Synth 14/2/2010
Here’s a grab of the latest version of Synth. Not much has been going on at a superficial level, but quite a bit has changed under the hood:
- OpenGL frontend – dabbled with OpenFrameworks, then wanted to be a bit more iphone friendly so tried CoreAnimation, then wanted some decent performance so implemented a simple 2D OpenGL engine.
- Caching of notes – the audio is still synthesized, but given the simple nature of the notes, I cache them on start up. It doesn’t use up much memory and is a hell of a lot faster than calculating them in realtime.
- And of course tried it out in the iPad simulator. It’s looking nice there – big chunky buttons!
So whats next?
- Been trying a bit of rotation detection, but it’s not quite there yet.
- Better looks – it needs nicer button textures, an icon, a splash screen and a website.
- Layers – it’s gotten to the stage where it’s fun to play, and sounds nice. Layers would make all the difference when playing.
- Octave changes – it’s all there in the synth, just not exposed in the GUI.
There would still be loads to do after that (e.g., loading and saving compositions), but for a 1.0, maybe even a released version, I think I’d need most of the above.
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