Sir Sampleton is in the Wall Street Journal this weekend!

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Marcin Ramocki and I are organizing a videogame-focused version of a Bring Your Own Beamer event on Dec 8th at Postmasters gallery in NY that will coincide with an exhibition that we’re curating. If you have a projector and some aesthetically interesting or unusual video games that you’d like to show or allow people to play, then email me to RSVP at BYOBgamesedition@gmail.com.

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Sir Sampleton 1.6 came out yesterday and now allows you to email samples for trading with friends, backup, and transferring between devices. You can also load Sir Sampleton sample pack files directly from Safari on an iOS device, which means it’s now possible to set up sample library webpages. If anyone comes up with some good sample sets, send em my way. I will probably eventually be starting a sample library page myself.

“…It’s called the Blue Brain project, and it’s an attempt to create a neuron-by-neuron simulation of a mammalian brain, using IBM’s Blue Gene super-computer. So far, Markram’s team has managed to simulate one neocortical column from a rat’s brain, which contains about 10,000 neurons. Markram has said that he hopes to have a complete virtual human brain up and running in 10 years. (Even Kurzweil sniffs at this. If it worked, he points out, you’d then have to educate the brain, and who knows how long that would take?)”

Seems like it would not take more than 18 years.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2048299,00.html#ixzz1YkGrvDLj

I’ve got a new version of my iPhone app search engine now renamed The App Catalog. The site now has detail pages for each app, the ability to filter by price using searches like “games free-2.99″, and the ability to easily share apps on Twitter or Facebook.

Here’s my freelance spiel:

I’m an embedded systems programmer in New York with 15 years of experience on a wide variety of embedded platforms and 1 year working exclusively in iPhone/iPad development. I am looking for paid freelance iOS development work.

I’ve released two iOS apps — a keyboard sampler called Sir Sampleton and an interactive audio-visual music album called Magic Carpet. Although simple in concept, my apps are polished, robust, and both use a basic 2D OpenGL game engine and include my own multithreaded low-latency polyphonic audio engine that supports CoreMIDI and other MIDI devices.

I’m looking for projects like:
- Interactive record albums (like Bjork’s Biophilia)
- Design-oriented sound toys, synthesizers, or drum machines
- Simple, designy 2D games
- VJ tools
- App art projects

[UPDATE: I got a job, will be busy for the next few months]

I was recently asked to DJ for Paddy Johnson’s Sound of Art event in Toronto, and due to a passport problem, I decided to try DJing remotely via the Internet. I researched a lot of different ways to do this and it wasn’t easy to find all the info I needed, so I’m sharing it here.

My goal was to send both audio and video, but the audio quality was unusable for music with all the video streaming methods I tried. For a performance coming through a loud PA, I think the sound needs to be pretty decent unless it’s really lofi music. This site lists a lot of audio streaming options for performances, but most of the things I tried weren’t right for one reason or another.

Ultimately I ended up using Mixlr for audio and Ustream for video because they are free to use, are easy, and both have built-in ability to record. The problem with this setup is that the video and audio will not be in sync, but for my DJ performance it didn’t matter. Mixlr sounds great and is very stable but there is a delay of several seconds on the stream. Ustream also has ads if you use the free service, but I actually think this makes the performance more funny and interesting, and when you’re streaming the audio separately on Mixlr, the audio will continue playing during the commercials. And if you use Ustream, I recommend downloading Ustream Producer.

The primary problem with the setup was just that I didn’t have any way to see the audience to know how they were responding, which makes it difficult to know which direction to go with your set. If we did it again, I’d want to set up some kind of live camera at the venue, either using Skype or another Ustream feed from the venue.

Below are a couple pics of the show in Toronto. The first image is of the two Magic Carpet projections that we had installed, and the second photo is the third projector that was showing my Ustream video feed from my apartment in New York.

I recently bought an iPhone 2G to test my apps on, which is important because Apple often creates undocumented incompatibilities between their libraries and some versions of iOS or hardware. Lately users have been leaving 1 star reviews saying my app doesn’t work, so I desperately need a 2G phone to reproduce and track down these issues, because the app works fine on my iPhone 4, iPod Touch 2, iPad, and on my friend’s iPhone 3. However when I received the 2G phone, it had a AT&T sim but was unactivated, which means it goes into “emergency dial” mode and is basically a brick. You can’t get to the home screen or anything at all. When you go into XCode and try to develop on the phone, XCode tells you that the phone is not activated and you have to activate it with iTunes. When you go into iTunes, it won’t activate the phone without signing up for and paying for AT&T service.

Apple has an article explaining how get past the emergency dial screen without service, but it requires an AT&T sim card with active service, and it doesn’t work. When I borrowed a live AT&T sim card and put it in the old phone to try to activate it with iTunes, contrary to what Apple’s article says it still required me to set up AT&T service for the phone to get past the emergency screen. I was told on forums that if you go to the ‘Genius’ Bar that they can fix the problem, so I called and the genius said they could do it. When I got to the Apple store, they retracted and said the only way to get past the emergency dial screen is to sign up for AT&T service. I can’t believe how much time I’ve spent messing with all this!

So I basically paid for a brick — Apple won’t let me use the rather expensive little computer that I bought unless I pay for AT&T service that I don’t need. This policy is uncool, and also inevitably results in buggier apps since it makes it difficult to test apps on all iOS devices unless you can afford to pay for unneeded AT&T service on all your test phones. The only other option is to jailbreak, which is especially complicated if you want to develop, and jailbreaking taints the environment so you can’t be sure if apps will behave the same way on a non-jailbroken phone. But since jailbreaking is my only option, it’s what I plan to do. I’ll report back later on how this works out.

UPDATE: I jailbroke the phone using redsn0w 0.9.4 and am now developing on it. Looks like I’m now able to reproduce the bug people are having with my app on older phones. I had problems with Redsn0w not liking the IPSW files I was giving it. I had to give it a 3.1.2 IPSW in order to get the phone jailbroken running 3.1.3.

Check this new awesome promo video for Sir Sampleton!!! by John Michael Boling, Javier Morales, Julian Bozeman, and John Crowe. Also, Paddy Johnson did an interview with John Michael and me about this.

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