OscilloScoop Review

Scott Snibbe Studio’s new music-generation app has an interface that is unlike anything I’ve ever seen and is a little difficult to explain: there are two spinning cylinders, each representing a different melody (on the iPad there are three). Touch one of the cylinders and draw a waveform up or down, which affects the sound being generated. There are four percussion beats that can be activated, and four holding locations to store different waveforms on the upper right. Tempo can be chosen via a slider.

Using this app can be a bit of an exercise in frustration. OscilloScoop does provide a full-screen infographic pointing out various landmarks but actual instruction is scare and somewhat cryptic. I found myself wishing that there were some decent instructions, or maybe a video of an expert using it, to show me the app’s potential and give me a sense of what I was shooting for. The interface is fascinating for a UI junkie like myself — I could totally see a professional DJ using an application like this, mixing and spinning different loops to generate an endlessly shifting stream of music. According to the description in the iTunes App Store, the app designer worked with leading musicians and music technologists including Laurie Anderson and Max Mathews, but as a music-synthesizing novice I was having too much difficulty to enjoy myself.

Like many other music apps I’ve reviewed, this app does not allow you to save the music you generate, which is frustrating. There is also no “undo” feature. After working with it for half an hour I generated some music which I though was halfway decent, but I blew the melody with a wayward swipe of my finger.

The app comes preloaded with several percussion tracks, and users have the option to purchase more in-app, but I didn’t think the preinstalled loops were sufficiently different from each other to be very distinguishable.

OscilloScoop has just as much going for it as it’s got going against it; the interface is fairly simple and intuitive, but it doesn’t provide nearly enough features to be of much use to anyone. Maybe enough people will buy add-on beats through the in-app purchase option to fund a future enhancement or two in the future.

Tiny World Review for you

It’s impossible not to look at images created with Tiny Planet and fail to draw comparisons to the illustrations in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s literary classic, The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince). With the right subject and the right framing, all it takes is one press of a bright red, candy-like virtual button and another fantastic mini-world is born. While the app itself is really nothing more than a funky lens filter for the device’s built-in camera, it’s still quite a lot of fun to mess around with.

The interface for Tiny World is as simple and no-frills as most photography apps: there’s a viewfinder, a screen that shows the filtered image in real-time and a giant shutter button. Aside from the faux leather texture and the logo, there’s nothing else to it. Well, that’s not entirely true. By making subtle adjustments to the angle of the device (both side-to-side and front-to-back), the composition can be tweaked to a surprising degree. Which is a good thing, because otherwise the majority of the images taken with this app would have more of a spiraled shell-like appearance rather than a spherical one.

As I’ve mentioned, the app is incredibly easy to use. It’s about as point-and-shoot as any app related to photographic imagery can get. But simplicity isn’t why someone will be using it. The reason anyone will want to play with Tiny World is exactly that: in order to play with it. It’s just plain fun to mess around with it; taking surreal pictures of the neighborhood, various random objects or even pets, as is evidenced in the gallery below. Our cat, Ampersand (yes, that’s really her name), was a very cooperative subject.

The toy-like nature of the app is also its biggest problem. Once the novelty of taking warped photos of things wears off, there’s a good chance Tiny World won’t be getting much use. Sure it’ll get some more love when friends and family who haven’t seen it before are introduced to it for the first time, but unless someone can find a reason to base an entire photo series around the concept it’s not going to get much attention after the first few days.

The brevity of its entertainment value shouldn’t be a deterrent, though. Anyone who enjoys using their Apple camera with a phone attached to it will most likely get a kick out of the funky pictures Tiny World can produce. And really, I don’t consider a dollar all that much for something that will have people crowding around the tiny screen of my iPhone and asking if they can “try it next.”