That site, while beautiful, really frustrated me. I kept clicking to get something to happen, but couldn't. I tried to scroll and each time it would put me back at the top of the page. Let's say that I'm intrigued by the product, but not enough to fight with the site, unfortunately. :(
Can I just say that, while the scrolling worked without issue for me, it was useless and annoying, and the number of problems other people are having with it made me wonder why you'd go to the trouble. As respectfully as I can say it, this is the very definition of dancing baloney. You had to put effort into this dorky effect that is arguably worse than a plain scrollbar, and to add insult to injury, now you're having to take bug reports because one of the oldest, most fundamental features of a web page (scrolling to see more) is complicated to the point that it doesn't work cross-browser.
Please just let the scrollbars work the way they're supposed to.
Yeah the scroll didn't come out as well as well as I had hoped. I went trough the trouble because I like experimenting with user interactions. I saw what Apple did with the locked scroll for their new iPhone promotions and wanted to do something like that but less restrictive.
Initially i had a implementation that didn't lock you in but tried to predict where you where going and adjusted scroll speed accordingly. While it worked pretty well the behaviour was so strange that you needed some primer before using it. So I settled on just locking you in since the design is very focused on this effect. We might redo the site with slightly different graphics and a "normal" scroll later.
So there you have it, the story of the useless, buggy, dorky dancing baloney scroll. :-)
(And yes, I spend way too much time on stuff like this)
Possibly related?: scroll down, then up. Before it reaches the top position, it locks up Firefox Aurora (current nightly build). Possibly a bug in Firefox, but those are relatively rare, even in the nightlies.
Seems window.scrollTo does not work properly in safari when you kick the layers in to hardware accelerated mode.
I've disabled the snapscrolling now on all Safari versions. Try it now! I think I'll end up disabling it everywhere since people seem not to like it that much :)
Oooh man, this is an awesome idea. I will be playing with this soon.
But just one suggestion: video footage of the app being used on the page, front-and-center.
The live logo is really neat, but it doesn't really convey anything about the purpose of the app.
I'm already familiar with Theremins, but I'd bet a lot of your userbase wouldn't immediately grasp the nature of the app from what's on the page if they haven't seen one being used before.
Just tried the app. Cool stuff! Managed to hook the midi out up with Traktor. Here's a movie of the beatmasher in action: http://bergstroem.nu/theremin.m4v
Are there any open source variants of this? Would love to play around with different possibilities (saxophone or cello setting, piano on your laptop, slappin da bass, etc).
Very nice. You might want to consider supporting OSC as well as midi. The mobile platform is providing a way to break from that horrible proprietary 1970s protocol, and you can do your bit to help out!
I really should write that essay about how midi is an evil tyrant holding back musical expression.
Also OSC will allow you to have less "discrete" notes, so it might actually sound like a theremin.
This was fun. Why don't you allow setting the key though?
Also, I would love to see a less skeuomorphic interface. Some things are particularly bad, like when changing the scale (you have to tap a button to the left of the active selection to bring up the choice selector).
That is a well produced video, and while I doubt any video can adequately convey the experience of using something like this, it comes near to the mark as makes no matter. Two unfiltered reactions: discretised theremins are missing the point of a theremin, and defocusing to avoid device frame rate issues isn’t worth it—just simulate screen images.
Agree. Spent a few mins trying to click and play with the logo in the hope that it'll start playing some tunes or do something interactive... Video would have hit the spot
I like the design of the site, however it hijacks the two-finger swipe to go back for me. I haven't seen this happen on any other webpage before. Chrome on OS X 10.9.
Looks very interesting - but I had to switch to Chrome to view the site. The scrolling (using mouse wheel / trackpad) doesn't work properly on Safari 6.1.
This is unfortunate. I have never heard a worse instrument, and I've been to events where this was played by practiced people. Okay, maybe those annoying horns some cultures play during soccer are worse, but these are still really bad. I consider it more of something that was easy to make rather than something that was made to produce a good result. They would have been better off just coming up with their own thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong but it has midi functionality on the payed version. This actually means that it could sound as anything as soon as you plug it on your computer and apply some sampled sound.
