May 9th, 2008
From our press release:
“TapeDeck is a new audio recorder exclusively for Mac OS X 10.5, designed with a quick-capture workflow in mind. You’re never more than a single mouse click (or keystroke) away from making a new recording, which are called, unsurprisingly, “tapes.” TapeDeck records directly to compressed MP4-AAC audio, making it equally useful for quick high-fidelity samples or hours and hours of lecture.”
I worked on TapeDeck for the past 6 months with Daniel Sandler, a friend I once worked with at Be, Inc back in ‘99/’00 (well, our tenures overlapped—I was an intern on the networking team and he was a full-time UX designer/coder. We’ve kept in touch ever since, and Dan’s even provided a lot of feedback for FuzzMeasure over the years.
Late last year we agreed this application needed to be written—a very simple, useful audio recorder that leverages Core Animation for the Zing! and Pop! you expect from Leopard apps today.
I am very proud of the things I was able to pull off in this application, and plan to write some blog posts about the long (well, it felt long) road to TapeDeck 1.0. After this endeavor I have learned an incredible amount about Core Animation, Core Audio, and became very intimate with the internal details of M4A files.
So, check out TapeDeck and let us know what you think! I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed writing it!
February 25th, 2008
If you enjoy living on the edge, and keeping up with the very latest FuzzMeasure developments, you should check out the FuzzMeasure Latest Builds page. There you’ll find the very latest published build of FuzzMeasure that’s not yet ready for public consumption.
Sometimes I fix very nasty bugs that block certain users from getting work done. In order to get these folks up & running as quickly as possible, I need somewhere to put my latest builds that weren’t ready to be released yet.
Because these releases will eventually become final, and more than one user is affected by these fixes, the obvious solution is a public page I can point the affected users at. However, I would also like to get a head start of having some other (brave!) people use and test these builds before I increase distribution further.
If you are one of these brave people, and would like to live life on the bleeding edge, you can set FuzzMeasure up so that it checks for the latest unreleased build automatically on launch. The instructions to do this are at the bottom of the FuzzMeasure Latest Builds page.
February 19th, 2008
One very common question I get asked by new users is to demonstrate how hardware should be set up for measurements. In the past, a severe lack of time meant that gathering and presenting this information was nearly impossible.
After an entire day of effort (cleaning off my desk to take pictures, taking and cleaning up the pictures, coding up the HTML, etc) I finally have the Getting Started with FuzzMeasure Pro guide online.
I only have a single main section in that document, covering the basic setup of audio hardware for new users. I touch on a few topics like loopback connections, which are required for device correction.
I plan on extending the document further over time, and incorporating the content into the manual one day. In the meantime, I find this method of presentation very simple to maintain and accessible for new users that may not have downloaded the software yet, so putting it in the manual isn’t a high priority at the moment. (Believe it or not, I get a lot of requests from users to send them the manual because they’re on Windows or earlier releases of Mac OS X).
If you have any requests for topics to be covered in the document, please send me an email and I will do my best to get that content added.
February 15th, 2008
I’m working at home on FuzzMeasure for only a week, and now I have FuzzMeasure 3.0.1 ready to go out the door. Coincidence? Hardly.
I fixed some pretty nasty issues (broken AIFF exporting of impulses and stimulus signals), along with some harmless-but-irritating ones (like the look of the graph markers).
Having all this extra time means I could package up a subset of the work I’ve been doing into a maintenance release. In the part-time era of SMUG, the work would get piled into a giant bucket that would eventually become FuzzMeasure 3.1 (or, 4.0 if we want to look at how I’ve done things most recently).
Enjoy the update, and keep filing bugs as you find them!
