my first iPhone app

Last week, my first iPhone app was finally accepted by Apple and is now available in the App Store.  At first, I was a bit surprised at the number of hoops I had to jump through just to make my app available: lots of certificates, code signing, Developer Program joining, bundle identifying, not to mention Apple's notorious review process.  Now that I look at the sheer number of throwaway apps available, though, I think there should be some more hoops, or at least different ones.  For example, does iLike really need to produce an app for every single music artist in existence?

My app has now been up for a week or so, and another surprise has been the geographic distribution of downloads.  Most of my downloads are from outside the US, even though I made no special effort at internationalization.  I'm not even sure how people are finding it, as so far I've only told my friends about it and it's certainly not at the top of the App Store charts.

Oh yeah, I suppose I should describe the app itself.  It grew out of a simple demo I created for our music seminar here at UW.  Our theme that quarter was the theremin, which allows for continuous control over pitch but is extremely difficult to play.  The problem with continuous control over pitch is that usually (in Western music), you just want to play the 12 standard notes, and mostly just the 7 notes from one key.  My app lets you trade off between these two extremes.  You play by touching the screen, with pitch on the x-axis and hardness of quantization on the y-axis.  Touch near the top of the screen, and the pitch is quantized to the nearest note from a particular scale.  Touch near the bottom, and the pitch is unaltered.  Touch near the middle, and the pitch is "soft-quantized", or nudged gently toward the nearest scale note.

Anyway, my app is pretty fun.  You should download it.  And if you tell me how to make it better, I might actually do it, especially if you have suggestions for making it a "real" instrument, that someone might use in a performance.

Interestingly, there is another instrument that allows for both continuous and discrete control over pitch: the ondes Martenot.  Good luck porting that to the iPhone.