Artificial Life - HD, the iPad edition

It’s now official. The iPad version of Artificial Life will be available on the grand opening day of the iPad iTunes store.

While the iPad version does preserve the same minimalistic art style of the original iPhone version, the artwork has been redone to take advantage of the higher resolution screen. Here are a few sample screenshots:

A few amusing points from the iPad HIG

I ran across these several weeks ago, but only posted them today due to the lifting of the iPad NDA

Regarding UI Design

"Give people more things to see and control, by adding more camera angles; more knobs, switches, and dials;" page 11

"Downplay application controls by minimizing their number and prominence." page 25

Regarding Icon Design

"...a 72 x 72 pixel application icon. These dimensions give you a sizable area in which to tell a story about your application." page 32

Tunemark User Tutorial: Background Play

I've received a few queries from people who are having trouble getting the "Background Play" option to work in Tunemark Radio.

Below is a very short video clip demonstrating how it is done. The most important not obvious step is to press the Home button on the iPhone after Safari starts playing the audio. You can not press the "Done" button, otherwise the audio will stop. Also, this does have the side-effect that you cannot use Safari while the music is playing, but you can use any other app.

Tunemark Radio 1.5, now with visualization

Tunemark Radio 1.5 is now available on iTunes. This update includes a new streaming music visualizer. While you are listening to a radio station, you can tap on the animated volume bar graphs to see a full screen animation that is affected by the music.

Here's a video demonstrating the visualizer



Given the iPhone limitations, it will never be as fancy as the visualizers you have on the desktop, but it's decent, and the performance is fairly smooth on actual hardware.

Tunemark Radio is an iPhone app which supports playing over 30,000 radio stations in the Shoutcast directory. It is available for FREE on iTunes and contains no banner advertising.

Visualizing music

I’ve been experimenting a bit with a way to add some visualization to live audio streaming on the iPhone. Here’s a very rough demo showing bouncing bars representing the left and right channel levels of the audio. It’s not much, but I think I might be able expand on it to have more advanced visual animations that are influenced by the music as it plays.

I’m not sure how much of a demand there would be for such a feature on the iPhone, but depending on how the experimenting turns out, I may include it in the next release of Tunemark Radio. Give that it will have some affect on battery life, it will definitely be an optional feature that can be toggled on or off.

Tunemark Radio 1.4 now available

The latest update for the Tunemark Radio iPhone app is now available on iTunes.

Tunemark Radio is a free iPhone radio player which provides access to the complete Shoutcast stream (over 30,000 stations!) as well as support for entering a custom pls, m3u, or direct URL for any radio station for which you may have a link.

It also includes support for “tunemarking” the current playing song. This allows you to save the song artist and title to list for future reference, email it to a friend, or search for it on iTunes for purchase.

This newest version has a slightly improved design for the user interface, including added support for customizing the background wallpaper image which is displayed while listening to the music. You are also able to select an image from your photo library and use that as the background wallpaper.

More enhancements are in the works, so please stay tuned for future updates.