0xtob’s coding blog

I finally made NitroTracker an open source project today! The code is available from:

http://code.google.com/p/nitrotracker/

This doesn’t only mean people can have the source, but also that I’m opening up development to the community. Or, to put it a little differently: NitroTracker needs coders!

I think there’s a lot of benefits working on NitroTracker. I’ll give you some examples of what I like about it:

• The thing that I love most about programming NitroTracker (this holds for most of my projects actually) is that it enables people to be creative. You make something and then people make something (in this case music) with that thing you made. It’s inexplicably cool, like being meta-creative!

• Working on NitroTracker has taught me many things. One thing was programming for the DS, but also how to design productive and easy to pick up user interfaces, how to write GUI toolkits, and how to write code that produces music.
• NitroTracker has a big community of users (over 100 beta testers!) that give a lot of very useful input in the shape of bug reports, feature requests and music (which can serve both as a motivation and as test cases for the XM player). It’s a lot of fun listening to your users and, learning design lessons from their experiences, and improving your software through feedback.

What I’m looking for are motivated people with good DS programming knowledge. Musical skills are a plus, but not required. Just check out the source (setup instructions here) and contact me if you’re interested. There’s really no commitment. You’re just part of the project and work on it whenever you feel like it.

Who’s in? :-)

Tob

r4revolutionds.co.uk ran a poll peoples’ favorite DS homebrew, and I’m very happy that both NitroTracker and Pocket Physics scored Top-10 positions! A big thanks to everyone who voted for my stuff!

It’s really worth checking out the top-20 list! There’s some great stuff in there:

• Places 20-19
• Places 10-1

TheRain has released the first version of the DSMI library for the iPhone! This library enables iPhone developers to create wireless MIDI controllers like xy-controllers, drum pads or keyboards! The iPhone applications can talk to any MIDI software on your computer through the DSMI server, making your iPhone a full-blown MIDI instrument! libDSMI for iPhone is available from the downloads page.

MIDI Motion Machine

TheRain has also released an exciting new app called MIDI Motion Machine, a tilt-based MIDI controller including 16 note trigger pads. The source code of a reduced free version of this app is available from the DSMI SVN. This should help you get started writing your own iPhone MIDI apps in no time!
You can get the commercial full application and the reduced free version (out soon) form the Apple AppStore. For more information on MIDI Motion Machine, check out the official site.

Because of chishm’s Supercard Lite Firmware Hack, the SuperCard Lite can now launch a .nds file on boot. So, I updated the GBAMP DevLauncher to support DLDI, making it usable on SuperCard Lite and renamed it “DS DevLauncher”. The updated binary, pre-patched with the SuperCard Lite patch is available from the filepile.

Thanks very much to chishm for the SuperCard Lite and GBAMP firmware hacks!

It turns out that sending the MIDI message (0, 0, 0) to some applications causes them to stop working. This, unfortunately, is the keep-alive message that the DS sends to the server every three seconds. So I patched the three servers to not forward this message any more.

Updating, re-packaging and uploading all thee servers takes quite some time, so I hope they are now bug-free :-)

The updated server is available from the DSMIDIWiFi homepage.

parad0x posted this awesome video on YouTube showing off his touchscreen jamming skills! He also explains how to set up DSMIDIWiFi under Linux with FluidSynth. Amazing job!