Bitnotic’s recently-released chill ($19.99) is a Mac application that automatically generates soothing, chilled-out music that’s perfect for relaxing, meditating or working to.

This kind of “generative music” has been around for a long time, with software such as SSEYO Koan (now superseded by Noatikl) providing a lot of control over the music created, allowing you to tweak over 100 parameters that affect the “composition”.

chill has more modest aims, and is consequently easier to use, with just 10 adjustable parameters:

• Mellow controls the overall “chilled-ness” of the music. High values result in major scales and chords, happier sounds, and cheerier ambient noises (sea, bells, and so on). Low values kick the track into minor keys, accompanied by distinctly un-chilled ambient sounds (such as sirens and something that sounds like a machine gun!).
• Beats sets the music’s beats per minute. Because this is ambient music, the maximum BPM is 80, with the minimum being a very leisurely 30.
• Click Swell to create a crescendo at the start of the next bar, with chords, melodies and ambient sounds played together.
• Pulse shows the activity level – the higher the graph, the more things are happening in the music. It varies automatically over the course of the track, but you can click it to influence the activity level (in some mysterious way).
• Pad determines the volume level of the pad sound that plays the main chords.
• The left Melody slider controls the volume of the two melody instruments, while the right slider adjusts the mix of the two instruments (both their relative volumes and how often they’re played).
• Ambience adjusts the volume of the ambient noises in the track.
• Click Heartbeat to add a heartbeat sound to the start of each bar.
• Click Effects to control whether the music includes fades, echoes and reverb. You can turn this off to create a dry mix for processing later (with Cubase or Logic, for example).

chill gives you lots of options for listening to your creations. You can save the last track to iTunes, AIFF, MIDI format and so on, and create continuous music with the chill Radio option. You can also control the app using your Apple Remote, and send real-time MIDI events to other music apps, allowing you to augment the music with your own sounds and beats.

The music produced by chill isn’t half bad; it sounds generally coherent, with enough variation to keep things interesting. Some of the melody and ambience sounds can be a bit cheesy in certain contexts, and some of the transitions can be somewhat jarring and “computer-like”. However, with a bit of tweaking you can get some quite professional-sounding results.

Even better, the music produced by chill is royalty-free, making it an affordable way to acquire ambient music for playing in public spaces or massage/relaxation clinics. You can download a free trial that doesn’t have the export options and stops playing after 7 minutes – enough to give you a decent taste of the app.

[via Cult of Mac]

FluidTunes is an interesting new free app from Majic Jungle Software. The idea is that you can move between tracks in your iTunes library by waving your hands at the screen. Your waving is picked up by the Mac’s built-in camera, and FluidTunes analyses the image to work out what you want to do.

Unfortunately the reality doesn’t quite live up to the promise. I was envisaging some sort of background app that detected right-to-left swipes across the screen to quickly advance to the next track, and left-to-right swipes to go to the previous track (and possibly top-to-bottom to pause, and so on). This would have been both cool and futuristic, and genuinely useful to boot.

In practice, you have to switch to the app in order to use it (which hardly makes it quick to use), and you then have to look at an image of your hand in the app window, guide your hand to a button, then shake it about a bit to activate the button. By which time you might as well have switched to iTunes and clicked the track skip buttons (or, for that matter, hit a key combo using the excellent SizzlingKeys).

You can also swipe through the list of tracks Cover Flow-style, though it shows each track as a separate image rather than grouping by album, which makes the list massive, and it’s quite hard to locate an individual track. What’s more, if you move from the “next track” button to the “play” button to play the track, you sometimes end up inadvertently swiping through about 50 tracks as you go.

So not much practical use, but a cool tech demo, and a taste of gesture-based interfaces to come. Using the camera to read your gestures is a great idea, especially as practically all Macs now have some sort of built-in camera. It’ll be interesting to see how this idea develops over time. Could this be a viable alternative to multi-touch displays?

Anyway, the app’s free, so download it and see what you think!

Parallels recently released version 4 of Parallels Desktop, their Mac virtualization app that lets you run other operating systems such as Windows and Linux alongside Mac OS X. The new version promises even better integration with the Mac, and up to 50% faster operation.

I’m a relatively happy Parallels 3 user, but I’m not upgrading to 4 – at least, not yet. The Parallels support forums are inundated with upgrade problems, reports of v4 being slow as molasses, horror stories involving Windows BSODs and Windows activation issues, complaints about poor technical support, and lots of irate users demanding their money back. Enough to put me off for now, thank you very much.

This Register article paints a pretty gloomy picture of the whole torrid affair. Of course, you’re going to get problems and complaints on a support forum, but nevertheless it does sound like version 4 has some serious issues.

I had a hunch this would happen sooner or later. Parallels strikes me as a company that has grown at a faster rate than it can handle. They caught the Intel Mac wave at just the right time, trouncing the market leader, VMware, with a solid, fast app that let a whole bunch of new Intel Mac users run Windows on their Macs. Along with Boot Camp, Parallels was probably a big contributor to the success of Apple’s move to Intel.

Now, Parallels may have become a victim of its own success. With over a million Parallels Desktop users (and all the sales and support issues that entails), and growing competition from the likes of VMware and VirtualBox, the company seems to be groaning under the strain. In their rush to catch up with VMware’s Fusion 2.0 release, it sounds like Parallels’ developers may have rushed Desktop 4.0 out the door without proper Q&A or beta testing.

This is all a shame because, at its heart, Parallels Desktop is a very nice product. I’ve used Parallels versions 2 and 3 for years now, and, for those times when I do have to hold my nose and boot Windows(!), it’s perfect. What’s more, it sounds like Parallels Desktop 4 is potentially a big improvement over both version 3 and VMware Fusion 2.1 – if only it worked properly.

I hope Parallels manages to sort out the version 4 issues soon, before their reputation gets too badly tarnished and more disgruntled customers jump ship to VMware Fusion or VirtualBox. Personally I’m holding out for 4.1 before I consider upgrading.

Today is Black Friday. If you live outside the US and have never heard of it, Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving and marks the start of the Christmas shopping season. Many retailers, both physical and online, give generous discounts on Black Friday, and Apple retailers are no exception. Here’s a quick rundown of the Black Friday offers reported by various Apple blogs today:

• MacNN details discounts on various iPods and Macs from Newegg.com and Gainsaver.com.
• Mac Rumors compares MacMall’s discounts on Apple hardware with Amazon’s.
• MacTech has a free 6-month subscription to their magazine for the first 100 lucky punters.
• O’Grady’s PowerPage reports on a 70% – yes, 70%! – discount on Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac.
• BabyGotMac brings news of Black Friday discounts on the Gracion Enclose file-sending app, the Tables spreadsheet app, and the entire DEVONtechnologies software range, including DEVONthink, DEVONagent and DEVONnote. The site also mentions 1Password’s buy one, get one free Thanksgiving offer.
• For all iPhone/Touch gamers, Touch Arcade has a list of App Store games with deep Black Friday discounts – many games are as low as $0.99.
• And don’t forget Apple themselves – Apple Stores around the world are currently offering discounts on a wide range of Apple goodies.

Also, if you do live outside the US, many of these deals still apply (assuming the retailer in question ships internationally).

Finally, BlackFriday.info has details of hundreds of Black Friday sales from all sorts of retailers. Happy shopping! 🙂

The latest revision of the iPhone software – version 2.2 – hit the streets a couple of days ago. But does it hit the spot?

Well, yes and no. Street View is certainly fun:

…and walking/transit directions could be useful if you live in a city (I don’t). Other Maps enhancements aren’t revolutionary, but they’re useful nonetheless. After you drop a pin, tapping the pin reveals the address at that point:

You can also email a URL of a location by tapping the Share Location button on the location’s Info screen. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been playing with Smule’s Ocarina iPhone app for a couple of days, and it’s quite fun. It emulates a real ocarina, an ancient wind instrument with four or more holes for controlling pitch. Instead of holes, you touch four circles on the iPhone’s screen in various combinations, and you blow into the iPhone’s mic to play notes. You can also tilt the phone while playing to add vibrato.

It’s supposed to be easy to learn, though I found it quite tricky to start with (then again I’m rubbish with real wind instruments). After a couple of hours, though, I could play a few scales and Amazing Grace, which was immensely satisfying! There’s a “how to play” section within the app, and a video tutorial online, which helps.

I’ve heard a few concerns about the fact that you have to blow into the iPhone’s mic to play the Ocarina – apparently blowing into a mic might damage it. Not sure if there’s any truth behind this theory – after all, the iPhone’s mic is presumably designed to handle the odd bit of spittle! We’ll see I guess.

Share the love

In keeping with Smule’s other apps, such as Sonic Lighter, you can also view a globe of other Ocarina players around the world, and hear what they’re playing. (It’s not clear whether you’re hearing them in “real time” – I suspect not.) You can also send some “love” to the player if you like their tune by clicking the little heart icon. However I couldn’t find any way to view a list of the most “loved” tunes.

And in conclusion…

Definitely a fun app, but will it end up being used seriously as a real instrument? Time will tell. Meanwhile you can get it on the App Store for a special introductory price of $0.99.

If you suffer from wrist or hand pain when using your mouse then you know how infuriating it can be. My wife uses the excellent Smart Cat touchpad to alleviate her wrist pain, and finds that just 1 minute of using someone else’s mouse is enough to bring the pain back.

It turns out that a lot of the pain when using a mouse is caused by the clicking action. One way round this problem is to use an application that enables so-called “dwell clicking”. The idea here is that the software senses when you haven’t moved your mouse for a short while, and automatically “clicks” on your behalf.

I recently tried one such app, ClickNoMo ($29). Fire it up, and it presents you with a floating palette of option buttons (shown at right).

Menu displays the app menu (which is usually hidden). On/Off toggles the dwell clicking feature. The remaining 4 buttons determine what happens when you stop moving the mouse: Select Click and a “click” action is made; select Dbl. Click and a “double click” is sent, and so on. By default, ClickNoMo reverts back to Click after a double-click, drag, or right-click action.

A nice touch is that the option buttons themselves can be “dwell-clicked”, even if ClickNoMo is currently off. So you never have to click that mouse button again!

The app’s preferences let you change things like the palette transparency, the amount you have to move the mouse to register a new “click”, and the time delays before a click is performed and before dragging ends.

In practice

ClickNoMo is especially welcome when using the stubbornly mouse-intensive Mac OS. You’d have thought that “downgrading” your mouse by not using its buttons would be awkward, but in fact there’s something strangely liberating about not having to click (even if, like myself, you don’t generally suffer from mouse-related pain). You just have to remember not to do things like idly moving the mouse while in the middle of typing!

Some apps, such as Photoshop, don’t lend themselves too well to the dwell clicking concept, but for things like Web browsing and document editing it’s great.

Issues

The downsides? For one thing, it’s a PowerPC app, so it’s a bit sluggish to start up on Intel Macs (which most folks have these days). It could use an update. Secondly, I’d like to see an option to enable some sort of audio feedback so you know when you’ve “clicked”.

The app also seems somewhat pricey for what it does. Still, if you suffer from any sort of mouse-related pain then it can’t hurt (pun not intended) to download the trial and take it for a spin!

[Found via ATMac]

Leopard’s Address Book is easy to use and, at first glance, appears pretty basic. However, scratch the surface and it has all sorts of neat features to improve your productivity. Here are just 5 ways to be more productive with Address Book.

Smart Groups

You probably know that you can organize your contacts into groups by clicking the + button at the bottom of the Group list to create a new group, then dragging contacts into that group.

However, Address Book also lets you create Smart Groups. These work pretty much like Smart Playlists in iTunes. Choose File > New Smart Group, then specify your search criteria in the dialog that appears:

The Smart Group automatically updates its list of contacts whenever you add, remove, or edit contacts in Address Book. Select the Highlight the group when updated checkbox, and whenever a contact is automatically added to or removed from the group, Address Book highlights both group and contact in purple.

(By the way, if you hold down Option while a contact is selected in the contacts list, Address Book highlights the group(s) they’re in – including regular groups as well as Smart Groups – in yellow.)

Smart Groups are great for grouping all the people who work at a certain company, or who live in a certain town, for example. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I get into reviewing this app (or rather, apps), a bit of background is in order. I’m a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, which I have been using on and off over the years with my trusty combo of my iMac with iCal, a Palm Tungsten T2, and Missing Sync to glue everything together. It’s worked well enough, though I find it can get a bit overwhelming once you start having lots of actions and projects.

We don’t need no stinkin’ To Dos

Being a bit of an Apple convert, I’ve obviously been interested in this thing called an iPhone for a while. If you’re a keen follower of this blog, you’ll remember that I was put off buying an iPhone by its inexplicable lack of a To Do list system, which makes it kind of tricky to replace my Palm with an iPhone. (Mind you, it’s hardly the only feature missing from the iPhone.)

So before rushing out to buy an iPhone that would have less functionality than my 4-year-old Palm (ha ha), I started researching third-party To Do apps for the iPhone to see if I could close the gap that way. That’s when I came across Things. Not only is it a To Do app, but it even follows the GTD methodology of projects, contexts, Someday/Maybe actions and areas of focus. What’s more, it’s available for both the Mac and the iPhone, and the two apps sync together over wi-fi.

In fact, the whole setup sounded so impressive that Things ended up being the catalyst that led to me finally buying an iPhone. So was it worth it? Read the rest of this entry »

I do really like my shiny new iPhone – it’s a thing of beauty, both hardware- and software-wise – but waiting for new features from Apple can be a frustrating experience.

The newest iPhone firmware, version 2.2, looks set to hit an iPhone near you soon. Its main new feature appears to be Google Street View incorporated into the Maps application. Now, Street View is pretty cool (and getting cooler all the time), and the transit directions do look genuinely useful (if you live in a city). But I do wonder what goes on inside Apple execs’ heads sometimes. How is Street View a more important feature than:

• Text selection
• Cut/copy/paste
• Flash
  
• To Do lists
• Syncable notes
• MMS

???

At least the update features a revamped Mobile Safari, which hopefully fixes the crashing bugs that plague the current version (I’ve had my iPhone for just over a week, and I swear Safari has quit on me at least 20 times). However I’ve started to get really quite frustrated with no text selection and no clipboard. It makes things like deleting large amounts of text very hard work, and sending multiple links or photos in an email message is next to impossible.

I’m not a big fan of Flash-based websites, but I have come across at least two sites in the last week that I simply can’t view on my iPhone due to no Flash support.

I’ve managed to solve the To Do list problem myself with the excellent Things; however it seems bizarre that Apple doesn’t include To Dos in the iPhone when they’ve even shoehorned them into things like Leopard’s Mail. And what’s the point of a built-in Notes app if it can’t sync its notes with the Mac? Unbelievable.

Oh well – roll on version 2.3…