CatSynth

Submitted by Ivonne Carley via our Facebook page.

“This is Gomez one of the cats of Irulan. Irulan the music makers, not the princess. http://soundcloud.com/irulan
“

From Alessandro Automageddon via our Facebook page.

Here’s another picture of Giuliano, the macbook was currently running Apple Mainstage, there’s a small modular rig (Mostly Doepfer modules, with some MFB) and an Akai mpk 25 (not sure about the name). He was mostly interested in the patch cables in the red basket…

The influence of Apple and Steve Jobs extends deep into this site and into our lives at CatSynth HQ. For today’s Weekend Cat Blogging, we look at a few of the many photos of Luna with Apple computers and devices:

This last photo is one of our many taken with the Hipstamatic app on the iPhone.  Indeed, most of the photos, even those not taken with an iPhone, are processed on a MacBook or Mac Pro.  Nearly all of the writing is done on a MacBook, and occasionally on an iPad.  The technology of Apple has become ubiquitous, even down to blogs featuring cats.

Weekend Cat Blogging #331, is hosted by pam at Sidewalk Shoes, where Smudge says Happy Fall to everyone.

Carnival of the Cats will be up tomorrow at Meowsings of an Opinionated Pussycat.

And the Friday Ark is at the modulator.

Like so many others, we are marking the passing of Steve Jobs. But one thing that is often overlooked in the many tributes is his leadership at NeXT.

I first came across NeXT in 1989, as I was starting to explore the world of computer music. It was an ideal machine for its time for music and media work. It had a powerful operating system, it had a programmable DSP, it had SoundKit and MusicKit libraries specifically designed for music programming. And the original NeXT Cube was quite a striking physical object.

I had even written a couple of letters and formal research proposals to NeXT and directly to Steve Jobs to support my incipient research work in high school. Of course, nothing came of it, but it was an interesting exercise in learning how to write a proposal. And my opportunities to try out the system (via various institutions) game me a sense of what a more ideal computing environment could be like. As a music and computer-science student at Yale, I did in fact have the opportunity to do work on NeXT systems, but by that point the computing world, and the computer-music world, were moving on.

Apple acquired NeXT in late 1996. In the process, they reacquired Steve Jobs, whose return marked the Apple that we know today, and also the NeXTSTEP operating system, which lives on to this day as the foundation of Mac OSX. Every contemporary MacBook and MacPro is in many ways a late model NeXT computer. Indeed, it was only after the introduction of OSX that I purchased my first Mac (an iBook) in 2003 and gradually shifted into being one of those annoyingly obsessive Mac/iPhone/iPad users. All of my music and photography work is done on these devices, as are all posts to this blog and updates to our Twitter and Facebook streams. Even my day job is intimately connected to the technology from Apple. We associate these technologies and designs with Steve Jobs, but much of it can be traced back to what he and others pioneered at NeXT.

Another from pulsewidthmod on flickr:

Not a “Cat-and-synthesizer pic” per se (though Logic does come with soft synths).

Submitted by steveoftheweb:

Steve has a music and opinion site and a cool cat comic as well. I think I've seen some more cat-synth pictures there…

wordless wednesday wwdc apple convention
san francisco

I had an opportunity to visit the big MacWorld Expo this past Friday, and of course Zip came along.

Of course, the big news this year was the unveiling of the iPhone. Here it is:

Can you see it? No? Well, neither could I. There was never a moment when there wasn't huge crowd surrounding the poor little device.

We decided to instead focus our attention on the well established and ubiquitous iPod:

You can barely stretch out your hand at MacWord and not come in contact with an iPod or something attached to an iPod. Indeed, much of the exhbition floor was devoted to iPod accessories and peripheral devices. I was most impressed with a device from Belkin, a six channel audio mixer that can record directly to an iPod (as well as to a computer if one so chooses). They expect to release it sometime later this year.

Among the more prosaic iPod accessories were numerous speaker systems:

Aesthetics and good design are key to Apple/Macintosh experience, so the emphasis is always on appearance and personality. This is true for speaker systems as much as for carrying cases and fashion accessories.

I quite liked the design of this offering from Harmon-Kardon:

And of course the extremely cute iWoofer from Rain Design:

This seems as good a time as any to discuss the use of the letter “i” for anything and everything at MacWorld. This is not only true for software and hardware offerings from Apple, but from the accessory vendors as well. You cannot escape the “i” in either the product names or the marketing surrounding them.

In reflecting on the “i”, I found myself thinking back to a favorite story of mine, Richard Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar…. The community in which much of the story was set was called iDEATH, complete with leading lowercase “i”. There was also the somewhat villainous character inBOIL.

On the subject of modernist art and culture, there was also this ad from the good people at Roxio for the latest versions of Toast, which evokes the art of Lichtenstein and Warhol:

HP also offered modern-culture icons at its large digital photography presentation, including large-scale prints from photographer Joel Meyerowitz. Among them were several photos of 1970s New York. New York in the 1970s epitomized the crossing of high culture and urban decay, and the photographs capture that mix of the sleek and modern and the slightly rundown…

…but time to get back to the expo. I suppose I did get bored with the whole “digital lifestyle” thing, but I would be remiss if I closed without mentioning our friends over at Creative Technologies. They made a big push into the iPod and Mac space this year with several “designed for iPod” gadgets, including the oddly named Xmod. It seems that even when Apple makes it embarrassingly easy or accessory makers to be hip, Creative refuses to get it. Note to the folks at Creative marketing: the “i” is supposed to go at the beginning!

I do have to give them credit for letting E-MU Systems at least have one table at the show to present its Macintosh-compatible products, including the 0404|USB and 0202|USB with recently released Mac drivers.

It's actually a pretty decent audio interface for the Mac, and of course certain people busted their $#%es to make it OSX compatible, so you should check it out.

Well, that will wrap it up for our brief visit to MacWorld. I would try and leave you with some pithy remarks, but I'm still stuck on my whole “nostalgia for the big city” line of thought, and on the intersection of high and low culture afforded by Apple's vision of “digital lifestyle.” I doubt this is the last we at CatSynth will have to say on such matters…

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Luna gets distracted while checking whether the battery on our iBook is subject to Apple's recall.

Apple has determined that certain lithium-ion batteries containing cells manufactured by Sony Corporation of Japan pose a safety risk that may result in overheating under rare circumstances.

That is Apple's gentle corporate-speak way of saying “may burst into flames.” Fortunately, it looks like we dodged this one. My Dell Latitude at work was not so lucky, and is now relegated to desk duty while awaiting a replacement battery. Ironically, my home Dell Inspiron whose warm and toasty characteristics I described preparing for my August 6 performance was not on the recall list – indeed, since installing the fan-control software things have improved significantly.

Thanks for boo_licious and her cats Ms. G and Fluffy over at masak-masak for hosting this Weekend's Cat Blogging.

It looks to be a pleasantly lazy Saturday for all of us.

Weekend Cat Blogging