The MorphWiz is not cool

An article, posted more than 12 years ago filed in ipad, app, music, virtual, touch, physical, instruments, technoligists, solutions, mimic, real, string, dream theater & midi.

Recently someone showed me a movie of the MorphWiz, a to be released app by Dream Theater1 musician Jordan Rudess. First impression: cool. Second impression, nice. Third impression…

I browsed some of the other movies displayed in the context of that movie and found another video by the same Jordan Rudess playing the Harpejji. And suddenly the app turns out to be a boring replica of the original:

Technologists are often biased towards technological solutions. Of course the cool thing about the instrument being an app is that you can use the device for something else as well (“you know that the iPad is also a mobile recording studio!”)… but I'm sceptical towards the idea that a two dimensional touch screen with some motion controllers can ever replace a real multi string instrument.

When playin…

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It's digital stupid

Notes by Luke Wroblewski on the Martin Belam (Guardian) talk at EuroIA:

> Up front, the team did not get their API model right. They tried to use ISBNs for books and did not heed advice that ISBNs are “evil”.

Sounds quite familiar :)

> They (ISBN numbers, ed.) are a physical system not a digital system. They don’t identify a unique work but a specific edition. They don’t cover anthologies, they are added to CDs, calendars and even card displays.

Lately I've been wanting to slam my head quite a couple times for a similar reason: not choosing the right identifier. While much of the data I work with lately has multiple codes/numbers that look like unique identifiers usable in the digital environment I am building. None of them, however, fitted my desired digital world view. While I could have adopted the real world view underlying the existing identifiers, that view did not fit the …

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