Bloom’s Day
Posted on | October 10, 2008 at 8:02 am | Comments Off
It had to happen sooner or later. Musical legend Brian Eno has decided to ride the iPhone gravy train. Along with Peter Chilvers, Eno has developed an application for the iPhone/iPod Touch that turns it into a an ambient music generator. It’s called Bloom, and it’s pretty cool. You just touch the screen and a musical tone plays and a colored circle appears. Touch the screen again and another tone/circle appears. The tones repeat in a loop and older tones eventually die out, to be replaced by the newer tones. That’s it. You get different tones depending on where you tap. It would be nice if the volume of the tone depended on how hard you tapped, but the iPhone screen doesn’t work that way. There’s also a mode where you can just let it sit and it will generate its own tones.
It’s a hypnotic, addictive, simple little app. I find it very relaxing to just sit there and tap on the screen and see what it comes up with. The visuals, though nothing special, enhance the experience. I think the one thing you have to be careful of is using it without headphones around people who may not share your tolerance for random ambient music. The downside is that it’s $3.99, which is a little pricey for this kind of iPhone app. $1 or $2 would probably be better. I don’t know how much use I’ll get out of it, but at this point I don’t really regret paying the $4. Y’know, it’s strange to me that I’m now complaining about paying $4 for an app for my smartphone, when most of the apps I bought for the Palm PDA were in the $20 – $30 range. Granted, most of the Palm apps do more, but when there are comparable iPhone apps, the iPhone ones are always cheaper. I never used to balk at paying that much. The iPhone and the app store have really changed the model for how we buy software for our mobile devices.
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 47°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Samantha” (Madness)
- “Always in Tears” (Vinyl Devotion)
- “Flower” (Liz Phair)
- “I’m A Terrible Person” (Rooney)
- “In A Funny Way” (Mercury Rev)
- “Ocean Spray” (Manic Street Preachers)
- “Money For Love” (Pidgin)
- “Just Like You” (Poster Children)