Re: Everyday Looper - A Looper for the iPhone/iPod Touch

[Mech <mech@m3ch.net>]

At 12:25 AM +0100 1/30/10, Raphaël - Mancing Dolecules wrote:
>
>Don't hesitate to tell me what you think about it, or ask me questions
>if things are unclear. On this mailing list will be fine as I read it
>regularly :).

Raphael,

Thanks for coding this, and an even greater 
thanks for giving us the chance to quiz you on it 
here.

I'm very interested, but I do have one question. 
In the past, I've purchased some of your 
competitor's products  and found them to be 
completely unusable for serious work due to 
timing discrepancies (Loopy, for example).

It appears that using the touch interface to 
trigger looping often does NOT result in the sort 
of critical timing that is necessary for 
recording useable loops.  You tap the screen to 
begin recording, and in some cases it's right on. 
In others, there can be as much as a half-second 
lag before it starts.  And in a few other 
instances, it ignores the touch altogether.

IMNSHO, this is not 100% due to the app.  It 
seems endemic to the iPhone architecture itself 
and probably stems from the multi-threading 
architecture (or, more accurately, the lack of 
it), the pitiful amount of available RAM on the 
iPhone (64mb for all applications?!?) and quite 
possibly even the performance of the CPU.  I've 
had the same sort of lag suddenly attack the 
keyboard as I've been typing an email, for 
instance.  It's just that email is not a 
time-critical application.

What's more, the lag is inconsistent, so it's 
impossible to compensate for with technique.

I would imagine that there should be a way to 
somewhat mitigate this in the application.  But 
since I'm sure a lot of it stems from the iPhone 
system, I'm curious what you've done to solve 
this issue in Everyday Looper.

I'm not trying to be confrontational here, 'cause 
I'd love to see one of these looping widgets 
actually work.  It's just that I think there's 
some limitation with the hardware platform that 
makes this difficult at best (maybe later when 
the iPad comes out, there'll be enough horsepower 
to make it work).  But if you've found a way 
around the issue, I'm definitely all ears.  :)

Thanks again!!!

        --m.
--
_____
"we're no longer sure where home is; homesickness is our only guide"