Share, the thesis project of Yannick Assogba in the MIT Media Lab Sociable Media Group, is an interesting idea in coding: it’s basically a peer-to-peer sketchbook for creative code. All of your sketches are synced to everyone else’s sketches, and Share tracks the connections between users.

http://share.media.mit.edu/about

You get more from Share than you would from simply, say, sharing a Subversion repository. Share not only syncs code and changes, but also tracks each time you copy and paste code from elsewhere, so that code snippets borrowed from others can be traced through the people using the system.

Up to 30 people are now invited for an online competition using the tool.

The Share Experiment is an online competition/design-a-thon/hack-a-thon and exhibition that invites 30 participants form to use Share to make new creative works over the course of ten days. The theme of this competition is "Inspired By Pong". Though the final result need not be games, artists/hackers are invited to reinterpret and remix the concept of pong while at the same time being open to reinterpretations and sampling of their own work as it being created. The Share Experiment will run from June 5th - June 14th and we are inviting applications. There will be some prizes awarded to winners (including iPod Touch[es] and Arduino kits) and we have some interesting ideas about mechanics for awarding prizes!

http://share.media.mit.edu/participate (via toxi on Twitter)

What is the Best Way to Share?

It’s a very cool idea, but this does raise some questions about implementation. It’s too bad that Share can’t run as some sort of plug-in; it loses some of the functionality of the bare-bones Processing editor, let alone the capabilities of an IDE like Eclipse or NetBeans. If it used a standard IDE, too, it’d be easier to be “language-agnostic” as the creator suggests. (OpenFrameworks or Flash or Processing, it wouldn’t really matter.)

But as a concept and an experiment, this looks really fascinating. It should be interesting to see how people use the code. And will users in a “competition” do a lot of copying and pasting, or focus mainly on their own work?

Part of the reason I bring up this is that we’re interested on CDM in doing some shared work. “Share” I think would be too limiting; it’s back to the old-fashioned Subversion approach.

So, for instance, we’re organizing a hackday around tangible interfaces in June, the first of what I hope will be many more. We’ll have people working on it in person in New York, but also folks collaborating around the world online. I’ll post more details, but just to kick off the discussion:

http://hackday.noisepages.com

Apple has rolled out its 10.5.7 OS update. First, the good news: it may enhance video support. Apple’s tech document claims the update “Improves performance of video playback and cursor movements for recent Macs with NVIDIA graphics.”

The (potentially) bad news is that it could cause issues with video output and external monitor resolution. There’s a growing thread on the topic:

Monitor with wrong resolution after 10.5.7 update!!!! PLEASE HELP!!!

(Thanks to DJ SD for pointing this out on Create Digital Music, where we’re tracking issues with Euphonix control surfaces and Ethernet.)

Those will be forum contributor’s exclamation marks, not mine. I’m staying calm; don’t worry.

Now, oddly, a lot of the discussion seems to be related to HDMI-to-DVI connections, something that may be less common among live visualists (and thus less concern to readers of the site.) But it looks to me like DVI may have issues, too.

I think if you haven’t upgraded yet, you may want to hold off as the update is so new – that is, if you’re gigging or presenting in the next few days, for instance. If you do update, the usual advice holds: back up, so you can roll back if you have to. (I wish Mac updates allowed manual roll-backs, as with Windows updates, though even that is no substitute for a real backup.)

Of course, if you do have the update, I’m curious how it’s going – especially if it enhances performance. Stay tuned.

Also, 10.5.7 or not, there’s a hidden gem in that thread:

switchResX

It’s a utility for explicitly setting external monitor resolution. I expect some of you are hard-core users already?

DisplayLink technology has existed for a while, and started appearing in more devices in 2008. It sounds like a very visualist-friendly concept - add extra monitors via USB - yet I haven’t seen it in action nor heard from any VJs using this hardware.

The DisplayLink site proudly displays seemingly daisy-chained monitors, and touts the energy efficiency of not using extra graphics cards to add more displays.

As to performance, DisplayLink is a software accelerated solution, compressing and sending the video data over USB. Various reviews have noted the performance hits this causes, and the DisplayLink Mac driver (released December 2008) page notes that the driver doesn’t support 3D acceleration. That aside, it could be useful for laptop performance or other compact projects where additional graphics cards won’t fit.

Amazon sports a selection of devices from around US$60, and for internationalists, DealExtreme has some too.

Has anyone tried DisplayLink? Is it usable for projection or live video, or should we stick with Matrox’s GXMs (a.k.a. DualHead2Go and TripleHead2Go)?

It appears that, with the shift to the DisplayPort, Apple has eliminated adapter accessories for S-Video and composite video output. We’ll need to properly confirm this, but of course, you will want a way of being able to do this for maximum flexibility on the road.

DIY solutions, anyone? DisplayPort does have the ability to pass through analog signals, so there’s no reason, in theory, this shouldn’t be possible, as far as I know. And you should be able to use an adapter that translates VGA to S-Video / composite. (Apple DOES offer a VGA output adapter for the new models.)

Tto be clear, as I understand it, what’s possibly happened is the elimination of adapters from Apple, not something that’s impossible to fix. That means, unless I’m missing something, we should have at the very least an opening for some third-party accessories.

I think it’s an arrogant decision on Apple’s part: no HDMI, no S-Video, and no composite means that, if this is true, they knowingly eliminated all of the primary ways people currently connect video output on their computers. And it certainly shouldn’t be technically impossible.

I’m happy to be corrected, of course. Solutions?

Updated: Here’s one way to go, theoretically — buy Apple’s VGA adapter, then buy something like this to get your S-Vid / composite video jack. And be sure not to forget either dongle. (Doh!)

Can anyone think of any problem with going that route?

Another update: DisplayPort, as an interconnect standard, specifies both the physical connector and the signal. Apple is not properly supporting DisplayPort, because they’re substituting a completely different physical connector. And, quite frankly, that means it’s unacceptable for Apple to crow about how this is an emerging standard, when they don’t actually support that standard. It also means the options for third-party accessories will be scant.