The Electrotap Shop now accepts Paypal for orders of Sensors, Teabox, Hemispheres, Tap.Tools, etc.

We still will process orders directly as we always have, but the Paypal option is now in place. This has been an often-requested feature for our site, so we’re pleased to usher in the new year with it!

After having quite few troubles with SVN 1.5 on the Mac when using the command line, the following link has proven to be quite useful:

http://www.glenscott.co.uk/2008/12/17/installing-subversion-15-on-mac-os-x/

After almost 8 months of beta, we’ve now released Tap.Tools 3.0 for Max 5.

In addition to supporting Max 5, there a bunch of nice new features and updates. All of the info can be found on the website. We greatly underestimated the amount of effort that was going to be required when set out to make a major upgrade of Tap.Tools, and it’s very gratifying to now see it released.

If you order before December 31, you can enter the discount code 2008ELECTROTAPCHRISTMAS on the checkout page you will receive 5% off of your order. Merry Christmas!

TTBlue 0.5.4 has been released. A lot of significant changes have been taking place in TTBlue over the last few months. This is the version that is being used to build Tap.Tools 3.0.

TTBlue is the DSP library used in the Jamoma Modular Framework, Jamoma Multicore Audio Graph Library, and Tap.Tools. To reflect the integral nature and relationship of TTBlue to the other Jamoma projects, we are now beginning to refer to it as the “Jamoma DSP Library”. A sneak preview of the new icon is shown above.

One of the last bits of work for our now-completed site transition was moving over article content. These are included in the blog section of our site now, but with an “Article” tag.

• Jesse Allison’s Op-Amps Part 1: Scaling sensor data
• Jesse Allison’s Op-Amps Part 2: Voltage Follower
• Tomas Henriques’ MetaEWI (Pictured above)

The old articles written about Jade, Jade Modules (now Jamoma), and Tap.Tools from CreativeSynth.com appear to be no-longer available online. Assuming this to be the case we may try to re-release them here.

Some additional content may also be coming in the future.

I’ve not previously had much of an opinion on optical media drives in computers: tray-loading, slot-loading, is there really a difference? The answer turns out to be yes. Here is why (the following is a transcript of a conversation between myself and my two-and-a-half year old daughter):

“Hi sweetheart.”
“Hi Daddy.”

“How are you?”
“Mmm… Mommy sad.”

“Um. Why is mommy sad?”
“com-put-er broken”

“What do you mean? How did mommy’s computer get broken?”
“I put money in it… Make mommy sad.”

Fortunately the genius at the Apple store had a tool for just this occasion so we could get the coins out and the computer is unharmed. But I’m not such a fan of these slot-loading drives any more!

Mathieu Chamagne, a fellow Jamoma contributor and one of the minds behind maxobjects.com, has posted a video on YouTube showing some recent work with the new Stantum multitouch displays.

As you can see in the video, he is able to manipulate Max patchers for performing. Most impressive to me is how multiple fingers can be controlling different parts of the same object at the same time, such as multislider or waveform~. Truly amazing!

Randy Jones has made his thesis work available online, which includes the actual thesis and also a video showing his multitouch controller.

Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo.

If you are a regular visitor to this site, then you have probably noticed quite a few changes – Electrotap has been re-tooling its web resources. If you are just reading the blog via RSS, then you may not have seen the changes – and it might be worth paying a visit :-).

First off, the web experience is much more integrated. Things are split between two subdomains:

• http://community.electrotap.com is where this blog, the FAQ, and other goodies are hosted
• http://shop.electrotap.com is where our newly overhauled online store is located

Secondly, we’ve updated not only how the site interaction looks and works, but we’ve updated quite a bit of the content:

• The FAQ is updated with more up-to-date and thorough information.
• Our Sensor Pages have been updated and all sensors now have a Spec sheet available as a PDF.
• Tap.Tools 3 has a proper page now, as we are getting very close to the final release of version 3.0. The page makes it look as if it is final — because it should be final in the coming days.

One really nice aspect of the new site is the downloadable orders and registration numbers are delivered instantly.

Finally, we now have the ability to offer discount codes. To celebrate, you can enter the 2008ELECTROTAPCHRISTMAS discount code when checking-out @ http://shop.electrotap.com and you will receive 5% off of your order. This code is good through December 31.

This probably isn’t very interesting for most people, but we have moved electrotap.net to another server with different versions of almost everything. If you notice a problem with blog, faq, etc. please let us know.

Thanks!