental and was a desktop processing sketch connected via osc to a max msp patch. This was Feed saying a garbled “hello world”.
This proto feed was coloured circles uncontrollably bouncing around the screen triggering sound hits. This was exciting for us, but not really for anybody else.
We continued to develop our ideas with this setup until we got to a point where we needed it to be deployed on iPads for an installation event. This is when the dev fun really started…
We enlisted the help of Seth Sandler who got us off to a flying ios start. We then had an xcode project setup with openframeworks, ofxpd a soundcloud uploader and a few other goodies. After the event we continued to develop ideas and code and released a Feed Version 1.
The interactions and visuals are handled by openframeworks and the audio engine is programmed in pure data vanilla. This has proved to be a great way of working as openframeworks (oF) has provided a great basis to make some fantastic visuals and some solid interactions, pure data (pd) let’s you mess around with procedural audio at a malleable level whilst being very powerful. Dan Wilcox created an addon ofxpd which made this possible,ofxpd, it is a wrapper that allows communication and control between the openframeworks and pure data components, verrrrry useful.
For version 2 we spent a long time developing the visuals. All of the new menu options were created using Objective-C and Xcode’s interface builder, I’d like to say this was lovely and easy, but that would be a lie. Apple have a tendency of making things seem easy and don’t get me wrong, they can be, but generally only if you want to unfalteringly walk the apple line in design and function. So naturally I had lots of fun trying to get all of it to play nicely. Grumbling aside, it was all well worth it as we are super happy with how it’s all come together.
So at the moment in Feed Version 2 we use Openframeworks, OfxPD, Pure Data, Interface Builder in Xcode, Cocoa Pods and some other nuggets of source code.
Here’s a playlist showcasing some of the new features…
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYjLJwIQqnEfJlwXlcD4UYfo1LAna8FM3
It looks like this:
Here’s some more coherent information: www.thefeedapp.com
We have a limited amount of promo codes, so give me a shout if you would like to have a go.
It will be on the app store in a couple of hours at a discounted price of £0.69 for the next week.
I’d like to take this chance to thank again the people I’ve mentioned above and also the countless others in the community ho have made this possible. Many many thanks.