Geeking Out

first it was the wii controller and now it's Android and iPhone SDKs. i haven't been excited about geeking out in a long time, hardly ever doing anything geeky outside of work beyond maintaining skipspicks.net. but now i've got this excitement about learning new technologies and putting them to use.

i've played around with the Android SDK and it's fucking slick. it's all java based and if you use Eclipse it's a snap to get up and running quickly. you can write a hello, world app in about 5 minutes and use the simulator to see your app run.

i just downloaded the iPhone SDK but haven't had a chance to use it yet. i think it's C-based, so that's going to be a challenge. gonna have to dust off that hat. but i think with all the libraries you don't have to worry about memory management so much.

using wii to midi, i finally got my mac to recognize my wii controller and i could see the stream of midi data coming into Logic. now i just need to write a filter to make the incoming data useful. but it's all pretty slick. i think the wii controller will be more useful in live applications using ableton live or something like that, but it might be useful when composing. we'll see.

also, it looks like the iPhone has a 3D accelerometer in it that's available to the developer. maybe you won't even need the wii controller anymore. well, the IR stuff is pretty damn rad. check out some of the links to see what i'm talking about.

• Johnny Lee and his tech geeking out
• Android
• iPhone SDK
• wii midi stuff on YouTube