AaronRutledge.com

CDM’s APC40 Hacking Superguide

Wow, seriously nice collection of tips, tricks, and hacks for the newly released APC40. Seems they already have a max/msp patch that lets it act as a monome 64, as well as direct midi mapping. I’ll personally probably just use it standard out of the box, as that’s plenty of functionality for me.

Create Digital Music » APC40 Hacking Superguide

AudioMulch 2.0 live patching demo

This just blew my mind. I haven’t used AudioMulch in years, but.. wow. For those who might not get what’s going on here. The user is taking a single simple guitar loop recording, and writing a full song live. Only working with processors and effects, until a few drum samples are added midway through. Amazing!

Flixel framework released!

Mr. Atomic (author of Gravity Hook & Fathom <3 )has posted the AS3 files for the Flixel framework! Time to install a Flash IDE and Poke around.

Nabz it here: flixel

My day in applications

I’ve seen a good handful of people write a post like this, and I find them all pretty fascinating. So, I’ll follow the formula here, and write a synopsis of a typical work day for myself, based on the apps I use all day. Let it be known that I use both 2 Windows boxes, and 2 Macs in my daily computer life, so something should be interesting or useful from this list, regardless!

8:30am – morning info time

When I first wake up, it’s all about getting a quick handle on my day. I check my mails for urgent threads, my calendar for meetings I have that day (helps me plan what to wear!), and the weather for the day. Then it’s off to work..

10:00am – info gathering time

Once I’m at the office, it’s time to gather & process my days information. This means more mail (responses now!), reading RSS, cross posting things I find to IM & Twitter, and updating my To Do lists for the day.

11:00am – idea time (mac)

The actual “work” of my day is split into two parts: “Ideas” and “Coding”. Recently I’ve been doing a lot of my “Idea” work on my Mac, as it’s the laptop, and I can move to a room or a whiteboard. Seems my main 3 apps there are OmniOutliner, for capturing notes, ideas, and lists in realtime; Keynote, for making convincing presentations; and OmniGraffle, just a touch.. for making some charts.

2:00pm – make time (pc)

My PC time seems to be more devoted to making things, although there’s still a hint of Axure involved for making clickable prototypes. I spend most of my time in Aptana, using MySQL Gui Tools, FTP, command line work via the shell, and the occasional text-munge using TextPad (my fav).

8:00pm – @home personal work (mac)

Once I get home I like to move over to a different kind of work (for me at least), and move towards expressing myself more creatively (still through code tho.. mostly). My recent digging into iPhone dev has me in XCode, iTGB & Unity, to explore the game possibilities on that platform. I also dig into making music here & there, using the incredible Ableton Live. I’m also a huge podcast consumer, and use iTunes for that.. so I guess that counts too. Then on the other side of my KVM, I have my PC.

10:00pm – @home personal work (pc)

Visual Studio is still a killer IDE for all kinds of development.. and I really enjoy using it. I’ve been taking a peek into TGEA lately, and look forward to the Torque 3D release soon. I also love playing games on my PC, and usually go right for Steam when I need to get some game on (but overall, I prefer a console). And finally.. I occasionally drop back in to my old friend FL Studio. I can still knock out a nice beat & tune in FL faster than anything else I’ve ever used.

12:00am – sleep -_-zZ

2D Boy releases a rapid prototyping framework for games

2D Boy, creators of the fantastic World of Goo game, have given out a nice little zip file full of rapid prototyping framework. It’s a mixup of some of their own libs, SDL, DX, and irrKlang. This will require Visual Studio, so all you M$ haters are gonna have to skip it. But otherwise.. get crackin!

2D Boy » Rapid Prototyping Framework

A Taxonomy of Digital User Types

So, recently I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about user types.. originally in the context of game design, but increasingly in the context of modern web property userbases. I’ve been slowly working on finding a way to visualize and discuss the types of users that all web properties have, and how to help think about converting the lower value users into higher value users. This diagram is a quick visualization of some of that thinking. Eventually this will make it into some talk, lecture, or workshop that I do.. but for now, you all can take a peek.

The basic idea is that any modern web property will naturally have users in all four segments. The main idea is to shape your experience to help convert down, and to the right. Lurkers are potentially the biggest draw on a site. They use bandwidth, storage space, and rarely help propel the site’s value. The big advantage of lurkers, is that they do look. The 2 million+ views a popular YouTube clip gets, is predominantly lurkers. So they should be the first group you think about. Converting enthusiasts to activists is usually a matter of equipping them with the right tools, and answering the most vocal of them personally, or interestingly. Converting lurkers to enthusiasts, and socializers to activists is a bit tricker.. something I’ll have to save for another post.

Thoughts?

automated posts suck

Hmmm.. automatcially posting things from my Twitter account and my Delicious bookmarks is lame.
Sorry it took me this long to realize that my blog has become an automated cesspool of uselessness to anyone.