intermorphic.com Blog

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Mixtikl:
♥ Improved: Updated Menu approach to make it MUCH easier to do the core things you want to do with Mixtikl, such as create a new mix, save a mix, import and export a mix, and share and copy files between Mixtikl desktop and Mixtikl for iPhone/iPod touch etc. It should let you get into Mixtikl much more easily. More to come, too….
♥ Improved: Partikl main screen to make it cleaner and clearer
★ Fixed: File sharing on Vista/Windows 7 (both 32-bit and 64-bit)
★ Created 64-bit versions to complement the previous 32-bit versions, as noted below:

Standalone: Mac: 64-bit/32-bit Intel, MacOS 10.5 or later
Standalone: Windows: 64-bit/32-bit version installed appropriate to your operating system ( Vista 64-bit/Windows 7 64-bit; XP/Vista 32-bit/Windows7 32-bit)
Audio Unit: Mac: 32-bit Intel, MacOS 10.5 or later
VSTi: Mac: 32-bit Intel, MacOS 10.5 or later
VSTi: Windows: 64-bit/32-bit version installed appropriate to your operating system (Vista 64-bit/Windows 7 64-bit; XP/Vista 32-bit/Windows7 32-bit)

Noatikl:
★ Created 64-bit versions to complement the previous 32-bit versions, as noted below:

Standalone: Mac: 64-bit/32-bit Intel/PPC, MacOS 10.5 or later
Standalone: Windows: 64-bit/32-bit version installed appropriate to your operating system ( Vista 64-bit/Windows 7 64-bit; XP/Vista 32-bit/Windows7 32-bit)
Audio Unit: Mac: 32-bit Intel/PPC, MacOS 10.5 or later
VSTi: Mac: 32-bit Intel/PPC, MacOS 10.5 or later
VSTi: Windows: 64-bit/32-bit version installed appropriate to your operating system (Vista 64-bit/Windows 7 64-bit; XP/Vista 32-bit/Windows7 32-bit)

Liptikl:
★ Created 64-bit versions to complement the previous 32-bit versions, as noted below:

Standalone: Mac: 64-bit/32-bit Intel/PPC, MacOS 10.5 or later
Standalone: Windows: 64-bit/32-bit version installed appropriate to your operating system ( Vista 64-bit/Windows 7 64-bit; XP/Vista 32-bit/Windows7 32-bit)

UPDATED (links were wrong before, sorry!)

Now that we have gone for a cleaner, clearer and more consistent visual approach on our product user guides and information, we will be updating and improving them from this new baseline.

Noatikl 1.5 User Guide [PDF version]
Liptikl 1 User Guide [PDF version]
Mixtikl 2 User Guide [PDF version]
Partikl 2 User Guide [PDF version]
Mixtikl Tiklpak & Pak Makers Guide [PDF version]

In case you’re interested, in addition to adding Lua-based scripting to noatikl, I’ve been using the same scripting engine in prototyping optikl, the generative visual art program we hope to release some time.

To help optikl and our other products go wherever we want, including maybe to mobile, I’ve written a common graphics library adaptor layer that sits on top of SDL, Juce and what have you. So this will let us, in future, write our apps once and simply recompiling them for whatever the target platform might be, without the need for any major rewrites.

Pete

For those of you who are keeping up with developments at intermorphic Towers, we sure had a lot of fun getting our new web store live – believe it or not, we finally got it running late on Christmas Eve. It was nice to be able to enjoy Christmas with that out of the way…!

Since then, we’ve been working hard to continue to improve and extend noatikl.

We’ve been trying to keep updates for noatikl coming every couple of weeks, and keep on adding new and interesting stuff. The next update will feature support for build-in trigger scripts and MIDI control of noatikl, which is very exciting as it takes noatikl into the realms of being a customisable hyperinstrument!

It has also been great to be able to work again with Tim Didymus, who authored two new Generative Drum template packs for noatikl. These are tremendous fun to use, and are proving a big hit.

We’ve also been working on behind-the-scenes ideas for optikl and liptikl (some of which have fed-in to noatikl, including the scripting engine).

It is lovely to find that past users of our previous software creations (such as Koan Pro and miniMIXA) keep on discovering the intermorphic site, and start playing with our new software. Welcome back to you all!

Looking forward to another innovative and exciting year,

Pete

We are making excellent progress with noatikl and liptikl, as can be seen from the way the information on the website is taking shape. However, we are not going to make our self-imposed launch date of 30th Nov due to a couple of last minute things we need to iron out.

That said, we are working to sort them out as fast as we can and our best estimates are that we will launch early next week. Thanks to everyone for their support and patience!

Pete and Tim

We’ve been very busy recently creating a whole new range of tools for intermorphic.

The biggest buzz is having a completely clean slate to dream-up a new set of tools that we’d really like to use ourselves!

The first one, liptikl, came out of a conversation I had with Tim, where he’d been complaining how difficult he finds to write lyrics for his songs. I said “Tim, you do realise that we could create a generative tool to help you do that?”. After a furious round of prototyping and experimenation, we knew we were on to something!

The second one, noatikl, is a totally obvious one for us to do; a new generative music system for a world where the Koan Music Engine (created by Tim and me) is no longer available. With noatikl, we’ve started again from a completely clean slate, focused on creating a range of generative music tools in plug-in form that can be used the desktop tool sequencers that everybody in music uses these days. Generative music is here to stay!

The third one, optikl, is something we’ve been aching to do for a very long time now, which is a very interesting (and entertaining!) light synthesizer…

One thing that is making this a whole lot easier than back in the days of SSEYO, is that we’re writing all the user interfaces using the wonderful Juce application development framework. This lets us write an application GUI once, and then have them run on any supported platform simply by recompiling! Yes, all our new tools now run on a range of platforms including Windows XP/Vista and Mac OS X. And even Linux if we want!

Not only does Juce let us write cross-platform applications with a beautiful look-and-feel, but it lets us write them five times faster than any other toolkit we’ve used for either Mac or Windows. Not only that, but it lets us write cross-platform audio plug-ins using the same framework. And more: all of the user interface components that we create (like sliders and what have you) can be re-used across our entire tool range!

It is really liberating to have this opportunity to create a vibrant, exciting range of tools, using novel generative technology, in a cross-platform way with a totally up-to-date look and feel. Marvellous!

We hope you like the new look site! We have tried to make it clean and easy to maintain.

At the heart of it are the new intermorphic company and product logos, which people seem to like. They are (we hope) unique and easily recogniseable.

As far as the im product logos go, we needed to come up with a concept and imagery that could have a common feel across the range of products we want to do, and also scale up as well as scale down to icons. Having tried many approaches and hit the usual buffers, I now have renewed respect for all those icon designers out there. How important can one eensy-weensy little pixel be? Quite a lot as it happens when it comes to icon design!

The noatikl, liptikl and optikl designs also lend themselves perfectly to being animated, as they are like little free-swimming fish or even mini-jumbo airplanes (you can see that by imagining the trailing connector circle as a tail fin). When it comes to animations, I hope we are going to be able to look at things like spinning the “tikl” feathers around the trailing connector, like little propellers on a shaft. There is so much fun to be had with these little tikls.

What do they “mean”, and where did the product names come from, I hear you ask? Well, the first name we came up with was liptikl. This is the name for the lyric generator. We liked it because we wanted our lyric generator to be able to deliver unusual, obscure, non-obvious, ambiguous and unexpected results (hopefully good results!). We got to thinking on these kind of qualities, and came up with “elliptical” – it just popped into our heads. Aside from the fact that it met the criteria, one of the cool things about it is that it is also great for word smiths, and imagery, as it sounds like “lip tickle”. We liked this, as it is quirky and visual, and we felt that tickling lips was like a way of stimulating words and utterances, teasing new prose into extistance! When I am thinking of something to say, I sometimes purse my lips. The blue circle on the lips represents an object that is going round the ellipse, like a tongue (blue?) licking lips in a circular motion, or a planet circling the sun.

The imagery for noatikl is meant to symbolise the wave of sound, and the fluidity of music. Also, noatikl is primarily a MIDI note generator, so we though “note tikl” was appropriate (and so the “notes” on the “n” in the logo). This concept moved along similar lines to those for liptikl, in that the product would be tickling notes into existance, and hopefully resulting in cool new ideas.

optikl was just obvious, once we had the other two! I like the quirky eyes, which fit well with it being a light synthesiser.

The intermorphic logo is also interesting. As the rationale for intermorphic is to build tools to help generate ideas, the concept of ideas “popping out” literally popped into our minds. So, we have an ideas factory (“inter”), generating ideas that are shown as circles migrating to the “morphic” cloud. The italicised “i” also makes it look like a moving train, which is pumping ideas out of its funnel (ok, like a old steam train!).

Why did we choose to have tail stems for the im products? Yes, we know that when it comes to branding taxonomy that it is normal practise for the common part of a brand (i.e. a stem) to be first, or to prefix other common words (e.g. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel etc.). When it comes to generating new ideas it is often handy to look at things from a different perspective. So, with that in mind, we decided to append our product stem, tikl, instead. This also means that our product brands can stand on their own two feet, independent of the main company brand: im noatikl, im liptikl, im optikl etc.

Anyhow, we should now be all set up, to keep things moving forward.