Reviews have been pretty mixed and I'm reluctant to purchase (but probably will). I think it very unwise of any developers to put out an app like this without really good documentation and easy to follow video tutorials ..... it makes such good business sense to do so since sales would increase as would customer trust and loyalty. I know I've been a bit frustrated with the computer version and was really hoping that the iPhone release would ease my frustration .... guess I'll have to see for myself and then add to the iTunes reviews.
The creation of documentation and video tutorials is a good point.
Intermorphic is something of a cottage industry; there are only 2 of us working on this (Tim and me), and we both have other jobs; Mixtikl is a hobby of ours that we put all spare hours into.
To take Mixtikl 1 and turn it into Mixtikl 2 has taken us an entire year - so we didn't rush it. :)
Most of our time in the past year has been working on the software/skins/content; the supporting materials (documentation/tutorials) are things that we're just starting to look at now that decks are cleared on the software writing side.
By all means delay your prospective purchase until you've had a chance to see some video tutorials etc. I'd have thought that the early adopters of Mixtikl on iPhone would be those who are familiar with Noatikl, or perhaps those who had tried Mixtikl 1 (or even miniMIXA) on other platforms.
I'd guess that a lot of software in this area is probably written as a hobby; it is unlikely that many music apps are going to make much money; not at only a few dollars per app! I have full respect for anybody who takes the time to create and launch an audio app for mobile, it can only ever be a labour of love! :)
We're looking to get back to working on Noatikl 2 in the new year, which is another passion of ours; Noatikl is our generative music tool (the engine of which is used within Mixtikl). I hope you have the chance to investigate that too at some point.
I downloaded the Mac demo (to get an idea of what it does, with the idea of buying the iPhone app) and was bewildered as well. It’s really difficult to determine what is a button and what opens up a menu. In part this is because Mixtikl 2 doesn’t follow any UI guidelines that I’ve encountered.
It did makes some nice generative melodies though and I would come back to it if I could understand it. The online documentation is in a bad state – someone should have at least fixed the broken image links before launching the update.
Aside from those major issues (which I’m uncertain I can ignore, but that’s ok, maybe the app isn’t for me) I was a bit unclear about how or if I could import my own samples directly into the iPhone Mixtikl. It seems I can somehow transfer items between the Mac app and the iPhone app but I’d love to be able to directly add to the iPhone version.
Pete - my complaint is basically with the UI. It feels unintuitive and extremely sluggish to me. I understand that the there is a reasonable amount of audio processing going on, but even when not playing, the UI responds very slowly. Menus, for example, scroll extremely jerkily. Combined with the issues that other commenters here have raised, this has made my exploration of the app fruitless and frankly frustrating. I'm sure there is a fantastic generative engine buried in there, but the user experience surrounding it requires a lot more polishing.
This is frustrating. I don't really care that the ui is pretty hideous, but I do care that I can't seem work this app out - particularly since I can also sense that it could be really great. It's not good enough with an app like this to just leave new users hanging without adequate documentation. That said, I shall stick with it...
By the fact that Pete Cole is reading these comments and responding to them is building my confidence in pursuing the task of learning this program. For me, purchasing an app such as this has nothing to do with the money and everything to do with the amount of time needed to learn to use it properly ...... I work a lot and devote my free time to projects that make me feel good and give me the desired results. Mixtikl 2 is very appealing to me because I really do like the generative music ...... after a while I get tired of the same sounds of the beat apps. Anyway Pete .... I will be buying your app now to support you and not passing judgement until you've had the proper amount of time you need to put together a worthwhile guide and tutorials.
Thank you for responding and I'm glad you enjoy my art :) from marlenedegrood.com
I gotta agree with Erik. Pete, I really think you should also rethink the Mixtkl UI on the iPhone, I can't make out head or tail of Mixtkl for iPhone (or Mac for that matter) either. I'm sure that this is a great app, it certainly has some nice music coming from the demo, but the sparse documentation is imo, rather poor too- sorry, but it had to be said. Maybe you folks should look at how Jusato has been developed, with the newer, yet-to-be-released Jusato Pro looking very polished, very Apple-like, so nice and easy to navigate around?
Many thanks for taking the time to give me some of your feedback, it is truly appreciated and will be used to help us improve Mixtikl.
Tim and I have been creating our software for many (many) years now, and as what we do really is boutique software (generative art is a small niche, even if fun to use!) we have learned to listen very carefully both to our customers and to those who aren't yet customers (because they don't like the way we do X/Y/Z).
The documentation/tutorials are a work-in-progress, and a bit like the hundreds of pages you'll see for the Noatikl user guide, the Mixtikl user guide will slowly improve by continual plugging away. We generally get there, in the end. :)
User-interface responsiveness: yes, we hear you. Where that is right now, is our current "best attempt" which just manages to get the full-on generative content playing even on a 1st gen iPod touch without break-up. I'm sure we'll be able to improve this in time (and for sure hardware will catch-up!), so I hope you check back from time-to-time to see how we're getting on there.
Norway: Tim'll have to check that! Can you please mail Tim at Intermorphic, that way we'll have a separate thread to track it?
We've also had really useful feedback, for example asking us to play through the main speaker, rather than the ear speaker, when the headphones aren't plugged-in; something neither us nor our beta users had picked-up on. All stuff we can build on!
We also hope to add more capability for doing some in-place editing of the generative rules, as the risk of adding some small complexity for users who might not be interested in such things.
What is interesting for me (as a techie) about Mixtikl is the sheer scale of it; though you might not realise it, as the UI is the tip of the iceberg that we all interact with. All maintained by just the 2 of us - how do we do it?!
Behind the scenes, Mixtikl is made up of around 250,000 lines of code. Might even be some kind of record. :)
Around 95% of our code is cross-platform; the rest is platform-specific code for iPhone, Mac, Windows, Windows Mobile. We also do VST/AU plug-ins variants, and web browser plugi-ns for Win/Mac (you can hear these in use in our forums, where you can share mixes online).
Because we want people to be able to share their music, across as many devices as possible, we have a real strong cross-platform focus to what we do. We also hope to support Android at some point! So, the user interfaces we create have to work on both touchable and non-touchable devices (i.e. with keypads only), with and without multi-touch. That leads to make a few compromises in the UI; basically, everything has to be keyboard controllable.
That means we also have to create and maintain skins across a big range of form factors - 10 at last count.
There are 42 "pop-up" dialogs to maintain user interfaces for, and that must work on all screen sizes; ranging from simple message boxes to complex wavetable builders. Each one of which requires documentation. :) Note that not all of these dialogs are in the mobile version; some of them are only in the desktop versions to help reduce complexity.
We even have a MIDI implementation chart hidden within the documentation; there is a full GM wavetable in there (custom, created by friends of Intermorphic...) and of course the modular synth that has to be documented.
Do please keep your comments coming, by any route; whether via Palm Sounds (thanks Ashley for such a great resource!), via our forums, or via mail. We'll always try to consider your feedback, and try to give a sensible response. :)
We've been around for years, and will be around for many years more; this is a long journey for us and we hope to share what we create with many of you along the way.
A minor factoid to close with: I'm pretty certain that many of the names in the Tiklpaks were created with Liptikl (our lyric creation tool). :)
Aside from a laggy UI, I've had nothing but an awesome experience with Mixtikl 2.
I'd love for Noatikl to somehow become available and import it's MIDI streams into Beatmaker, but I own't hold my breath lol. A guy can dream, right? :D
I should note it has yet to crash for me, which is sort of amazing since most of my apps crash at some point since upgrading to 3.1.2
One day, I hope that the iPhone will allow for real-time interaction between apps.
Our Noatikl users seem to use Noatikl in so many ways (standalone, VST, AU) in a bewildering array of contexts; there are just so many tools available on desktop, and it is when they are used together that really interesting things get cooked-up.
Thinking about the digital musician as a sort of cook, it is the real-time mixing-together of interesting apps, tools and techniques that makes for something really unique to the artist, and stops everybody sounding the same.
I guess that while the iPhone/iPod remains a one-app-at-a-time system, scope for all this will be limited... until such time as plug-in architectures might be supported... at which point, I guess we'll have to make Noatikl appear as an iPhone plug-in...!
I echo Pete's comments, and thank people for their comments - we appreciate them very much.
We always try to do things the best we can, and, because of cross platform issues, we have a lot of "satisficing" going on. There is room for improvement in many areas, sure, and customer/market feedback helps us prioritise efforts.
We know the Mixtikl UI is complex, and we know we can and will improve it over time. But (if!) you can get past that (and we hope some videos will help) and get far enough to get into some of the depth in it, you may start to appreciate why we had to do things the way we did - simply to allow access to many of the features in it.
Anyhow, Mixtikl 2 is better than Mixtikl 1, and we can only hope that future versions keep getting better, and doing what people most want them to do!
It's REALLY slow... Crashes a lot too...
ReplyDeletel should add, seems like a lot of fun...
ReplyDeleteComplete mess off an app. Not sure how this got through the approval process.
ReplyDeleteMixtikl does a *lot* of audio processing, so if there is one thing that'll have to give, it'll be the UI responsiveness!
ReplyDeleteAny crashes: please mail them to us at Intermorphic!
Hope you like the music. :)
Best wishes,
Pete
Reviews have been pretty mixed and I'm reluctant to purchase (but probably will). I think it very unwise of any developers to put out an app like this without really good documentation and easy to follow video tutorials ..... it makes such good business sense to do so since sales would increase as would customer trust and loyalty. I know I've been a bit frustrated with the computer version and was really hoping that the iPhone release would ease my frustration .... guess I'll have to see for myself and then add to the iTunes reviews.
ReplyDeleteHi Jng,
ReplyDeleteInteresting - is there anything you particularly don't like about it? Is there anything you do like about it?
Best wishes,
Pete
Hi Marlene,
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for your comments.
The creation of documentation and video tutorials is a good point.
Intermorphic is something of a cottage industry; there are only 2 of us working on this (Tim and me), and we both have other jobs; Mixtikl is a hobby of ours that we put all spare hours into.
To take Mixtikl 1 and turn it into Mixtikl 2 has taken us an entire year - so we didn't rush it. :)
Most of our time in the past year has been working on the software/skins/content; the supporting materials (documentation/tutorials) are things that we're just starting to look at now that decks are cleared on the software writing side.
By all means delay your prospective purchase until you've had a chance to see some video tutorials etc. I'd have thought that the early adopters of Mixtikl on iPhone would be those who are familiar with Noatikl, or perhaps those who had tried Mixtikl 1 (or even miniMIXA) on other platforms.
I'd guess that a lot of software in this area is probably written as a hobby; it is unlikely that many music apps are going to make much money; not at only a few dollars per app! I have full respect for anybody who takes the time to create and launch an audio app for mobile, it can only ever be a labour of love! :)
We're looking to get back to working on Noatikl 2 in the new year, which is another passion of ours; Noatikl is our generative music tool (the engine of which is used within Mixtikl). I hope you have the chance to investigate that too at some point.
Best wishes,
Pete
BTW Marlene, there is some lovely art on your site! Pete
ReplyDeleteNot available in Norway yet :-(
ReplyDeleteI downloaded the Mac demo (to get an idea of what it does, with the idea of buying the iPhone app) and was bewildered as well. It’s really difficult to determine what is a button and what opens up a menu. In part this is because Mixtikl 2 doesn’t follow any UI guidelines that I’ve encountered.
ReplyDeleteIt did makes some nice generative melodies though and I would come back to it if I could understand it. The online documentation is in a bad state – someone should have at least fixed the broken image links before launching the update.
Aside from those major issues (which I’m uncertain I can ignore, but that’s ok, maybe the app isn’t for me) I was a bit unclear about how or if I could import my own samples directly into the iPhone Mixtikl. It seems I can somehow transfer items between the Mac app and the iPhone app but I’d love to be able to directly add to the iPhone version.
Response to my previous comment. The app does show up in iTunes on my PC, but not on my iPhone's app store
ReplyDeleteSorry, I was right the first time, I just looked at the US store on my PC
ReplyDeleteMixtikl 2 is not available in Norway.
I was looking forward to this app, Pete, so please include the excluded countries (if anymore)
Pete - my complaint is basically with the UI. It feels unintuitive and extremely sluggish to me. I understand that the there is a reasonable amount of audio processing going on, but even when not playing, the UI responds very slowly. Menus, for example, scroll extremely jerkily. Combined with the issues that other commenters here have raised, this has made my exploration of the app fruitless and frankly frustrating. I'm sure there is a fantastic generative engine buried in there, but the user experience surrounding it requires a lot more polishing.
ReplyDeleteThis is frustrating. I don't really care that the ui is pretty hideous, but I do care that I can't seem work this app out - particularly since I can also sense that it could be really great. It's not good enough with an app like this to just leave new users hanging without adequate documentation. That said, I shall stick with it...
ReplyDeleteBy the fact that Pete Cole is reading these comments and responding to them is building my confidence in pursuing the task of learning this program. For me, purchasing an app such as this has nothing to do with the money and everything to do with the amount of time needed to learn to use it properly ...... I work a lot and devote my free time to projects that make me feel good and give me the desired results. Mixtikl 2 is very appealing to me because I really do like the generative music ...... after a while I get tired of the same sounds of the beat apps.
ReplyDeleteAnyway Pete .... I will be buying your app now to support you and not passing judgement until you've had the proper amount of time you need to put together a worthwhile guide and tutorials.
Thank you for responding and I'm glad you enjoy my art :) from marlenedegrood.com
I gotta agree with Erik. Pete, I really think you should also rethink the Mixtkl UI on the iPhone, I can't make out head or tail of Mixtkl for iPhone (or Mac for that matter) either. I'm sure that this is a great app, it certainly has some nice music coming from the demo, but the sparse documentation is imo, rather poor too- sorry, but it had to be said. Maybe you folks should look at how Jusato has been developed, with the newer, yet-to-be-released Jusato Pro looking very polished, very Apple-like, so nice and easy to navigate around?
ReplyDeleteHi All,
ReplyDeleteMany thanks for taking the time to give me some of your feedback, it is truly appreciated and will be used to help us improve Mixtikl.
Tim and I have been creating our software for many (many) years now, and as what we do really is boutique software (generative art is a small niche, even if fun to use!) we have learned to listen very carefully both to our customers and to those who aren't yet customers (because they don't like the way we do X/Y/Z).
The documentation/tutorials are a work-in-progress, and a bit like the hundreds of pages you'll see for the Noatikl user guide, the Mixtikl user guide will slowly improve by continual plugging away. We generally get there, in the end. :)
User-interface responsiveness: yes, we hear you. Where that is right now, is our current "best attempt" which just manages to get the full-on generative content playing even on a 1st gen iPod touch without break-up. I'm sure we'll be able to improve this in time (and for sure hardware will catch-up!), so I hope you check back from time-to-time to see how we're getting on there.
Norway: Tim'll have to check that! Can you please mail Tim at Intermorphic, that way we'll have a separate thread to track it?
We've also had really useful feedback, for example asking us to play through the main speaker, rather than the ear speaker, when the headphones aren't plugged-in; something neither us nor our beta users had picked-up on. All stuff we can build on!
We also hope to add more capability for doing some in-place editing of the generative rules, as the risk of adding some small complexity for users who might not be interested in such things.
What is interesting for me (as a techie) about Mixtikl is the sheer scale of it; though you might not realise it, as the UI is the tip of the iceberg that we all interact with. All maintained by just the 2 of us - how do we do it?!
Behind the scenes, Mixtikl is made up of around 250,000 lines of code. Might even be some kind of record. :)
Around 95% of our code is cross-platform; the rest is platform-specific code for iPhone, Mac, Windows, Windows Mobile. We also do VST/AU plug-ins variants, and web browser plugi-ns for Win/Mac (you can hear these in use in our forums, where you can share mixes online).
Because we want people to be able to share their music, across as many devices as possible, we have a real strong cross-platform focus to what we do. We also hope to support Android at some point! So, the user interfaces we create have to work on both touchable and non-touchable devices (i.e. with keypads only), with and without multi-touch. That leads to make a few compromises in the UI; basically, everything has to be keyboard controllable.
That means we also have to create and maintain skins across a big range of form factors - 10 at last count.
There are 42 "pop-up" dialogs to maintain user interfaces for, and that must work on all screen sizes; ranging from simple message boxes to complex wavetable builders. Each one of which requires documentation. :) Note that not all of these dialogs are in the mobile version; some of them are only in the desktop versions to help reduce complexity.
We even have a MIDI implementation chart hidden within the documentation; there is a full GM wavetable in there (custom, created by friends of Intermorphic...) and of course the modular synth that has to be documented.
Do please keep your comments coming, by any route; whether via Palm Sounds (thanks Ashley for such a great resource!), via our forums, or via mail. We'll always try to consider your feedback, and try to give a sensible response. :)
We've been around for years, and will be around for many years more; this is a long journey for us and we hope to share what we create with many of you along the way.
A minor factoid to close with: I'm pretty certain that many of the names in the Tiklpaks were created with Liptikl (our lyric creation tool). :)
Best wishes,
Pete
Aside from a laggy UI, I've had nothing but an awesome experience with Mixtikl 2.
ReplyDeleteI'd love for Noatikl to somehow become available and import it's MIDI streams into Beatmaker, but I own't hold my breath lol. A guy can dream, right? :D
I should note it has yet to crash for me, which is sort of amazing since most of my apps crash at some point since upgrading to 3.1.2
Cheers Kris. :)
ReplyDeleteOne day, I hope that the iPhone will allow for real-time interaction between apps.
Our Noatikl users seem to use Noatikl in so many ways (standalone, VST, AU) in a bewildering array of contexts; there are just so many tools available on desktop, and it is when they are used together that really interesting things get cooked-up.
Thinking about the digital musician as a sort of cook, it is the real-time mixing-together of interesting apps, tools and techniques that makes for something really unique to the artist, and stops everybody sounding the same.
I guess that while the iPhone/iPod remains a one-app-at-a-time system, scope for all this will be limited... until such time as plug-in architectures might be supported... at which point, I guess we'll have to make Noatikl appear as an iPhone plug-in...!
Pete
I echo Pete's comments, and thank people for their comments - we appreciate them very much.
ReplyDeleteWe always try to do things the best we can, and, because of cross platform issues, we have a lot of "satisficing" going on. There is room for improvement in many areas, sure, and customer/market feedback helps us prioritise efforts.
We know the Mixtikl UI is complex, and we know we can and will improve it over time. But (if!) you can get past that (and we hope some videos will help) and get far enough to get into some of the depth in it, you may start to appreciate why we had to do things the way we did - simply to allow access to many of the features in it.
Anyhow, Mixtikl 2 is better than Mixtikl 1, and we can only hope that future versions keep getting better, and doing what people most want them to do!
Thanks again,
tim