Saturday, April 03, 2010

SoundToy iPad app approved for launch

This is great news. It has been approved by Apple and will be available on the iPad's launch on the AppStore! Keep you posted on how it goes.

Thursday, April 01, 2010

SoundToy - iPad app in 24hrs


The story started when a day before a public holiday here in Malta (31st March), I got a reminder from Apple Developer Center to submit any iPad app for review for the great launch of the iPad. And I thought why not create something simple in just a 24hr - code jam. My wife was going to be busy doing figolli (traditional Easter sweets), so I said let me a do a coding marathon where in less than 24 hours I have to submit an iPad app. This wouldn't have been possible if I didn't have experience building Buttonia for the iPhone.

Problem 1: I didn't have Snow Leopard, so I bought it after finishing a tutorial with my students on that day. And that evening I installed it together with XCode 3.2 / iPhone SDK for the iPad. Installation went smooth, although took a while to finish due to updates. I still made a TimeMachine backup before just in case :)

Problem 2: What can I do in less than 24 hours? I thought what would I want to do if I had a big multitouch screen? I would want to touch it with both hands and swipe and do some nice visual effects. That would be quite easy to do. Then I said what if I add some sound to it? That would make it more engaging and it would be ideal for kids to play around with it. I'm not really an audio programmer, but a sine wave generator wouldn't be difficult to code. Then if I get some sales, I might add some more sound effects to it and improve it later.

Problem 3: I didn't have an iPad, so I was bound to use the iPad simulator which although it works, its a bit slow on my machine. Plus I cannot tilt it or shake it, or actually multitouch it. So once I had a semi-decent touch trail effect, and a sine-wave generator, whose pitch changes according to where you touch the screen, I ported the code into another project to try it out on my iPod Touch. Now I know I could have done a universal build, i.e. an app that works both on the iPod Touch and iPad, but I didn't want that as it is not the same thing when you have a small screen. The main idea of porting it was to test the multitouch, but also to hope that the sound glitches I was experiencing in the simulator where a bug in the simulator and not in my code. Obviously I was wrong! The sound glitch still occurred and it only occurred when a sound starts, and when it ends. It also wasn't working nicely when blending multiple sine waves.

As I said I'm no audio programmer, so probably this would have been a no-brainer for some experienced audio programmers. The problem was in fact in the blending of the waves. I didn't want to use (A+B)/2, where A and B are two samples, because if one of them is silence, then outcome would be half the volume. I tried this as a test, even though it might half the volume and with this I didn't have any glitches. So I concluded my blending formula of (A+B) - A.B (not exactly this, but a variant of it), was not working right. My mind was already slowing, especially after coding an all-nighter with just 4 hours of sleep (5am - 9pm). I tried to find on the internet how to do correct blending. I discovered a lot of other unrelated algorithms, but not what I wanted. After telling the problem to my wife, I got to the solution :). Basically I used A*a/t+B*b/t where a is the current sine wave's volume, b is the previous waves' volume and t is the total volume (a+b). Now consider A as being the current wave we are mixing, and B as the previous wave (which is a mix of other waves). Then b is simply the maximum volume of all the waves mixed so far. This is probably not the correct way how to do, but I was pressed with time. It worked and no glitches :)

The polishing stage was the shortest cycle I have ever done on any project. There wasn't much to polish since it was a small project. I just added some concepts like double tap to hold a note, and shaking to clear the notes. Then made a quick logo and some simple text instructions while the app is loading.

All in all, it was a fun coding experience. I learned a lot, and definitely I need to get my hands deeper into audio programming/DSP. Waiting for Apple's review...