Spacepaper

Some time ago I discovered Spaces, the Virtual Desktop utility that comes with Mac OSX. It took a while to get used to the extra step of switching desktops instead of juggling with bringing windows to the top, but once I'd got the hang of it, then I wondered how I'd ever managed when I had a single over-crowded screen. As switching between desktops has become second nature, I've begun to wonder if there are any ways to extend the ease of use and immediacy any further...

One thought was to replace the keyboard key-press with a mouse click, but I used to use a three button mouse when I used Unix, and my fingers are happier with just a couple of choices. Squeezing a mouse feels wrong to me, too. The finger-gestures on the new Apple Magic Mouse might be a way forward, and I'll check that the next time I'm in an Apple Store (or find someone with a Magic Mouse - I've always found that talking with another user is a good way to shortcut the learning cycle).

But it turns out that there are a few software solutions that make virtual desktops easier to use, so here's a few things to consider.

- Dockland Soft's Spacesuit is a free utility that allows you to have different wallpapers for each desktop, so you get immediate visual feedback as you change desktop. But Dockland are into more than just extra wallpaper - Fantastik is a neat 'window preview' switcher system that offers an alternative way to sort out multiple windows.

- The CocoaBots' Hyperspaces is an alternative wallpaper-per-space utility that also allows you to colorize/tint one background image differently for each desktop.

- Once you start looking for alternative wallpapers for desktops, then you also find utilities that extend the basic Finder functionality. One example is Conjure 3 from Conjurebunny. Another (early beta) example is here.

There seems to be an evolution in progress here. Multi-touch tables, Magic Mouse, and iPhone seem to be influencing people to increase the tactile aspects of screens, and it seems to be leading to something of which we are only seeing glimpses so far. I'm reminded of other 3D-influenced utilities like the Cooliris image browser, and I also remember previous bursts of 'user interface' innovation activity like the transition from the one-app-at-once Finder via the Switcher to the many-apps-at-once MultiFinder and alternatives like the Slave beta from (I think) Steve Capps...

What I'm certain of is that there's plenty of things to explore in this area, and that having a different wallpaper for each virtual desktop is only the beginning.

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Musically useful!

Every so often, I surf the internet looking for interesting music-related software. The things that I find vary from freeware with a wide range of qualities, through shareware which tends to be as good if not better than many more overtly commercial versions, to commercial software, where my rule of thumb is that the smaller and more dedicated the programming team is, the more worthwhile the software will be.

Some freeware is a by-product of academic research, and there are sometimes gems to be found here. It is all to easy to be put off by sparse documentation, or worse, documentation which points to a conference paper containing formal methods mathematics. But perseverance can reap huge dividends when you find something that is clever and useful, or maybe amazing and a stroke of genius.

One such marvel is ixiQuarks, which is 'hidden in plain view' here on the Apple.com download site. There's no need to feel guilty if you passed it by, by the way.

At this point I have to comment about an interesting use of words by the UK television channel called 'Channel 4', who responded to my query about why I could not view their TV programme online catch-up service on my Mac with a comment about them looking at ways of providing the service to 'non-Windows' computers - I had never, ever, thought of having a Mac or a Linux box as owning a 'non-Windows' computer! To try and balance this rather biased view of computing, I have to report that this software does not work on 'non-Macintosh' computers.


ixiQuarks is freeware from ixi audio, who describe themselves as: "an experimental project concerned with the creation of digital musical instruments and environments for generative music." This sounds rather like a music-oriented version of the very broadly-based 'arts and technology' collective that I'm a founder member of: the Curiosity Collective.

ixiQuarks, as the name suggests, contains a number of separate units of musical generation, processing, or utility. The first thing to do is to read the documentation, which means going to the bottom of the help file, and reading the section called 'Getting started: few studies'. This explains the importance of loading files into the 'BufferPool' utility, and provides help with setting up audio inputs and outputs. For me, it all went smoothly, and I was soon trying out the very neat user interface to the Karplus-strong algorithm generated sounds in the 'Quanoon' (presumably a clever play on words for the Latin phrase 'sine qua non' which means 'without which not' and which is interpreted as meaning 'an essential requirement', which is pretty accurate if you want a versatile plucked-sound controller.) instrument, and using 'SoundScratcher' to smear audio files using granular synthesis. Granular synthesis can provide a daunting array of controls, and so something that makes times-smearing simple and mouse controlled is exactly what I've been looking for - think of it as a bit like the Smudge brush in a bitmap paint program, but for audio.

But the highlight for me was rather played down in the documentation: 'ScaleSynth'. The user interface looks deceptively straight-forward: the screen fills with pale green rectangles. But moving the mouse around the grid and clicking (or holding the mouse button down) rapidly reveals the purpose as the rectangles go increasingly orange in hue: horizontal and vertical movements control pitch using a menu-controllable scale. It gives a marvelously simple and intuitive interface to controlling pitch, and I'm now wondering why more electronic music software does not use this type of front end. This is probably my best 'find' for this year, although Puremagnetik's Vector is a close second.