mini and beyond

It's a thrill...our happy little app, miniSynth makes an appearance in the latest three iPhone commercials with its proud (and maybe often imitated...but this is vain) bucktooth icon.

The next update (already in) shall include French language support. Just to show we appreciate Liberté, égalité, fraternité.

Meanwhile, we're working on a pair of new apps, with a twist (oh, no...not like the Tarantino film...or maybe). Tickle soundbuds.

On the Last Day of August

We've been quiet recently...mostly as we were working on some updates. A couple of these were submitted this and the previous week. Then, there's also a new app we also submitted some weeks ago, but didn't talk much about. Things sound a bit slow so far as the review cycle goes, from what I heard...hence, there isn't even much point in hyping it up :) Que sera, sera, right?

Strings

Our new tuner is out. Some changes to the website today, and finally our links page is up. New app...yes, it's a tuner. No, it doesn't make sound, but measures it. Check out some of the lab footage and let us know what you think. We thought long, cold and hard doing this thing. It's not the same kind of fun as writing a synth, but it's got a charm of its own.

Hype aside, there was really a year's worth of effort put into this. By Newton's good graces, if you put strings on wood, they just don't behave anymore...so that's when testing and measurement came in handy, and we ended up working the results into a number of algorithms.

This also involved me personally in a lot of made-for-iphone and stand alone tuners out there. As a tip, to find out if it's good or not, pluck a harmonic and watch the dial go. Not to give away a trade secret here, but a good number of them go awry.

Three Pieces of News (One, really)

Our last app passed final testing and was given away earlier today. It's cute. That's the news.

We also put in some overtime this last week and weekend to augment the video library some. There's now a new one for Steel Guitar, and two for the synth trio of MegaSynth, the mini and the therm. The latter were pulled out of about 2 hours of live experimentation, after a voice suddenly said, "why in the hell don't you plug all this into a mixer and see what comes up." Hence, no pretence or marketing is intended...probably need to add some percussion though.

miniSynth Update

Submitted 2.1 earlier today. By popular demand, this version offers two skin options: classic and new.

The App-a-lachians

We have submitted the first update to Steel Guitar earlier today: the "code" is sped up here and there, but the main thing is that we put an option whereby the player can call up a free-play slide that "frets" semitones, and pretty much gives tone control to the fretting hand. This particular app is intended to have a very fast update cycle, as we decided to keep things simple for the initial release, the nature of the emulated instrument being somewhat arcane.

The third of the aforementioned four apps (for this summer) has also concluded the beta development today. I think the submission should be within the next 10 days, depending on the speed and success of the final testing cycle. As per our obsession with silence, I'll skip mentioning what it is until time's opportune.

Once this round concludes, we plan on changing directions a slight bit, for better or worse.

Now go we in content

It's been a busy, busy few weeks over here. The new site is out, and our latest app, Steel Guitar, has just got approved and started hitting the virtual shelves as of the time of this writing. You can see an over-all demo on YouTube. For whatever is its merit, the app feels pleasantly suited to the iPhone platform, and vice versa.

Shall write more on this....