Freedom! I cry out for you!

Or: I have quit my day-job to pursue my own personal carrier. Both as an artist as a freelance developer for artists, theater as a teacher. So now I am officially unemployed and seeking for assignments.

But to kill the time I have decided to fix up the explanation of the printing from Max/MSP on Mac OSX and try to make a general patch how to do it. I recently have had a lot of people asking me how to do it, but the instructions I posterd earlier, don't seem to cut it. So time for an update. That post will follow soon.

Furthermore I have finally found the time to start digging into OpenFrameworks, and I must say the results look promising. A bit more memory and pointer management, but all is well that ends well.

But now: finishing my last days at IJsfontein.

The last couple of days a have been playing with the OSCemote, a very simple yet nice application for sending OSC data to applications like Max/MSP.

Currently it has three main features (the free version has only 1): Buttons, Sliders and Multi-Touch. [The slider screen also features buttons and tabs, but i am guessing it is called sliders because these take up most of the screen.]

Anyhow, the multitouch feature is very nice, although it only goes up to 4 fingers (but who needs more) and i had some ghost fingers in there every once in a while. The sliders seem a bit unresponsive still but i am guessing that will be fixed in a next update. But it has never crashed on me so far (which some apps tend to do a lot) and the data seems to arrive almost instant in my patches.

So i can definitly say i will be experimenting with this App alot and might even feature it in the upcoming max/msp course. But most of all: it takes the wind out of my sails for wanting to create an app exactly like this one (but i am still missing some features, so who knows)

For a project i am working on i needed to have a way to print pictures from Max. The first (and easy) step was to save the image to the disk. But for printing a file there is no default object. But thanks to the aka.shell external I was able to actually print the file on a Mac.

Just as simple as:

lpr -P printername "/path/to/file"

Easy as pie. To configure your printer use CUPS: http://127.0.0.1:631/

update
The most common mistake here is that there is a space in the path to the file. To make sure that it works put this in the messagebox that goes to the aka.shell:

lpr -P printername \"/path/to/file with/spaces\"

This will keep the full path intact instead of splitting it at the space, in which case lpr will never find the file.