Okay, having gotten my rant about Apple’s extreme level of secrecy out of the way (I’m standing by that), we can at least talk about what Apple is saying about QuickTime X, cutting through the marketing as best as possible.

We’ve known for some time that QuickTime X would be a ground-up rewrite – one badly needed. That could have some implications for compatibility, though, which is something to watch. The details are sketchy at this point, but here’s what’s possible to say:

• X is more integrated with Core technologies. Apple promises that QuickTime X will build on Core Audio, Core Video, and Core Animation. Some of that is to say that the long-in-the-tooth player application itself will work with those technologies more than the underlying QuickTime framework.
• There’s a new player. It’s about time: QuickTime Player gets an update. The nicest feature here is the slick trimming interface Apple has added. A lot of us use QT Player for quick edits and other tasks, so this is definitely welcome.
• There’s no more “Pro.” Finally, you don’t have to spend thirty bucks just to make QuickTime Player a useful tool. In fact, you’ll get all of Snow Leopard for that price (if you already have Leopard).
• Playback is more efficient. Here’s the part that could be most useful to live visual apps. Playback is now more “optimized” and makes use of the GPU for scaling, display, and hardware-accelerated H.264 decoding. Decoding, interestingly, uses the NVIDIA 9400M integrated chip. Most live visual apps already use the GPU for scaling and display, but under-the-hood performance tweaks and decoding features should be good news.
• HTTP video streaming. You can now stream video live over HTTP, which means you can use a standard Web server like Apache instead of a specialized video server, and you don’t have to open special ports on your firewall.
• ColorSync for maintaining color profiles on the computer and on mobile devices (well, provided those devices are also made by Apple).
• Built-in screen recording: You can now create quick screencasts using QuickTime player – groovy. (The Mac is, unquestionably, the easiest platform out there when it comes to making screencasts. Ask any tech journalist or educator.)
• Quick capture: Capture is improved in QT Player for quick recording – always a handy thing to have.
• Performance improvements. QuickTime X promises to take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, the new Apple threading technology, and 64-bit computing for better performance.

Apple unveiled QuickTime X at the WWDC keynote. Here are their bullet point slides:

• Modern foundation
• Hardware Acceleration
• ColorSync
• HTTP Streaming

I’m actually quite keen to know how the new QuickTime X works. What will it mean for live visualists? What does it mean for developers, not only on Mac but Windows? What does it mean for open source projects built on QuickTime, projects vital to music and visual applications and innovation?

Here’s the problem: we’re not allowed to talk about that. Apple didn’t talk much about what’s in QuickTime at their public WWDC keynote. Now, they’ll start explaining all the details at sessions at WWDC. Some of our readers are at those sessions, but because the entire conference is under a non-disclosure agreement, they can’t talk about them. In fact, in the past, I’ve contacted PR to try to get information based on a report and was told by upset Apple PR representatives that I should not even be asking the question, and that it was a real problem that someone had told me what they had heard in a session. Even more surreal, Apple has told me that I’m not allowed to know about things that are printed in descriptions of sessions from WWDC posted on their website. Apple will happily charge you a couple grand to go to California to their session, but they won’t share information with the press.

What’s the message to the press?

Repeat our hype and our PR. Ignore the technical details. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Kamel Makhloufi posts this appetite-whetting image of the “augmented reality” ARToolKit working on the iPhone platform. Sure, Microsoft and Sony may be hard at work on computer vision applications that don’t require tags, but for mobile applications, tags seem perfect. This is just a preview, but it already suggests some interesting art applications, as well as the usual games and such. I’ve been impressed with how well the camera on my Android-powered TMobile G1 works, even in low light, so the fact that tags are designed for easy readability by digital cameras suggests this could be eminently practical.

I just hope we also see ARToolKit on Android, too, naturally.

Via Flickr.

That was fast – Kyle McDonald notes in comments that some folks have already baked some parallel tracking and mapping system work on the iPhone, for markerless tracking. This sort of confirms for me why I like markers – there’s just so much data in this image to deal with, and presumably you have more you want to do in an app than just take care of tracking.

Having flowers pop out of this does look beautiful, and there is something magical about watching this happen without the markers.

By the way, since we’re looking at yet another iPhone video, I’m not advocating working on Android out of some sort of sense of ethical purity. Put simply, I just personally see the long-range development experience and deployment as being more flexible and broader. And I don’t think that thinking “mobile” has to be about any one platform. Ideally, you’d come up with solutions that allows you to get your artwork or game or whatever it is on iPhones and Androids and other devices.

Philia 01 Support Video from Lia on Vimeo.

Artist Lia has created her first piece of art for the iPhone and iPod touch, something called PhiLia 01. It’s a quirky, gorgeous generative sound and visual app activated by movement, one that encourages users to save their own artwork.

http://www.iphoneart.org/philia01

On the iTunes Store

Composer Morton Subotnik used to talk really eloquently back in the days of multimedia CD-ROMs and The Voyager Company about computers as “chamber music” environments. Instead of seeing the personal scale of technology as an impediment, he viewed it as something intimate and wonderful. So it’s fantastic to see artists engage mobile platforms as a way to have that relationship with a participant.

There’s now also a page up that is beginning to collect some of these particular artworks, focusing on generative-style interactive creations, and featuring work by our friend Memo Akten. Joshua Davis’ kaleidoscopic artmaking tool Reflect, which he showed for the first time at OFFF earlier this month in Lisbon, is enroute.

http://www.iphoneart.org/

Open Source iPhone Art

The way in which these tools are being created is interesting, too. PhiLia is built in OpenFrameworks, the open source C++-based development tool made friendlier for artists with integrated toolsets, a community of friendly creative folk, and simplified, speedy syntax similar to Processing. OpenFrameworks, thanks to its open source nature, has made its way onto the iPhone.

Part of what this demonstrates is that, while the iPhone itself is proprietary, some of the power of open source can still triumph. And, indeed, by basing work on this open source foundation, these same artists aren’t imprisoned by a single platform. PhiLia could be a desktop app, or on other mobile platforms once they support OpenFrameworks.

And, yes, it means I’m aching that much harder to get OpenFrameworks and/or Processing onto Android – it should be possible. (Java on Android is not identical to Java on desktop, so it can’t be a direct port – you can’t just install Processing on Android – but it is possible.) There are also still some wrinkles in the App Store approval process; it really is refreshing on Android (and presumably things like Palm WebOS) not to have those restrictions.

Then again, that’s the whole point: OS and specific platform shouldn’t have to matter, and open source software – and artwork – can be just as brilliant on a proprietary platform as an open one.

Ready to try this yourself?

Developing for iPhone using openFrameworks and ofxiPhone [memo.tv]

Using openFrameworks for iPhone dev [Rober Carlsen]

On the OpenFrameworks Wiki

You can thank Lee Byron, Memo Akten, Damian Stewart, Zach Gage, and the core OF team (Zach, Theo, and Arturo). The “power of open source” is not some sort of magical whirlwind that surrounds code and makes things appear spontaneously – it’s blood, sweat, and tears (unpaid!) by real people. Although, if you get those real people together in a room and do some sort of battle shout or Care Bear Stare (sorry, I’m an 80s kid), it might help psych you up.

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