Roundup of 2008

I’m writing this a month later than I’d planned, but nonetheless, I thought it’d be worthwhile sharing my thoughts on useful and interesting technology from 2008. I don’t think ‘08 was a year of earth-shattering innovation, but rather a time of consolidation and growth in already-established technologies. In this post I’ll give my best picks.

Max 5

For me this was the most significant software release of 2008 — the much anticipated, discussed, hyped and criticised release of ‘Max 5’. If nothing else Max 5 has been controversial amongst the Max/MSP and dataflow programming communities.

This release brought a raft of changes including:

• JSON-based file format
• ‘Presentation’ mode, which separates visual and logical layout
• Re-written GUI based on JUCE
• Patching workflow improvements and shortcuts
• Integrated documentation
• New ‘metrical’ timing system

The impressive thing about the Max 5 upgrade is that Cycling ‘74 have managed to make these changes with minimal impact on existing Max patches and externals, i.e. the majority of users’ patches and externals will work as before, with only very esoteric or gui-based externals requiring a rewrite.

However, you could look at this another way: the changes in Max 5 are largely cosmetic. There is nothing ground-breaking about Max 5, there’s no paradigm shift. Just a large number of usability and user-interface improvements, which should make the software easier to program with. I don’t think Cycling ‘74 will lose or gain large numbers of users as a result of these changes.

However there are two things that stand out as being more important. The first is the JSON file format. This has the advantage of making Max patches a lot easier to convert to other formats (e.g. XML) meaning that they can be read and interpreted by other software. It would be relatively straightforward, for example to write a web app for rendering and even editing Max patches in a web browser.

The other significant change is the choice of JUCE for the UI framework. Using JUCE means that Max/MSP no longer has specific dependance on the OS X or Windows operating systems, and can go wherever JUCE can. The subtext of this is that C’74 could (if they wanted) release a Linux version of Max 5 with relatively little porting work.

To summarise, Max 5 marks a significant improvement in usability and interoperability, but the nature of Max as a programming language hasn’t changed.

Twitter

Twitter is just so simple, yet so useful and versatile. It takes the idea of ‘status updates’ found in Facebook and other social networking sites, limits them to 140 characters, and makes a public feed from them. Updates are displayed on the user’s page and any subscribed users’ pages. Twitter is a big win for the Ruby on Rails framework it’s built with.

2008 has been Twitter’s year, with the site’s monthly unique visits rising from 0.5 million in December 2007 to 4.5 million in December 2008 (source: siteanalytics.compete.com). According to Twitdir the total number of Twitter users rose from just over 600,000 to 1,000,000 in the first quarter.

I predict that Twitter become even more significant in 2009, entering public conscious on national news.

OS X 10.5 ‘Leopard’

Leopard was released on October 26th 2007, but its impact was really felt throughout 2008 as users upgraded. Leopard includes a raft of usability improvements including virtual desktops (Spaces), RSS support in Mail.app, CalDAV support in iCal, pseudo-3d file browsing (coverflow), fantastic backup facilities (Time Machine) Cocoa scripting bridges for Ruby and Python etc etc.

This was the release that finally caused me to move away from GNU/Linux as my main desktop operating system and switch to OS X. Put simply, OS X is now too good to be ignored.

Android

Android is a software development platform and mobile operating system released in the UK on October 30th 2008. Android is significant for the fact that it is based on the open-source Linux kernel and a mostly open source software stack, but has massive commercial backing from Google. It supports application development in the Java programming language, and also in Python using the jythonroid extension. The T-Mobile G1 is the first Android powered mobile phone.

Only time will tell whether Google can make a success of this, and take on the Apple iPhone in the super mobile computing market. Personally, I have my doubts.

Python 2.6

Python 2.6 was released on October 1st 2008, and sees significant improvements and additions both as bug fixes and important language-level changes that bring it in line with Python 3.0. Python 3.0 will be the first Python release to break backwards compatibility with prior versions, and 2.6 is designed partly as a ‘transitional’ release to ease the porting process for developers.

Changes are too numerous to mention here, but can be found in detail at docs.python.org. Some of the highlights for me are:

• The new json module for encoding and decoding Python values to/from JSON
• plistlib, a library for generating and parsing OS X plist files
• Class decorators

I haven’t yet ported any code to 2.6, but I’m looking forward to playing with some of the many new features. I’m particularly intrigued by the with statement that was added in 2.5.

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That’s all folks! We’re already a month into 2009, and with a ‘Max for live’ product announced by Ableton and an Intel Mac-bootable key-based media arts Linux distro on the cards from pure:dyne it looks to be another exciting year.