Thursday play – 2 -Rhythm Necklace – Make music with shapes

Rhythm Necklace is a sequencer for composing rhythmic loops. It was created by Meara O’Reilly and Sam Tarakajian. The interesting thing is this app make uses can see the music they made.

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The latest instalment in a long tradition of compact and innovative iOS musical tools is Rhythm Necklace, a new app for generating and modulating melodies. Capitalizing on super legible circular step sequencing and a restrained interface, the app offers a tangible method for composing, iterating, and exporting audio.

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Rhythm necklaces are circular representations of repeating patterns. They’ve found application in fields as varied as crystallography, radio astronomy, nuclear physics, and ethnomusicology. When applied to musical rhythms, circular representations show the underlying geometric properties that make them enjoyable, such as the degrees of evenness and symmetry. Computer scientist Godfried Toussaint has found that analyzing rhythms geometrically reveals surprising relationships between rhythms the world over. The Rhythm Necklace iOS app is a musical sequencer for exploring the geometry of rhythm necklaces, and for experimenting with generating rhythms algorithmically.

Thursday Play: Blue Cheese

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Blue Cheese is a menu translator and dictionary. This app could complete menu translation immediately via simple scanning of single or multiple lines. With using this app, people could easily obtain detailed ingredient and flavor descriptions with food images, food and view historical information, and food comments.

Since a lot fancy restaurants usually have a dim space, this app also have the light function. It help people to light the menu.

For now it support translation between Chinese and English.

There is a love story behind of this app. Ray, the founder of Blue Cheese, was an international student studying in a university in the United States and was pursuing a Taiwanese girl in his freshman year. When Ray took the girl to an Italian restaurant for their first date, they were both confused by unfamiliar food names on the menu and had no clue what to order. The girl asked Ray for suggestions, so Ray ordered a Grilled Romaine Salad with Blue Cheese dressing for her. He had no idea what blue cheese was and just wanted to order for her to show his cultural savvy. Ray thought foods with beautiful names such as blue cheese must taste good. But after seeing the unpleasant look that appeared on his date’s face while she was chewing, he realized he must have made a huge mistake. After searching online, he was shocked that the blue dots are actually mold. He felt horrible and promised her that she will never have to order blindly again. Although the girl has gone back to Taiwan, Ray never forgot his promise, and built this app for her with the hope that she and others will be able to order with confidence wherever they travel. The “Blue Cheese” story made the app featured as the “Best New App” in the iTunes AppStore in China. Ray hopes she will see Blue Cheese and that this time she will like blue cheese.

Order Together? Digital Prototype 1/2 By Feng and Xueer

Please find our first digital prototype here.

Possible names: Porder / Pooli (Pool in Finnish). Vote!

What we learnt from paper prototyping

  • Cart view is redundant for our app. So our tab bar iterated from [Feeds, Cart, Profile, History] to [Buy, Cart, Profile, Orders] to [Buy, Orders, Profile].
  • We reduced the complexity of settings by merging personal info/notification/security settings to a single page.
  • We simplified the process of placing an order by reducing the quantity of confirmations.
  • We found that it is more convenient for users to allow them to scan their cards instead of entering card information. Reference: Uber.