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Orphion and cantor

IanIan
edited June 2013 in General App Discussion

Apparently it's not just cantor getting pulled permanently

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/06/hands-off-apple-wants-to-pull-orphion-music-app-over-touch-apis/#comment-936053401

This is the pits. Back yours up somewhere

Comments

  • That's a shame. That's cool that they mentioned a link to back it up (provided by @Michael)...

    http://atastypixel.com/blog/want-to-be-able-to-downgrade-your-apps-save-em-before-updating/

  • Both devs knew that area sensing was a ticking time bomb. Cantor is dead, as Rob is no longer supporting it, but I would suggest to Bastus Trump that it's worth looking into velocity sensing as a viable alternative. Other devs have made it work well, look at the two iFretless apps, for example.

  • I'm surprised it even got through to the App Store in the first place. Apple doesn't check for private APIs?

  • edited June 2013

    A cynic might take the view that if Apple pass an app, then pull it later, people buy it and Apple get their 30%, plus people may then have to buy an alternative app at a later date. If they reject it to start with, they make nothing.

    Lucky I'm not a cynic...

  • And lucky for us that companies wouldn't operate that way ;-)

  • Just lucky for them.

  • So how do we let Apple know musicians want this private API made public? Any of you devs got an Apple email address for someone with pull who'll know what we're talking about?

  • edited June 2013

    Speaking of devs, Cantor is open source and the guy who made it has offered to let anyone who wants to take it and run with it... All it needs is: take out the private API and resubmit to Apple, right?

    Sounds simple to a non-dev :-b

  • I suspect the API in question is what makes Cantor so cool.

  • Well, not for me @TedBPhx.

    The API is about the radius or size of each touch, which only adds a bit of expressiveness to Cantor.

    Orphion however depends on it a lot according to the dev.

  • edited June 2013

    Anyone can post a feature request to http://bugreport.apple.com to request touch event finger-area control be added. Be positive, and clearly state how useful it would be to have apps that can make use of it, for musical expression purposes (and for graphic arts purposes as well). You can give examples of the apps that had it, but don't scold them about their recent rejection. Try to be nice, perhaps then we'll get results.

  • Thank you.

  • Oops.

    "You must be a Registered Apple Developer to file bugs via Bug Reporter."

  • Hmm, that's too bad. I was hoping anyone with an Apple ID could report something there, since they had a separate link for developers.

  • Is there manual for cantor?

  • Thank you. Signed. Mentioned Cantor in my comment.

  • Also left a polite request at

    http://apple.com/feedback/

  • There's some talk that this is somehow related to iOS 7. It's possible, given the timing. Will be interesting to see if they make this private API unusable in iOS 7, and/or offer an alternative.

    I believe the reason an API like this is (and should be) private is that it can lead to apps that are only truly usable by people with the same finger size as the developer. E.g. I'd love to use this API for guitarism, such that fret muting is triggered not by releasing a chord but by loosening your grip on it (just like a real guitar!). But using finger area to determine "grip strength" might treat kids' smaller fingers as always being "loose grip" and XXL-sized peoples' larger fingers as always being "tight grip", so these people wouldn't be able to use fret muting properly.

    It turns out that Cantor uses this API in a good way which avoids this issue. But that's because Rob Fielding is a smart guy. Many other developers won't be. Apple can't afford a PR fiasco along the lines of "iPhones and iPads discriminate against fat people".

  • I think sensing a percentage change, rather than an absolute area, would work for stuff like that, but even Cantor's method had problems. I experienced volume increases the more fingers I had on the playing surface, as if the areas were getting summed in some way.

  • @PaulB That sounds right, it'd have to be used in a relative / percentage sense rather than absolute values. I think if Apple were to support this kind of functionality they'd need to offer an API that somehow abstracts this away, effectively forcing all developers to use it as a percentage, so the dev can't get it wrong. Perhaps when a touch starts it's marked as "100%" and then the percentage goes up and down as the touch area increases / decreases.

    FYI Rob said that his Cantor implementation was more of a test to see if Apple would approve it, he had a much more usable version in Geo which he removed before releasing it due to the Apple restriction.

  • You can now update Orphion safely without losing the articulation. Update to the latest version, swipe to the last of the help pages and then double tap on the version number to restore the previous articulation features!

    I assume that Bastus Trump found a loophole in the rules rather than defying the might of Apple.

  • edited August 2013

    I've managed to update a couple hundred apps since Orphion got changed, and all the time avoiding the 'Update All' button. If I do update it now, I'm gonna kinda miss it being there.

  • This is a test post...I keep getting moderated.

  • Did Orphion just get pulled out of the store by Apple?

    Real shame and bad luck if so. :(

  • Still there for me..

  • Yeah it's back...definitely went missing from my list of updates and was then invisible with a store search.

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