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Show HN: Theremin I/O

theremin.io

81 pointsrwinn48 comments

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. :(

That sucks, what OS and browser are you using?

OS X Mavericks, Safari

Same thing happened to me.

Safari Version 7.0 (9537.71), OS X 10.9 (13A603)

Screencast: http://i.imgur.com/7uigOMg.gif

Couldn't two-finger scroll, couldn't click the navigation circles, and when I dragged the scrollbar manually it'd snap to the top when I let go.

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 :)

What'd you use to make the screencast?

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.

edit: specifically, here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/abbuk5ktjpmos7f/Screenshot%202013-... and you have to be scrolling in individual steps (since scrolling has inertia, can push you >1 step).

Horizontal two finger scroll to navigate back in history is somehow prevented. I'm using Chromium.

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)

We've all committed that class of crime at one point or another. Kudos for being willing to hear some blunt feedback.

Yeah the site is pretty annoying to use. It kept forcing me up when I tried to go down.

Worked fine for me. Nevertheless, I generally dislike sites like these because they rarely seem to function as intended.

Same here - I was trying to turn the nobs, trying to press the 'On/Off' button. And after all that - no YouTube demo etc.

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.

If you don't have an iPhone, you can build your own Theremin (with vacuum tubes) by following this Popular Electronics article from 1955: http://www.swtpc.com/mholley/PopularElectronics/Apr1955/PE_A...

Simple!

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).

Nope, but we are discussing releasing the sensor code as a open source library. It's pretty modular already, and wouldn't require a ton of work :)

To be honest, I'm most impressed by the directional lighting simulation in the header. Any hints on how it was done? Mouse position and image opacity?

It appears to be canvas with WebGL I believe.

It's done using webgl and additive blending of 3 light sources rendered with maxwell render. (check the console for a list of libraries used ;)

This site reminds me of the Mac Pro site: http://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

I hate libraries that alter the scrolling action, don't mess with that please. That's like switching keys on the keyboard, it is a very bad UX...

On a happier note, checking the console made me happy. I didn't event know you could "style" log messages. Very cool.

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).

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.

check out standaloneV2 as well https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/standalonev2/id656556702?mt=..., works similar but based on sound waves and is free for the month as a part of the wrong biennial http://thewrong.org/

I also noticed that the screenshots in the iTunes Store are not in the best quality. You can even see some artifacts on the tab bar at the bottom.

I can see that now as well. The screens i uploaded was PNGs, Apple must have replaced them with pretty low quality jpeg versions :/

Confusing site, why not just make a normal website.

Interesting app. Also, the website's source code seems to contain a secret code. When you type it in, it unlocks teh funnies :-)

Very cool! Apps like these make my phone a beautiful, versatile thing, not to-do lists.

(Hijacked scrolling doesn't work in Safari, fyi)

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.

Taste is hardly a useful factor for reviewing an instrument.

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.

Bought it. Does not seem to work properly with iOS6.1 and iPhone 4s. Hopefully there'll be an update on this!

If you send me an email at johan@theremin.io we can try to sort it out.

It works now! Had to boot my phone for some reason. Looking good :)

Just write "disco" anywhere in the page. The creator left a surprise. Cool webGL work.

I was going through the code and found that as well! Nice effect.

Seems like the main.js[1] file is inordinately large to me - did you feel that way?

[1] http://theremin.io/scripts/main.js?v=5

I did feel the same.

It's quite large and poorly fragmented in my honest opinion. But the code sure does the job !

Very neat, now I'll spend the rest of the day attempting to master Good Vibrations.

This site is literally just a black page for me on Chromium/Crunchbang.

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