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Generative music apps

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At our sponsor Intel's LifeScoop site, I posted about "Music That Writes Itself":

In ambient music pioneer Brian Eno’s 1996 book A Year with Swollen Appendices, the composer wrote, “I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say: ‘you mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?’” Eno was talking about generative music, a process by which a computer creates unique works from fixed parameters set by the artist. In its simplest form, you twist a few knobs (virtual or otherwise) and the computer takes it from there, creating music that can be credited to the system itself. The term generative art is most likely derived from “generative grammar,” a linguistic theory Noam Chomsky first proposed in his book Syntactic Structures (1965) to refer to deep-seated rules that describe any language. Steven Holtzman, author of Digital Mosaics (1997), traces the art form to the dawn of the information age in the 1960s, when musicians like Gottfried Michael Koenig and Iannis Xenakis pioneered computer composition. Decades later, a number of generative music apps are bringing Eno’s vision to our smartphones.
"Music That Writes Itself"

The Exploratorium's Sound Uncovered: A science museum in your hand (for free)

This review also appears on Download the Universe, a group blog reviewing the best (and worst, and just "meh") in science-related ebooks and apps.

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi.

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Science museums are chaotic. They're loud. They're usually full of small children. Your brain is pulled in multiple directions by sights, sounds, and the knowledge that there are about 15 people behind you, all waiting for their turn to press the button, too. In fact, research has shown that adults often avoid science museums (and assume those places aren't "for them") precisely because of those factors. Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music.

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Rob Walker on the cult of Evernote

Count me among the members of the cult of Evernote, a web service (with 50,000,000 users) that stores digital documents and makes them easy to find. I use it with my Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner (here's my review) and would have a very hard time without them. The current issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek has our friend Rob Walker's excellent story about ardently devoted Evernote users.

“What you put in Facebook isn’t who you are,” says [Evernote CEO] Phil Libin. “It’s what you want some people to see. And what you put in LinkedIn is certainly not who you are; it’s what you want the professional world to see.” Libin suggests that the addiction to a particular strain of “viral” growth has led to a drastic overemphasis on digital design for extroversion. As a guy who describes himself as too introverted to win over his high school chess team, Libin says that’s an oversight. “What you put in Evernote is who you are,” he continues. “We used to say in the beginning that Evernote is not social. In fact, it’s antisocial; we don’t care about your friends.”
As Evernote's Cult Grows, the Business Market Beckons

Twitter launches video sharing app

Twitter's just released Vine, a video sharing app designed to make it easy to create and embed short snippets of high-quality, low-bandwidth video on the web. The shortcomings of animated GIFs, and the bloatedness of most web video, leave a poorly-served middle-ground that it intends to fill—but only, for the time being, if you have an iPhone or iPod touch. Rob

Hundreds is a stylish iOS puzzler

Hundreds is a minimalist puzzle game from Semi Secret Software, the makers of Canabalt. Each of its 100 levels is filled with one or more floating circles. When you press down on a circle, its numerical value and size increases. Your goal is to enlarge the circles until their combined values add up to 100. But as a circle grows, it turns red, and if anything touches a red circle, it’s game over.

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KaomojiApp makes crazy text emoticons easy \(☆o◎)/

KaomojiApp adds a menu item to your Mac with a huge collection of Unicode emoticons that you can easily select and insert in any text area. The free version has a few basic samples in each emotion category, and you can unlock hundreds more for just $3.

Yay! ☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°☆

KaomojiApp.com

Tyra Banks has an app that teaches people how to "smize"

John Koetsier of VentureBeat: "Tyra Banks has released a new iPhone app to help other women -- and men -- learn the secret that she teaches America’s Next Top Models: how to take sizzling hot self-portraits by “smizing.” Smizing, as I learned today, is the art of smiling with your eyes."

Smizing with Tyra Banks

Small world, tracker music edition

I love to hang out with online pal Cabel Sasser, founder of Portland software company Panic, whenever our paths cross in real life. But I only just realized that he was an early 90s tracker musician whose work I listened to in England as a kid, on my Commodore Amiga, decades before we met.

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Plasma Orb marble maze game for iOS

Plasma Orb looks like a fun marble maze game for iOS. But beware -- it has "Infrequent/Mild Simulated Gambling." (Via App Spy)

New features in Glympse, a location-sharing mobile app I like

For the last year or two I have been using a free location–sharing app on my iPhone called Glympse. It's purpose is simple: when you are driving somewhere to meet someone, the app generates a URL so they can see where you are on a map and track your progress as you are driving.

Today, Glympse introduced a new version of the application, and it has interesting improvements.

Glympse Groups allows users to share and interact via common activities, such as sporting or industry events, meetings or social gatherings. Glympse reveals group members’ real-time locations on a map for a set amount of time, encouraging local interaction and social discovery.

Glympse allows users to automatically schedule location updates to everyone associated with a specific calendar event, virtually replacing the need for “Running Late” or “On my way” emails, texts or phone calls.

When Glympse first debuted, it made it fast and easy for users to “Share Your Where” with others, for a specified period of time without creating yet another network. Now, the new Glympse turns the tables and makes it just as easy to ask your friends, family, and colleagues, “Where are you?” With the new “Request a Glympse” feature, users simply send a request via text or email and recipients can instantly accept and start broadcasting their location for the given time period.

Get Glympse in the App Store and Google Play

AwayFind gives you the peace of mind to ignore your inbox without fear of missing an important email

I've found that having big stretches of time where I don't frequently check my email boosts my ability to accomplish things. A service called AwayFind gives me the peace of mind to ignore my inbox.

In a nutshell, AwayFind lets you add selected email addresses to a Priority Inbox. When someone on your list sends you an email, a notification appears on your phone. That way, you don't need to check your email inbox every few minutes. I've added my family members, my book editor, my coworkers at MAKE and Boing Boing, and a few other people to my Priority Inbox list.

Does this sound like Apple's new VIP feature? Yes, AwayFind and Apple's VIP share some of the same functionality. However, AwayFind goes beyond Apple's VIP feature, making it much more useful. Jared Goralnick, the founder of AwayFind, wrote a blog post that describes the features in AwayFind that VIP doesn't have. For instance, AwayFind determines the 25 people that you reply to the fastest and makes it easy to add them to your Priority Inbox (this list is regenerated every month). It also notifies you when someone you've scheduled a meeting with sends you an email before your meeting, even if they aren't in your Priority Inbox. These examples just scratch the surface. Check out a list of the other differences between VIP and AwayFind here.

You can try AwayFind for free for 30 days. After that you can subscribe to a personal plan for $4.99 a month, which includes 100 alerts a month, or a pro account for $14.99 a month, which gives you 1000 alerts per month.

AwayFind

As car service app Uber grows, D.C. council pushes to regulate

I absolutely love the smartphone app Uber, which allows you to order car service on demand, instead of trying to hail or call a cab or order a black car. It became an essential tool during my radiation treatment for cancer in LA, when treatment made me too weak to drive, public transportation didn't serve the route I needed to get to the hospital, and I was just too flaked out to arrange rides in other ways. When my friends Tara Brown and Sean Bonner "gifted" me some Uber credits, I tried it once and was hooked. Uber wasn't a luxury for me, but a truly practical service.

It is also the very definition of a disruptive technology: as Napster was to the recording industry, Uber is to taxi unions. And, not coincidentally, the guy behind it is Travis Kalanick, who was once sued for $250 billion by the MPAA, RIAA, and NMPA over his now-defunct P2P search engine Scour.

In his latest round of pissing off legacy industries by building great internet-based services, Kalanick has managed to upset the forces that represent Washington, DC area cab drivers. And the DC city council is now considering regulation that would mandate much more government oversight over Uber's operations, and severely cramp its style. Snip from WaPo:

The regulations, among other things, would require drivers and companies to obtain licenses to be renewed annually; require companies to operate at least 20 vehicles, with at least 10 percent of them wheelchair-accessible; and require the vehicles to be painted black and meet age and model standards.

Also in the proposed rules is a ban on “demand pricing” — a direct shot at a key part of the Uber business model, which hikes prices during periods of high demand to guarantee a supply of cars.

“I would ask the D.C. Council to figure out what problem it is trying to solve,” Kalanick quipped this week. “Sedans didn’t all of a sudden grow horns and get a pitchfork.”

Read more: D.C. Council weighs limo regulations (Washington Post, thanks, Miles O'Brien).

Spacecraft 3D: Nifty robotic space travel augmented-reality app from NASA JPL

I recently had a chance to visit NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Miles O'Brien. At the NASA center in Pasadena, engineers are readying for the long-anticipated landing of the Mars Curiosity rover on Aug. 5. During our visit, we met with the team behind a cool new iOS app from JPL: NASA's Spacecraft 3D, an augmented reality application that allows users to "learn about and interact with a variety of spacecraft that are used to explore our solar system, study Earth, and observe the universe."

Using a printed AR Target and the camera on your mobile device, you can get up close with these robotic explorers, see how they move, and learn about the the engineering feats used to expand our knowledge and understanding of space. Spacecraft 3D will be updated over time to include more of the amazing spacecraft that act as our robotic eyes on the earth, the solar system and beyond!

The app is really a ton of fun. You can download it here for free, iPad and iPhone and iPod Touch. Here's the JPL press release announcing its release.

iPhone app makes a game of monitoring pain for young cancer patients

[Video Link] Canada's Hospital for Sick Children (aka SickKids) and the Cundari creative agency are developing a iPhone app called "Pain Squad" to help monitor and report physical pain and emotional wellness in young cancer patients. Snip from a post on Springwise:

Using the narrative of a police force hunting down pain, users are inducted as a rookie officer working on the case. Patients fill out a daily survey – which asks questions relating to whether they felt pain that day, how intense it was and its location – and can progress through the ranks of the force when they keep their records updated. The concept was created by Toronto-based media agency Cundari, who got stars from Rookie Blue and Flashpoint – two primetime cop shows in Canada – to appear in videos that are unlocked when patients do well and progress the narrative. By gamifying the process, the app gives patients an incentive to keep a daily journal of their pain. The app is still in the testing phase but SickKids hopes to release it later this year.

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It's shopped, this new app will be able to tell by the pixels

At Poynter, Craig Silverman writes about FourAndSix, a new photo forensics tool now in beta. The idea is to create tools that "sniff out digitally altered images." Two of the people behind it: Kevin Connor, former VP of product management for Adobe Photoshop, and digital image forensics expert Dr. Hany Farid. (via Erin Siegal)

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