iPhone development continues despite a lack of SDK. Masayuki Akamatsu has updated his native iPhone OSC client aka.iphone to 2.1, and includes plethora of screen/input configurations to suit your mobile performance needs. The update should suit typical VJ and Dj applications with its range of GUI sliders, knobs, button grids, etc.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, be sure and check out aka.iphone. Very cool stuff. Yes, sorry, another Apple oriented update. Shoot me.

[Ed.: Note you will want Max/MSP/Jitter to work with this app, though I think it should work with Windows, too; I just lack a machine that can test it. Be sure to see also Masayuki's complete Max collection, which now covers everything from Wii remotes to 3D SpaceNavigator controllers, Apple Remotes, and even the motion sensor in the MacBook Pro. Completely brilliant. And needless to say, even if you don't want to hop on AT&T's mobile network, this gives you options with iPod Touch, too, even if you can't play Phase on that. -PK]

Though most of what’s new in Max 5 is concentrated in Max and MSP, there will be a few treats for Jitter users. First and foremost is the new Matrix Probe: hover your mouse over a green matrix patchcord and you’ll be presented with a floating preview of the matrix passing through it along with information such as dimensions, planecount and other info. This will be a great timesaver — no longer will you have to drop in four jit.pwindows, four jit.fps’s and jit.unpack to find out whether the video you’re sending is the video you think you’re sending. Gregory Taylor tried to demo the Matrix Probe for me at AES last weekend but it wasn’t working in the build he had on his laptop. Nonetheless, I offer this JPEG as proof:

Other features:

• The ability to drag and drop movies directly into patches will make a big difference for folks developing VJ patches (auto-creating “read foo.mov” messages and such), not to mention the slickness of the new file browser, even though its not yet as integrated as some would like. Ed.: The limitation of the new file browser, as I pointed out on CDMusic, is that you can only use it within a patcher, not in, say, Presentation Mode as a way of browsing files during a performance.
• There will be some performance improvements in Jitter’s matrix operations on the CPU thanks to a recent bug report on jit.rota on the Jitter list.

And, unfortunately, that’s about it — too bad Cycling doesn’t have ten more developers working on Jitter full time. Still, the new (dare I say it?) paradigm in Max 5 will bring much to explore even without, um, totally jitter-free playback of HD and SD footage.

Ed.: It’s possible we’ll see some other enhancements between now and Max 5 ship time, but as has happened in the past, Jitter appears to get a different “rotation” in development than Max — so Jitter got a huge 1.5 update while Max/MSP was largely standing still. We’ll certainly keep tabs on development and let you know more details as they arise. There are quite a lot of general improvements that I’m sure Jitter users will love while we wait on these other needed improvements to Jitter itself; see details in discussion in our general Max coverage from Create Digital Music. -PK

Cycling ‘74 Releases Max 5 Details: Bringing Max Out of the 80s, Into the Future
First Max 5 Preview: Music Patching, the Next Generation?