I'm taking a course called "Documenting and Developing Technology," and in this course, we're supposed to independently create wacky stuff with computers and then document using a video presentation on youtube. I've developed a gimmick that involves a small ASCII man that narrates the project instead of a human. He looks like this:
___ ___
. | .
\
.-_)
.______,
Maurice ^
I'd like him to move his mouth for the narration, but doing this by hand is extremely taxing and imprecise. I've seen plenty of videos of people turning different data formats into ASCII animations, but none of them go in-depth enough to explain how to do something like this, or how to get started. So I'm asking friendly strangers on the internet if they can point me in the right direction.
How should I go about making Maurice talk?
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I am a total beginner with Xcode and Objective C, but I have some experience with OOP in C++. I bought this book. I read about how to make a simple app, and skimmed the rest of the book. What I want to do is make an iPhone app people can use to look up math equations such as the quadratic eqauation, pythagorean identity, etc. I plan to include a lot of stuff, and do a lot of things better than other apps I have seen. However, before I pay Apple $99 to be a full fledged iOS developer, I want to know that it isn't too hard to make the Greek letters and Math notation that we see in math books. So for example, what code is needed to make an iPhone app that display . Of course I want to use features that I understand are included in Xcode for doing this sort of thing, rather than, make a graphic with another program that my app would use when needed. Besides that specific example, where is the Apple documentation for making other math symbols and notation that my iPhone app will display? If this is the wrong place to ask, it would be great if you could tell me of a beter place to post my question.
It's going to require a lot of writing to get good layouts using the system frameworks. All the building blocks are there, but your program would need significant rendering customization to get the layouts you expect. In detail, the characters you need are there, but you will need to write a bunch of supporting code in order to resize, position, and layout these characters correctly.
You may want to look for a suitably licensed library you can use which specializes in this purpose. Perhaps a LaTeX renderer would offer some good leads.
Use core animiation layers to construct the elements of a parsed equation. Use Quartz to draw lines, symbols, for rendering visual elments of the operation with the equation. Also use Core Plot. And then eventually output to Latex once parsed into hierarchical data structure. Also check out Graham Cox's GCMathParser.
Similar question: Drawing formulas with Quartz 2d
I need to develop a performance evaluator for piano playing. Based on a midi generated from sheet music, I need to evaluate the midi of the actual playing (midi keyboard). I'm planning to evaluate the playing based on note pitch, duration and loudness. The evaluation is I suppose a comparison of the notes of the sheet music and playing in midi.
But I have no idea how I can visualise (i.e. show where the person have gone wrong) this evaluation process. i.e. maybe show both the notation and highlight which note has gone wrong.
But how can I show any of this in some graphical form? Or more precisely on a stave (a music score) itself. I have note details (pitch, duration) and score details (key and time signature) stored in a table, and I'm using Java. But I have no clue as in how I can put all this into graphical form.
Any insight is most gratefully appreciated. Advance thanks
What you're talking about, really, is a graphical diff tool for musical notation. I think the easiest way to show differences is with an overlay of played notes (and rests) over "correct" score symbols. Where it gets tricky is in showing volume differences, whether notes are played (or should be played) staccato, marcato, tenuto, etc. For example, a note with a dot over it is meant to be played staccato, but your MIDI representation of a quarter note might be interpreted as an eight note followed by an eight rest, etc.
You'll also have to quantize the results of the live play, which means you will have to allow some leeway for the human being to be slightly before or after the beat without notating differently. If you don't do this, the only "correct" interpretation of the notes will be very mechanical (and not pleasing to the ear).
As for drawing the notation and placing it on the correct lines or spaces on the staves, that is not hard if you understand how to draw graphics. There are musical fonts available that permit you to use alphanumeric characters to represent note bodies, stems, rests, etc. you will also have to understand key signatures, accidentals, when certain notes are enharmonic, etc.
This is not a small undertaking you are proposing, and there is already a lot of software out there that does a lot of what you are trying to do. Maybe some exists that does exactly what you want to do, so do research it before you start coding. :) Look at various work that has already been done and see if there is anything you can use or which would put you off your project.
I made my own keyboard player/recorder for QuickTime's MIDI implementation a few years ago and had to solve a number of the problems you face. I did it for fun, and it was fun (and educational for me), but it could never compete with commercial software in the genre. And although people did enjoy it, I really did not have time to maintain it and add the features people wanted, so eventually I had to abandon it. This kind of thing is really a lot of work.
Consider a single button.
At one extreme, we have a black OpenGL window, with:
outline (in white) of a rectangle
bitmap remdered font inside of it, saying "Ok"
At the other extreme, we have Mac OS X, a button that is:
well rounded
has some gradient showing light effects on it
nice antialiased "OK"
soft shadow of some sort
These two UIs present very very different user experiences. The former says "This is from the 80s" the latter says "this is professional".
This is something I do not understand well as a programmer (and don't know where to learn about this).
Does anyone know of a good technical resource for this? [I'd prefer things that draws upon psychology / perception literature to say why to do something rather than design books that just says "use color XYZ with a gradient of blah"]
Here is something on it. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/indefenseofeyecandy
You can check this link out to answer the part of your query in the comment. It has lots of references to samples and some helpful links too. http://www.usernomics.com/user-interface-design.html
The perception and psychology part of designing the UI does not come as any rule or steps, as we all know. It gets developed over time. Making your application user friendly and pleasing, that part of the magic or deal gets added from experience\survey and also you can include layman testing. I do it many times.
Also thinking out of the box. You will get a solution when solve it within the box. But you will get a better solution when you think out of it.
Another useful thing is be a good learner and observer. Note something nice and useful when you visit sites or use other applications. You might not even notice it. It might be something very small or trivial but it makes a lot of difference when it's used in the right places.
You will want to read up on Human User Interface guidelines HIG and Usability:
Apple's Human Interface Guidelines
Windows User Experience Guidelines
Platform agnostic guidelines
Amazon has plenty of books on the HIG subject, but I'd also recommend books based on usability. Steve Krug's "Don't make me think" is a great book (mainly tailored for web usability)
etc.
A classic: The Design of Everyday Things
Pretty quick read, discussed some of the psychology behind using and understanding human interfaces. It's a bit dated and doesn't directly focus on programming GUIs but I would start here.
I'd start with Vitruvius' firmness, commodity, and delight.
Also Gibson's affordances. Also, many HCI researchers have applied activity theory, with mixed results. Norman's DOET is a good start, but I think it covers only the first 2 of Vitruvius' triad - you're asking about the delight. Might also look at McCloud's Understanding Comics.
The Opera web standards curriculum has a very good section on aesthetic aspects, especially regarding color usage. I think it's very useful reading not only for web development, but all application design.
Chapter 8: Color Theory
Chapter 9: Building up a site wireframe
There is also a color scheme designer website, which allows you to play around with some of the color theory aspects. Definitely worth a visit.
Is it possible to write a program that can extract a melody/beat/rhythm provided by a specific instument in a wave (or other music format) file made up of multiple instruments?
Which algorithms could be used for this and what programming language would be best suited to it?
This is a fascinating area. The basic mathematical tool here is the Fourier Transform. To get an idea of how it works, and how challenging it can be, take a look at the analysis of the opening chord to A Hard Day's Night.
An instrument produces a sound signature, just the same way our voices do. There are algorithms out there that can pick a single voice out of a crowd and identify that voice from its signature in a database which is used in forensics. In the exact same way, the sound signature of a single instrument can be picked out of a soundscape (such as your mixed wave) and be used to pick out a beat, or make a copy of that instrument on its own track.
Obviously if you're thinking about making copies of tracks, i.e. to break down the mixed wave into a single track per instrument you're going to be looking at a lot of work. My understanding is that because of the frequency overlaps of instruments, this isn't going to be straightforward by any means... not impossible though as you've already been told.
There's quite an interesting blog post by Comparisonics about sound matching technologies which might be useful as a start for your quest for information: http://www.comparisonics.com/SearchingForSounds.html
To extract the beat or rhythm, you might not need perfect isolation of the instrument you're targeting. A general solution may be hard, but if you're trying to solve it for a particular piece, it may be possible. Try implementing a band-pass filter and see if you can tune it to selects th instrument you're after.
Also, I just found this Mac product called PhotoSounder. They have a blog showing different ways it can be used, including isolating an individual instrument (with manual intervention).
Look into Karaoke machine algorithms. If they can remove voice from a song, I'm sure the same principles can be applied to extract a single instrument.
Most instruments make sound within certain frequency ranges.
If you write a tunable bandpass filter - a filter that only lets a certain frequency range through - it'll be about as close as you're likely to get. It will not be anywhere near perfect; you're asking for black magic. The only way to perfectly extract a single instrument from a track is to have an audio sample of the track without that instrument, and do a difference of the two waveforms.
C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Perl should all be able to do all of this with the right libraries. Which one is "best" depends on what you already know.
It's possible in principle, but very difficult - an open area of research, even. You may be interested in the project paper for Dancing Monkeys, a step generation program for StepMania. It does some fairly sophisticated beat detection and music analysis, which is detailed in the paper (linked near the bottom of that page).
I remember the days of Shadowrun that got me excited about hacking. There is CodeWar and LightBot which are both fun (though CoreWar is a little dated). What other games are there involving coding that are fun and challenging that can be used to get someone excited about coding or flex their chops or even learn the basics?
How about RoboCode
You code your tank in Java and let it loose in the 'ring' with other coded tanks. People got pretty into coding strategy, targeting, etc. IBM sponsored it and came up with some nice introductory programming tutorials to get you started.
Here's a great article to get the feel for it:
Rock 'em, sock 'em Robocode!
(source: sourceforge.net)
Uplink isn't so much a coding game, but it is a great game that makes you feel like a hacker.
There's a whole bunch of "drag-and-drop" coding games, where you make a little thing (usually a robot) solve some puzzle by giving it a list of instructions. They're only vaguely similar to actual coding, but they are still pretty fun.
RoboZZle
The Codex of Alchemical Engineering
light-Bot
Not sure if it's considered a "game", but the TopCoder Competitions are fun, and come in various sizes and commitment levels. You can also work on puzzles from the archives for some good programming practice.
The Python Challenge is like those "look at the html source" riddles, but requires a bit of programming to get the answers.
When I was a kid I played "Rocky's Boots", where you had to hook up logic gates to solve puzzles. That had a big impact on my thinking.
Core Wars.
Here's something that allows you to make games and animations: Alice
If you're looking for a board game, you might want to have a look at Robo Rally. In this game 2-8 people are trying to maneuver their robots over the board as quickly as possible, dodging deadly obstacles and trying to shove other people robots into obstacles on the way.
Each game round all players have to "code" the program the robot is going to execute in the next round and then the robots just follow their program. The programs are just five instructions long, but still creating an optimal program can be quite tricky. There usually is very little luck involved, which is why I really like this game.
Similar to Uplink is HackWars. Instead of point and click hacking though, it's multiplayer and you can write your own attack scripts. There's actually an included runtime for writing 2d/3d games and there's a bunch of different places to hook in scripts (for defense, banking, in game website, etc).
Scripting language looks similar to Java.
How about Ai-Board
You play it on your phone/tablet.
It's IDE is built into the game.
It has a built-in node-based visual programming language, whose code-behind is a python-like language.
You write the code, that drives the Ai, that moves the pawns, that plays the game, all still on your mobile device.
YouTube Video: Visual Programming Time-lapse on a mobile device
It comes with quite a few tutorials that introduce the player to programming, genetic algorithms etc, and you get a step-by-step walk-through of all these methods.
It also comes with ready-made scripts that work right out of the box, and are ready for you to copy into your free 'Dev' & 'Test' envs,...
...so that you can tweak them to your heart's content, knowing that you can always revert to the original at any time.
The in-built machine learning engine allows you to
train your AiBot to play the board-game,
play your AiBot against their in-built Ai
play against your own AiBot
breed your AiBot (Genetic Algorithm)
fine-tune your AiBot (Back-Propagation)
...debug your AiBot, and so on.
YouTube Video: Machine Learning is mobile!
Its currently in BETA testing, but soon to be released, and everything described comes for free.
In addition, there are single and multi-player modes as well, but it is primarily a game about coding, coming complete "...with batteries included!"
Project Euler