Pianist Pro is a new piano simulator app for the iPad

Pianist Pro is a piano simulator, similar to highly successful iPhone app pianist but maximized to fit the iPad's screen. It is the only app with photo-realistic graphics and an unbelievable sound released by MooCowMusic just today. This app offers advanced music composition functionality for both at the casual user and the music professional.It includes features like 88 keys of a professionally sampled piano,dual keyboards for the right and left hands,soft and sustain pedals,for additional emphasis during a performance. Up to 10 keys can be pressed at once, and react to the touch just like a real piano. Alternative instruments are available within the app including organs, synths, and guitars.

In addition, a built-in arpeggiator allows the user to create perfectly timed runs of notes just by holding down a few keys. Pianist Pro includes a new mode called 'Pattern Arp', allowing the user to define patterns of notes that turn a simple held chord into a complex musical phrase. Pianist Pro makes it easy to play shuffle-beat blues piano, complete with walking bassline and overlayed jazz chords and runs by simply holding down one single chord. Changing the chord changes the melody but maintains the tight rhythm provided by the arpeggiator.

For musicians working on a new piece of music, is another new addition 'Scale Piano' that can be used as a solo instrument or as experimental tool for a teaching aid for musical composition. This allows the user to select a musical scale from a large choice of presets (from standard scales such as Major and Natural Minor, to more specialised scales such as Pentatonic Blues, Persian Gypsy or Chinese), or define their own from scratch. Notes and runs on that scale can then be played back in any key, simply by running a finger up and down a virtual touchpad.

Pianist Pro is available at the iPad App Store for $9.99.

My Weekend with iPad

I'll be honest with you: I wasn't all that excited about getting an iPad in order to use it. I was mostly excited about developing for it. I bought the lowest-end 16Gb Wi-Fi and figured it would be permanently attached to my computer. For reasons I stated shortly after the iPad introduction, I saw this as a product targeted at other, less technically savvy individuals.

And I still think it's a great product for those people. I really do. I think with just a few changes, such as a keyboard dock with a USB port and built-in Time Machine, this could be the ultimate non-techie computer.

I also saw the very obvious role as a media consumption device. It's clearly targeting the Kindle and Nook, and it's going to do great in that role. The screen is not hard on your eyes, even though it's LED. The colors are beautiful and the viewing angle is nearly 180°. Combined with the 10 hour battery life (mine actually went a fair bit longer on the first charge), it's a great eBook reader as well. I love the idea of eBooks, but until the publishing industry gets a clue and stops trying to charge me $12.99 for fifty year old books I can pick up for a dollar or get from the library, I'm hesitant to actually buy any and will limit my iPad reading to news and all the lovely classic literature available on Project Gutenberg.

But I really didn't see myself falling in love with this product. I saw it as a great vacation computer; something that would be small and easy to pack that would let me check e-mail and surf the web while on vacation without being tempted to do work, and that was about it.

But, the exact thing that makes it a good vacation computer is key. Yesterday was Easter, and I promised my wife I wouldn't work this weekend. So, I actually unplugged and closed my computer and didn't use it at all. My iPhone is great for keeping in touch when I'm away from my computer, but typing any volume of e-mail on it sucks.

The iPad allowed me to do triage with my e-mail and read the news without going upstairs to my office. Now, I have a tendency, when I get in front of my computer, to start responding to work e-mails. I'll also sometimes pull open a project that I've been having problems with if I've thought of a possible solution, or hack out some notes about possible blog postings It's very easy for me to get sucked in to doing a few hours of work completely unintentionally.

But not with iPad. Some people are complaining about there being no Xcode on it. Screw that. I don't WANT Xcode on it. I think it's perfect as-is. This is something I can use to read before bed, without getting sucked into work. This is something I can play a game with the kids on, and not get sucked into doing work afterward. This is something I can use to check the news or weather without going up to my cave office and then getting sucked into work.

The iPad is not a way to do work, it's wax for my ears against the siren call of work.

Plus, it's really fun. It's silly how much I like it.

A Few More Notes on Creating Universal Apps

Now that I've had some more time with the iPad and making Universal Apps, I've realized there are some important things I left out of Saturday's post.

First, I talked about the newly defined macro UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM(). There's a problem with this right now, however, because iPhone OS 3.2 was an iPad only release. Most of us are assuming that iPhone and iPad will eventually run on the same OS version, but for now they don't ,and UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() doesn't exist in 3.1.2 and earlier. So, if you're creating a Universal Binary, you can't compile code that uses it.

Instead, you need to use a different technique, which is the check the precompiler definition __IPHONE_OS_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED, which is set to the OS version number without dots. The definition is five digits, the first is the major release number, the second and third are the minor release number, and the fourth and fifth number are the patch release number. So, 3.2 would be defined to 30200 and 3.1.2 would be defined to 30102, so here's how you should probably design your code for the time being:

#if __IPHONE_OS_VERSION_MAX_ALLOWED >= 30200
    if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad)
        NSLog(@"iPad Idiom"); 
    else
#else
        NSLog(@"iPhone Idiom");
#endif

In the future, you won't need to check this, but it won't hurt to after. Since it's resolved during pre-compilation, there are no drawbacks other than a little bit of code clutter.

I forgot to mention that there's an option to upgrade Targets to Universal under the Project menu. It will convert your target for you, and you should use it instead of manually setting the project (the way I did my first few). If the option is grayed out, make sure that your project's base SDK (not just the currently selected SDK) is iPhone Device 3.0+. If it's older, or if it can't find the Base SDK, you won't get the option.

This option will do a few things. It will update your Base SDK to 3.2 and your Deployment SDK to the original Base SDK. It will configure your targets either to create a Universal Application, or two separate applications. It will create your application's main iPad NIB for you. It will strip out the ARM6 instructions from the iPad portion of the binary.

Note: As a few people have pointed out in the comments, UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() works just fine in Universal Apps. Where you can't use it is if you want to test your universal app's iPhone functionality in the simulator. The 3.2 Simulator only works in iPad configuration, so to test the iPhone build on the simulator, you need to set the Active SDK to 3.1.2, and this check will allow your code to compile against the 3.1.2 Simulator target. If you're testing on the device, the code above is unnecessary (but also doesn't hurt anything). Sorry for the confusion.