RjDj, an iPhone App You Can Actually "Go LEGO" With

Warning: Nerd content below.

I've been messing around with making PD patches that play in the RjDj iPhone app, and I wrote a little how-to about it on MAKE. It's fun because you can use touchscreen input and accelerometer data to control the patches, so that allows for a few new ways of interacting with PD patches even if you can't use the regular GUI (instead, you're limited to one simple JPG).

My article explains how to add additional RjDj scenes (using SSH via jailbreak), how to make the scenes play on a regular computer (since they're really just PD patches), how to modify existing scenes, and how to make your own scenes.

There really hasn't been anything for the iPhone that has captured my imagination quite like this one. When I said that you can actually "go LEGO" with this thing in the title of this entry, what I mean is that you are actually allowed a huge number of creative possibilities within the PD patches that you can make and run on RjDj. The objects in PD are like LEGOs, and you can really go buck with the possibilities. You can make a little car, or you can make a whole city. You're allowed to use as many objects as you want, as long as they don't crash your iPhone.

Anyway, here's a little demo of one thing I've done to run on RjDj:



If you saw me on tour on Germany this summer, this might seem familiar, since I used a similar sort of patch (although done in Max/MSP) to create a kind of sonic backdrop to the songs I was playing. Now I don't have to carry around a laptop to get a similar vibe, so that is nice.