I’ve always wanted to use the default OS X ‘hero’ mail sound as my iPhone mail sound and finally in iOS 5, I can realize my silly dream of (almost) having a Mac in my pocket.  And so can you.

Here’s what you do:

• On your Mac, Spotlight search for ‘hero.aiff’
• Copy/Paste it onto the desktop (So you don’t accidentally delete because you’re a clumsy arse, like me)
• Drag the copy into iTunes.
• In iTunes, convert it to an .AAC file.
• Right Click on the newly created .AAC file in iTunes.
• Select ‘Show in Finder’.
• Find the file and notice that it’s an .m4a file named ‘hero.m4a’
• Rename this file to ‘hero.m4r’
• Drag file back into iTunes.
• Notice that the file is now in the iTunes Ringtones library, on the top left.
• Hook up your iPhone and sync to iTunes.
• On the iPhone, go into Settings –> Sounds —> New Mail and select ‘Hero’ (It will be at the top of the Ringtones section).
• That’s it.  Enjoy.

EDGE Touch is another iDevice pixel art editor,  so I guess I’m going to have to do a head to head review of this and Sprite Something.  There are some pros and cons to both.  Edge Touch utilizes a Dpaint-like paletizing and gradient spreading (superb!) but the animation interface is a bit clunky relying on layers.

I’m going to mess around with them some more and pick a victor.  Perhaps there’s a 3rd option?  Anybody know any other iPad/iPhone pixel animation editors?

Behold:  A Crow in his Crowship.

I made this animation with Sprite Something on the iPad.  It’s pretty fun and quite useable, but could do with some additions like cloud sync through dropbox, colour palletizing and a few other tools.  I do like that it builds sprite sheets and includes the info in an email (Along with animated gifs up to 4x the original size ).  Neat.

I haven’t touched pixel art in years, but now I’ve got an iPad, the idea of clicking pixels on and off again with a finger is fun.  Back in the early ’90s , I used Dpaint III on the Amiga for my sprites, backgrounds and animation.  I loved that software to death, but the mid ’90s saw me shift into Photoshop textures and polygons, as was the fashion back in those foolish days.  Recently, I got the urge to go pixelly again, so let’s see what happens…

Another Fall painting, but this time Digital.  I’ve revisited this image a total of 4 times now, in oil, acrylic and pencil on toned paper.  It’s somewhat of a compulsion and I just can’t see myself stopping any time soon. It’s the first time a crow has appeared in one of these images and it’s just occurred to me that the crow might represent death. Or perhaps these paintings are merely about obsolescence?

A Quick(ish) Digital Painting.  I actually started this a year ago, laid it away, rediscovered it and yesterday decided to finish it.  It went through several iterations, but some of it felt self conscious and calculated, so I deleted a lot of it and went with pure compulsion instead.  I’ve been drawing a lot of octopuses lately.  And cyclops.  And those specific pointy shapes which form the knife, the tentacles, the eyepatch and the roots of the teeth.

Two Electro Tracks I wrote in the early ’80s when I was about 9 years of age.  I used nothing but a dirty plastic trumpet and a tape deck that I found under a hedge

Century

Aftertaste

An experimental scribble effect to make it appear that each frame is hand-drawn in biro on note paper.  I’ve saved it as a composition, so I can use this effect on a more substantial project later.  The robot was animated using the great DuIK Tools for After Effects.

A trilogy of little music I made which comes from a very damp place.  Permanent rain, frogs, fish and all things aquatic.  The whole recording method for these tracks is intentionally dirty: Apocalyptic levels of tape noise, rough-as-heck mixing, 60hz mains hum and rain sounds recorded from my studio window and up on the roof during a rare California rain storm.  This all adds an element of organic randomness as well as being a way to cloak the music and interact with the various instruments – Sounds rise and fall into the mucky fog as things progress.

Artistic Liver Paste is about a small child in bed watching a relentless parade of toys marching across the bedroom floor playing cyclic melodic music.  Even when more and more extreme/violent measures are taken to stop them, they simply continue on in psychotically twee fashion completely oblivious to the child’s frustrations.

Sardines describes the look of silver’d Sardines catching light in a puddle on a city street. A distracted frog gumshoe walks by and doesn’t notice all this action beneath his (webbed) feet.

The Spirits Are Telephoned. An exploration of space seen through the eyes of a dead frog in the spirit realm.  A small space: The telephone is juxtaposed against a large space: The afterlife.  Just who is calling the Frog Spirit?  And besides being woken up by the phone, why is the Frog Spirit so pissed?

Artistic Liver Paste

Sardines

The Spirits Are Telephoned

An attempt at writing a pop song structure with real instruments and an actual melodic hook in the chorus.  It’s about a future where children are unnecessary because they have been replaced with machines who are titularly ‘just human enough’.  Quite how that works out is anyone’s guess, but it all came in a dream and I have to go along with it.  The arrangement worked out nicely, but the drums still bother me.  The whole mix could definitely be a lot less ‘down the center’, but bad habits from making and mixing extremely ‘forward’ electronic dance music can make you a little more mono than you care to admit.

Just Human Enough