A Tasty Pixel » Posts

Encrypting and decrypting text with Alfred 2

Here’s a couple of Alfred 2 workflows that implement encryption and decryption via AES256, useful for doing things like sharing passwords.

Select some text (or copy it to the clipboard), and hit the encryption hotkey, and you’ll be prompted for a password; the encrypted contents will be copied to the clipboard.

Then when the recipient has the encrypted text, select or copy it, hit the decryption hotkey, and the original password will be requested. Then, the original text will be displayed and copied to the clipboard.

Encrypt.alfredworkflow

Decrypt.alfredworkflow

The Amazing Audio Engine is here, and it’s open source and Audiobus-ready

I’m very pleased to announce that The Amazing Audio Engine has pulled into the station. It’s been a long time in the making, and there have been one or two minor distractions along the way, but I’m proud of the result:

A sophisticated and feature-packed but very developer-friendly audio engine, bringing you the very best iOS audio has to offer. We’re talking audio units, block or object-based creation and processing, filter chains, recording and monitoring anything, multichannel input support, brilliant lock-free synchronization and rich Audiobus support.

You’ll find The Engine, a bunch of documentation and the brand-new community forum at theamazingaudioengine.com

It’s also open source. And it’s ready for Audiobus.

Thirteen Months of Audiobus

Tomorrow, Monday December 10, my friend and partner-in-crime Sebastian Dittmann and I are launching a project over twelve months in the making: Audiobus. We’re very proud of what we’ve managed to do, and we both firmly believe that Audiobus is going to fundamentally alter the way people create music on the iPad and iPhone.

You can find out more about Audiobus itself at audiob.us, but I wanted to take a moment to breathe, look back, and explain why the hell I’ve been so quiet over the last year.

Loopy and Loopy HD, now with Bluetooth pedal/keyboard support, iPhone 5

Loopy HD 1.3 and Loopy 2.4 just hit the App Store.

The main new stuff is support for Bluetooth pedals like the AirTurn and Cicada (as well as any Bluetooth keyboard). This uses the same system as the MIDI control, so you can do all the same stuff. It’s pretty neat.

Also, iPhone 5 support, which introduces — you guessed it — another row of loops. How could I resist?

There’s also some dramatically improved clock code in there, which offers new behaviour when using the x/÷/+/- clock length controls to give you new options for putting interesting rhythms against each other, and better support for non-4/4 time signatures.

There’s a bunch of other relatively minor improvements in there. Here’s a summary of all that’s new:

Added support for Bluetooth pedals like the AirTurn and Cicada, and Bluetooth keyboards
Added iPhone 5 support
Enhanced support for alternative time signatures
Improved clock length manipulation, with more flexible behaviour for “+” and “-” buttons
Rearranged Settings screen for easier understanding
Added “Cancel pending actions” MIDI action
Keep MIDI device connections over multiple sessions
Ask for a session name when saving for the first time
Assorted bug fixes and optimisations

Updates, updates for everybody: Loopy HD 1.2 and Loopy 2.3

The update has landed!

Loopy’s now slicker and meatier than ever, with a brand-spanking new audio engine — with some nifty new audio processing smarts and just ~6-7ms latency, which sounds absolutely fantastic — greatly improved punch in/out controls, multi-channel audio interface support, and a colossal amount of other improvements.

You can read more about the update here, grab Loopy HD (for the iPad and iPhone) or Loopy (for the iPhone) right now on the App Store, and talk about it on the forum.

You can also check out the new introductory tutorial — there’ll be more soon.

Many thanks to the testing team for their hard work making sure the new update is house-trained.

Happy looping!

Three Years On The Road: The Story So Far

My partner Katherine and I just hit the three year point of our adventure abroad. Here’s the story so far, over on our travel blog:

Brand New Loopy, Coming Real Soon

I’m very happy to say shiny new versions of Loopy and Loopy HD are on their way!

I’ve had my nose to the grindstone over the past months; I’ve taken Loopy’s insides out, given them a good, solid spit-and-polish, and put them back in. The result is a huge number of performance enhancements, much better quality audio processing, and a more robust engine (which, incidentally, is soon to start leading a life of its own). What it means for you: More stability, better audio quality, improved workflows, hugs, puppies.

It’s true that this is most significantly an internal-evolution release, but there’s also some new stuff in here.

Multi-Channel Audio Interface Support, Baby

The most exciting for the more serious musicians and tinkerers among us is new support for multi-channel audio inputs. When you have a stereo source plugged in, you’ll have a choice of whether to record stereo, mono left channel or mono right channel. If you have a device with more than 2 channels, then you’ll be able to select any stereo pair, or one particular channel.

Count-In Quantize Length

By popular demand, I’ve also added a “Count-In Quantize Length” setting, which lets you set how long you want Loopy to count in when recording, independently of the clock length. The default options syncs with the clock length, or you can set a specific duration from a quarter of a bar, up to 16 bars.

Huge Punch In/Out Improvement

I’ve also made a fairly significant change to the punch in and punch out mechanism.

In prior versions of Loopy, the actual punch in/out command is fired when you release — when the touch ends. That means that if you’re a slow toucher (it’s okay, no one’s judging you), you could miss the punch in/out point by tenths of a second. I went back to the drawing board, and came up with a new system: Loopy begins recording, in the background, as soon as you touch a track. If that touch ends up being a punch in/out gesture (instead of, say, opening the menu), then recording continues, beautifully in time. It’s much more intuitive, and I think will end up making it far easier to get perfect loop timing.

Toggle Track Sync Via MIDI

I’ve added a MIDI-triggerable action to toggle track synchronisation with a foot switch, which makes it easy to record irregular-length tracks, hands-free.

SoundCloud Update

I’ve integrated the snazzy new(ish) SoundCloud interface, which looks fantastic and also takes care of all the social network sharing stuff.

And finally, I’ve added a Japanese localization (こんにちは!), and updated the Italian one.

The update’s in beta testing right now, and I’m expecting to submit it to Apple next week.

Compiling Image Resources into a Static Library

I’ve recently been working on a static library for distribution to other developers — Audiobus — and I need to include a couple of graphical resources with the distribution. The usual solution to this is to include the resources separately in a bundle, and require the user to drop them in to their project along with the static library.

I thought I’d see if I could make the process just a little neater, and successfully devised a way to compile the images straight into the library, so the distribution remains nice and clean — just the library itself and a few header files.

Now, I can pop image resources into a folder, and after compiling, access them within the static library with:

UIImage *image = TPGetCompiledImage(@"Button.png");

It automatically handles “@2x” Retina images (although it doesn’t currently do “~ipad” versions).

Here’s how it’s done.

The magic is in a shell script which uses the xxd hex dump tool to create C code that represents the image data as a byte array, then creates around it a set of utilities to turn those arrays into UIImages on demand.

Along with it is a couple of template files — a header and implementation file — that describe the format of the derived code.

Finally, a little tweaking of the project in Xcode (with a brief foray into a text editor to work around some Xcode shortcomings) puts it all together.