I ventured out last night to check out a HEARding Cats Collective event at Washington University in St. Louis’ Tietjan’s Hall. Rich O’Donnell, Mike Murphy, and Kevin Harris improvised on DIY & euro-rack synthesizers solo and ensemble. You can see in the photo above, the performers spread out in the…

I love the new content direction of the App Store. When I first started building apps, I would check the App Store every Thursday. That’s when the featured apps would be updated and I could see what Apple thought was cool and innovative. These days I only open the App…

When we drop money into tip jars and wishing wells they have long lasting visual effects. Rather than an ephemeral flash of a transaction, a collection slowly builds. In this visualization, a Lumens address is entered and then that wallet is watched. As new payments (or tips) arrive, they appear scaled to their amount. The payments gravitate and orbit indefinitely. Unless the owner decides to restart or enter a new address, which would virtually empty the tip jar.

Spotlight Solos is a new music education project I was stoked to work on. The goal was to create an interactive platform to teach guitar solos and improvisation. Check out a demo here: We built a handful of prototypes before settling on this launch version. Our first iteration was based on web audio players and static html. Later versions included Tone.js to power the seamless audio loops and Jekyll for content management.

I saw Dynamicland in the latest Eyeo Festival announcement and I can’t stop thinking about it. Founded by Bret Victor, Dynamicland is a non-profit long-term research group in the spirit of Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC. They’re inventing a new computational medium where people work together with real objects in the real world, not alone with virtual objects on screens. They’re building a community workspace in the heart of Oakland, CA– the entire building is the computer.

Daniel Shiffman has his Nature of Code course up on Kadenze. Actually, it’s been up there for a little while, but I’ve just recently enrolled. It’s not an intro to programming course. It’s a jump in and make creative things with javascript and p5.js course. And it’s awesome. It reminds me why I create digital things in the first place: For exploration, for creativity, and for delight.

Greg Wells in conversation with John Baccigalupp: I want artists to feel like they’re at a three-star Michelin restaurant when they’re here. I can’t always pull it off, but I want them to feel the same way as if you take a date, or your partner, to a nice restaurant…

It feels like joining two audio files in iOS should be one or two lines of code. It isn’t. My latest attempt uses AVMutableCompositions to join the audio segments and AVAssetExportSession to export it. I wrote a little extension to make it a little cleaner The basic implementation looks like this: let composition = AVMutableComposition() let compositionAudioTrack = composition.addMutableTrack(withMediaType: AVMediaTypeAudio, preferredTrackID: kCMPersistentTrackID_Invalid) compositionAudioTrack.append(url: audioUrl1) compositionAudioTrack.append(url: audioUrl2) if let assetExport = AVAssetExportSession(asset: composition, presetName: AVAssetExportPresetPassthrough) { assetExport.outputFileType = AVFileTypeWAVE assetExport.outputURL = recordingUrl assetExport.exportAsynchronously(completionHandler: {}) }

I made this small experiment to visualize transactions on the Stellar network. It is, maybe, more like art, less like a utility. Just some small circles fading away as lumens trade hands. Big circles for big amounts, small circles for small amounts. I think we have many ways to…