I'm attempting to create an application for my iPhone to enable the phone to act as a hardware interface to control software on my computer through midi mapping. For example to assign cue buttons in software such as Ableton/Traktor onto a GUI interface controlled on the Phone.
I am aware that previous versions of this have been created, such as the ITM Matrix http://www.itouchmidi.com/?q=node/5. I have been using this application but I have some variations i wish to implement so figured the best way to learn would be to start from scratch. Though my programming skills are limited I'm hoping this task shouldn't be too difficult and would appreciate any advice in how best to get this up and running.
Cheers
Mike
You are going to have a difficult time with little programming experience. But here is the documentation on the Core MIDI Framework in iOS which you are going to need.
I decided to write my own iPhone MIDI Controller app too.
What really helped the most was this five part blog post series that really helped to understand how Core MIDI works on iOS.
There is a bit of open source code called PGMidi (http://goodliffe.blogspot.com/2011/02/pgmidi-updated.html) that is a good example of sending and receiving midi on iOS using core midi. He has a working example that you could try tinkering with.
Related
I have been looking around trying to figure out how crossy road developers and beat sports developers have made their remote controller "add-on." First I thought Multipeer-connectivity, but after trying to test it on the Apple TV realized the framework was not support, why? Makes no sense to me, but anyways. So my question is, does anyone know what cross road developers did?
Thanks in advance.
If you only need to create a software-based game controller, you don't really need peer-to-peer. I've used NSNetService and made my framework available as open source: https://github.com/robreuss/VirtualGameController
Core Bluetooth would also work but will not give you the same performance as WiFi (NSNetService).
I want to add something (eg. the related city name) into the UI view when I make a phone call or received a phone call on iPhone. However, I can't figure out a good solution for this idea. Could anyone who has experience on this subject gives me some suggestions?
My currently solution is, try to write an extension based on mobile substrate and hook functions in SpringBoard. So many difficulties existed and following are my current big questions,
How to develop such a extension? I downloaded some examples from google, unfortunately they cann't even be compiled on my toolchain.
I can't figure out which ui view for the related screen I should use to insert my own component. I get header files of SpringBoard via class-dump, but no docs and no comments about its usage. Could someone share his discoveries with me?
How to build a trusted cross-compiling enviroment on leopard? All kinds of confusing errors pop up when I try to build others's codes. I've tried Zdziarski's instrunctions in his book, it works with iPhone OS 1 and can compile common projects with open sdk, but how should I do to make it works when comipiling ms plugins?
Also, is there any other solution to translate my ideas to codes? I start iPhone development one month ago, no experience with cocoa/Obj-C before. So your suggestions are very appriciated.
~ Link Bian (卞林扣)
Email/MSN: linkou.bian#gmail.com
I think you are asking for too much. It wont be possible to manipulate incoming/outgoing call screens. Ethically, that is.
Zdziarski is a hacker and from his book, you will get many undocumented API calls which will make Apple reject your app. Same goes for Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer's Cookbook.
Something that really helped me get dylibs compiled was using SkylarEC's Xcode template and just appended an extension of '.dylib' onto the binary and sshing it into /Library/MobileSubstrate/DynamicLibraries. I suggest hooking SBCallAlert or SBCallAlertDisplay to get the id of the caller which is usually just an NSString. Play around with it a little bit, those are all the visualizing methods of a call. If you put in an nslog in your custom override method, you can view the output in iPhoneConfgurationUtilitie (windows) or the console in Xcode. From there you would most likley need an index of area codes to comare the callers to. I don't believe you can add subviews to the call, on I intercept and reissue the strings for the views already there.
But you know, apple doesn't like this :P
lemme know if this helps
I need to build an application which will run on OS X, polling for data, and displaying that data full-screen in a purty, graphical way - generally "identifier: value" text in some sort of tabular format, but possibly with spark-lines to display historical changes, and "animations" (nothing fancy, just fading text and similar) to show updates.
However, I've no idea where to get started. I've no experience with desktop application development or development on a mac.
Where/at what should I be looking for OS X development information which will get me quickly up-to-speed (coming from a web-dev background)?
For OS X development, and a really nice overview that will get you writing actual applications quickly, I'm not sure anything can match Aaron Hillegass' book, Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X.
It's considered by many to be the Bible of Cocoa programming, and it is example driven. You are writing applications that you can actually run throughout.
It is useful, although not as much so, for iPhone development, which you don't mention in your question, but you do in your tags.
If you really want to go native with OS X that will mostly mean learning Objective-C and Cocoa. You get started by becoming an Apple Developer Connection (ADC) member and downloading XCode. Inside the ADC site there is a lot of information that will help you get started, Objective C reference, sample code, etc. .
Depending on your background you might want to consider using Adobe Air for your application, if you know Flex or Flash that might be easier for you to learn.
There are also a couple of question already up on stackoverflow on this subject https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=learn+cocoa
Take a look at http://www.realsoftware.com. It's a cross platform development environment. Easy to learn, established user community, lot's of sample, shared code to get you started.
Which of the new features are you looking forward to the most in iPhone SDK 3.0?
Is it one of the main advertised six new things, or something smaller? Something in the "1,000 new APIs", perhaps?
Phone to phone communication via bluetooth seems like it will terribly useful for some apps I am writing. No longer do you have to input all the data you want to store yourself, you can share some of it with other iPhone users.
not really a feature, but the best thing about developing the iPhone SDK further is the great frameworks that arise. there are some really, really great frameworks out there already (like the Three20 project) which will become even better with the new 3.0 SDK.
my real excitement will take over once they let us run background processes. maybe in 4.0?
Video! The ability to write decent tools for mobile video uploads is a big draw.
MapKit by far will bring the biggest change sweeping across the app space.
My personal favorite is that we can finally easily track upload progress of large files (like images).
I really, really want to see fixes in the camera API so that it isn't either broken (2.2.1) or forcing a switch to portrait (3.0).
Apart from that, the most useful features to me are:
push notifications. Great for making an app more sticky - you can let the user know that something of interest to them has happened.
CoreData - I've been using a third-party SQL layer, but it's a little buggy and no longer supported.
Peer-peer bluetooth, as the poster above said, is also useful for local data exchange.
And the least useful? Cut and paste. I actually want to disable it in my app (to discourage people from copying content) - and it doesn't look as though you can (yet).
Bluetooth phone-to-phone communication with GameKit will enable a host of currently impossible applications. Multiplayer games with no WiFi network needed and data exchange between two phones are obvious use-cases.
I'd also like to see - not currently included in the betas - a decent camera API that allowed us to customize the appearance of the capture screen, and as another poster said, have it work properly in landscape and portrait mode.
Does anyone have any suggestions for a site that potentially has some inspirational user interfaces for building my own iPhone Apps. It's straight forward to continually build out applications with the conventional UIKit widgets, but it does not set you apart from the competition. Some resources on how to build attractive interfaces is highly desired for inspiration. This is for someone with minimal Photoshop/Illustrator skills, but doesn't mind using sites such as iStockPhoto and working with custom views.
Apple is historically well-known for the user interfaces of its products and programs written for them, but in recent years it has come under fire for seemingly allowing its Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to lapse. Some of the best Mac and iPhone applications are actually those that deviate from the HIG, but not so much that usability (or acceptance into the App Store) is sacrificed (see link text).
Examples of such innovative iPhone applications can be found in the iPhone app and web app showcases of Apple Design Award winners. These apps have been judged by Apple itself to be creative, inspiring, and exemplary of the iPhone platform's potential as a mobile computing device.
Go to your local best buy, game stop, or any other store with xbox360s, wiis and playstation 3s lying around. Play every single demo on these machines and rate them solely on UI experience. Triple A console games still lead the interface world in my opinion. Soft synths are a close second and also often have beautiful UIs (as Chris Schreiner pointed out). A quick trip through logic will give you a glimpse of apple's own work in that direction.
You might want to check out this article by Matt Gemmell about his process in designing the UI for his Favorites app.
10 Gorgeously Designed iPhone Applications has some very nicely designed apps.
I spent a long time getting this one together, it's a full list of every single ios inspiration / mobile css gallery I could find on the internet. Let me know if you find any others so I can add them!
http://www.kintek.com.au/web-design-blog/iphone-mobile-css-gallery-listing-ios-inspiration/
Maybe this will help: My source of inspiration comes from the software-synth domain. Circle from FAW comes to mind. Ableton Live is (in my book) something to look at.
Heres a good article about designing the Convertbot application. A very simple app that stands out because of its UI.
I hate to burst your bubble, but great design is not something you will get from finding a "site" to look at. Major universities have graduate design programs, that's the kind of place where some people learn to be great designers. Multiple courses and textbooks on design and all the related areas (art, architecture, psychology, biomechanics, etc., etc.) I've seen too many engineers, without at least some of this training, routinely suggest some really bad UI design ideas. Don't be another one of them.
Treat learning great design as something far bigger than finding a site (or learning another programming language, etc.), more like a multi-year endeavor, and you might have a chance.
Or find and team up with someone who's already an experienced designer.