Trond Lossius recently wrote about his studio space. It included the photo below — In which I spy not only a Hemisphere , but also a Teabox !

If you have any pics that include the Hemisphere, Teabox, or anything else related to Electrotap, please let us know!

An email from Jasch just went out to the Max list. Info below…

this is just a quick note to say that a new beta version of the ICST ambisonics tools is available for download on our website:
http://www.icst.net/research/downloads/ambisonics-externals-for-maxmsp/

i’ve finally managed to finish a working beta-version of the new ambisonics dsp tools.

some highlights are:
* Furse-Malham or N3D encoding/decoding
* up to eighth degree in N3D (the corresponding b-format has 81 channels!)
* unified messages and attributes for ambiencode~, ambidecode~ and ambipanning~ externals
* four different coordinate systems in spherical or cartesian definitions are supported (see also SpatDIF.org)
* new distance attenuation algorithms, including none
* correct b-format orientation
* ported fully to the Max5 SDK (5.0.8+ required)

Enjoy!

Cycling ‘74 is shutting off its public mailing lists this coming Friday, and going to a web-forum-only format. There are naturally people thrilled with this, people unhappy about, and people who don’t care.

For people who prefer to interact with a community using a mailing-list format, Trond Lossius has set up a new Max List. The text of his “post about this”: to the Cycling ’74 forum is here:

For the ones that prefer mailing lists to forums a new mailing list for Max, MSP and Jitter has been set up, hosted by BEK, and we are particularly pleased by the fact that some of the Cycling ’74 engineers have signed up already:

https://mail.bek.no/mailman/listinfo/max

The list archive is set up to be public.
Enjoy!
Trond

(Note that you might see something about the security certificate being for the URL above. I was able to say “okay” and it wasn’t really a problem. You could just use “http:” (with no s) and you wouldn’t see the security warning, but it would actually be less secure.)

If you aren’t sure what all of the fuss is about, or haven’t been following along, Chris Muir posted a note that sortof summarizes the current hubbub.

The Max list is dead; Long live the Max list!

I’ve recently been drinking some of the GTD Kool-Aid. That means trying to do a better job of self-management. In theory this leads to both the ability to keep “more plates spinning” and to less perpetual stress. Whether such claims are possible or not I cannot yet comment, but like a lot of people I’m desperate enough to try. Naturally there are companies ready to capitalize on the GTD bandwagon, and so I went poking around.

Task Management

For years I’ve used Backpack. It’s a fine little to-do list. It is not convenient when you are offline though. I have an iPod Touch rather than an iPhone (due to the insane iPhone contract which I can’t stomach), which means that I’m often with no internet connection on that device. The result is that I keep lists of things in multiple places — Backpack, legal pads, the note thing on the iPod, etc. It’s a half-system, but I’m used to it.

It seems like I’ve been hearing non-stop about OmniFocus for most of the last year. I downloaded it (again) and tried it out (again) and was underwhelmed by it (again). For one thing I really can’t stand the way all of the Omni apps use these inspectors and find them very cumbersome. I also find it hard to believe that a modern system would be using a one-category-per-item paradigm rather than the ability to apply multiple tags (or labels or whatever you wish to call them). This seems crazy. And OmniFocus seems over priced. On the upside they are an established company rather than some flight-by-night operation.

Then I found Things. Things addressed the three issues I had identified in OmniFocus that I didn’t like: usability, tags, and better price. It feels like the app is a bit immature, but I find it, so far, a lot more livable than OmniFocus. Both programs sync with an iPhone/iPod.

I don’t like that Things doesn’t (currently, at least) sync with other Macs very nicely. It does a clumsy iCal sync. I would rather that I could just save the to-do database file on my iDisk.

Brain Dump

I had thrown myself on a bit of wild goose chase at first with the to-do lists. I had this idea that the to-do list application should be the same as the place where I throw all of my random notes and bookmarks and snippets and things. I was convinced that it should be this way. Backpack is sort of like this. And DevonThink can sort of fake this, which made my mission more difficult. It doesn’t really do a very good job of it though – especially compared to a dedicated GTD app like Things.

Along with OmniFocus I have been hearing about DevonThink quite a bit in the last year. I have to admit that I was always a bit non-plussed about the idea. The Mac Finder seemed adequate for organizing and searching files — why do I need to put them all into this other database?

The reality is that my info was not as organized as I thought. I had notes in virtual Stickies on my desktop. I had things in PDFs. I had emails. I had web shortcuts saved all over the place (mostly on my desktop). I had lists and notes in text files. Then I recently bought a document scanner to realize the dream of a paperless office — which means that I have scans of receipts and magazine articles and other stuff.

DevonThink integrates with my scanner (A Scansnap S300M) so that I don’t have to do anything but hit a button to scan something, and then it performs the OCR so I can search the text of the PDFs. It even seems to figure out the headings when scanning magazine articles and create a table-of-contents in the PDF. So all of my scans can go into DevonThink and whatever other information I need to brain-dump into it as well. I don’t like the price of the software, but I’ll get over it.

The other option I was considering was Evernote, which is mentioned by Merlin Mann in one of the videos on his 43folders site. Evernote is a lot cooler than DevonThink in some ways. The sync capability to between multiple computers and also the web and iPhone are tremendously cool. It’s also much less expensive (e.g. free for a limited amount of stuff and cheap thereafter). It was a hard decision, but ultimately I decided that I needed the most streamlined workflow for using my scanner.

Also Evernote seems like it is still fairly immature. One obvious thing that I wanted to do was drag webpages into my database. I could not figure out how to do it. I tried dragging the icon from the browser onto the app icon, onto the ‘notebook’ in the Evernote window, using the menubar item, looking in the Services menu, etc. I could take a screenshot, but that’s not what I wanted. I think Evernote looks a lot cooler than DevonThink, but I will need to at least wait for 2.0.

Since initially drafting this blog post, a comparison of DevonThink and EverNote has appeared @ http://theappleblog.com/2009/02/06/faceoff-devonthink-pro-office-vs-evernote-premium/ .

Getting Things Done?

Well, I certainly don’t feel like I’ve gotten anything done. It feels like its been a big distraction having to deal with all of this other stuff. I guess the proof will be in the pudding. So I’d better get working on the pudding…

A strange thing happened today. I have been trying to work on writing a paper in TextMate using LaTeX. I was really struggling with it and felt like I could make it work for me. I’ve had this experience before.

Then I realized that it’s because it looked too much like code and too little like text to me. I changed the colors (about 5 hours ago) to be black-on-white instead of white-on-black. Voila! It is all feeling very good to me now.

It’s amazing what a psychological difference those text editor colors can make.

Some impressions of Max 5 that were recently posted to the web:
http://www.2secondfuse.com/archives/max5inthepipeline.html

This has made my life using CygWin soooooooo much better:
PuttyCyg