This video captures Jordan Rudess‘s demo at the Windows 8 “Build” Show. He kicks off with a prog synth jam, before moving on to demonstrations of his Wizdom music apps, MorphWiz & Tachyon, running on a 27″ Lenovo Windows 8 touchscreen computer.
The technical demos kick in around 9 minutes into the video.
via ouz1349
He is not human. Was half expecting (well….more than half) to see additional tentacles shoot out of his hand.
That said….this video shows precisely why Microsoft is doomed to lose the tablet wars as well. Surface is just another word for ZUNE.
Who the hell at Microsoft made the decision to schedule Jordan Rudess at the butt crack of dawn for a developer meeting knowing he was going to demo such an awesome and awe-inspiring app? And in particular…a Windows 8 app that can take advantage of much larger touch screens than an Apple or Android ?
OMG…the stupidity and ineptitude continues unabated at Microsoft. Well…at least 2/3 of the crowd got to see the TAIL end of Jordon’s demo and a really ROCKIN’ jam on regular keyboards. And most of them were probably going….”Who the hell is Dream Theater ?”
Micro-Idiots !!
Microsoft may be inept at marketing, but they have tons of money and are persistent.
These big touchscreen tablets are going to be game-changers for musicians. MorphWiz looks like it would be great to work with on that big screen. Imagine apps like Animoog. Of course, Live will be awesome on this, once it’s updated to handle multitouch.
Game changers in the sense that musicians will have to go get day jobs to afford them. 🙂
Amazon has the 27″ Lenovo IdeaCentre for $1,760, which seems competitive:
http://tinyurl.com/a2l8p47
Prices on these are going to drop as more companies start building in this form factor, too.
Jordan was not paid for this performance. Like all attendees, he got a Surface. We flew him out, but (as he said on his Reddit IamA) he did this because he feels we have some cool technology here. In fact, he later went downstairs in the PC display area where I loaded Tachyon on to a Sony Vaia Tap 20 (Core i7 tablet-like but more an all-in-one PC you can carry around and run on battery) and he was stunned at how good it was. He absolutely loved it and its response.
I’ve seen Jordan’s studios. He doesn’t have a single brand of keyboard, or audio gear. He’s not religious about brands, but more wants to use what helps him advance his music, and what is enjoyable to play. Computers are like any other equipment in his studio.
[I work for Microsoft and worked with Jordan on this event]
You are 100% right. Because an awesome keyboardist demoed a really cool looking app on amazing hardware using an inventive new platform to a bunch of enthusiastic developers who maybe didn’t all catch the whole performance because it was scheduled too early, the whole platform is doomed to failure.
Yeah what kind of idiot hires one of the best living keyboard player who also happens to be one of IOS most proficient app creator to demo the musical possibilities of their new platform!! Marketing 101 people!!
/s
It was *my* recommendation to bring in Jordan, and also to get him in front of a big touch screen PC. I’m not a marketing guy; I help developers with Windows 8. Having Jordan kick off the biggest Microsoft Developer event ever certainly seems like a good idea to me, and it’s something he really enjoyed. 🙂 For those who missed it, the recorded stream is on channel9 -dot- MSDN -dot com, just look under Build 2012 sessions. That all said, I’m not sure what logic you used to come to the conclusions you did. The performance was great, the apps are great, and Jordan is an all-around great guy, a technology enthuiast, and an app developer.
Although in theory this is really cool, I wonder if they plan on standardizing a limited range of display resolutions for developers to work with. Unless you have developers designing their apps for specific resolutions you will end up with a fragmented marketplace of apps that have to be scaled up or down to fit whatever size and resolution display manufacturers come up with, which results in an overall poor user experience.
Yet somehow music apps work on any size of monitor you put on your computer.
Seems like different screen sizes is a problem good designers can work around.
Say Apple decided to make a 27″ iPad. Of course it would run a standard-size iPad app just fine, but it would either be small and not taking advantage of the screen real estate or it would be scaled up, and all the UI elements would just be bigger (think of how an iPhone app runs on an iPad if you’re familiar). App developers would have to redesign their apps to fully take advantage of the new size/resolution to be optimized for touch input (which they already have to do when making an app for IPad 2 vs. Retina, or for iPod touch/iPhone. Apps designed for iPod touch don’t have the same UI as the same app designed for iPad.)
The developer for MorphWiz and Tachyon has a code base which scales to *any* resolution, and DPI. We tested it on surface at 1366×768 as well as on high resolution and low DPI displays. It’s not hard to do; video game developers have been doing it forever. Remember, the technology you’re looking at is PC-based. PC developers are used to working with a large range of display resolutions. It’s only since the iPhone and iPad that developers have started hard-coding in display resolutions and using bitmap graphics for entire displays. All three development technologies in use with Windows 8 (C++/DirectX/XAML, HTML/CSS/JS, C#/VB/XAML) have built-in support for scaling and fluid layout. The developer tools even include a simulator which makes it easy to test at a variety of common DPIs and resolutions.
What about IOS? IOS apps have to handle at least 5 different types of resolutions, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.
Iphone 5 and Ipod Touch 5G : 1,136 x 640 px
Iphone 4/4S and Ipod Touch 4G : 960 × 640 px
Iphone 3G/3GS and Ipod Touch 1G to 3G : 480 × 320 px
Ipad 1/ Ipad2 / Ipad Mini : 1,024 × 768 px
New Ipad / New New Ipad : 2,048 × 1,536 px
But I keep forgettting fragmentation does not exists in IOS land….
I’m not saying there isn’t any fragmentation in iOS land, what I’m saying is when you open the door to hundreds of screen sizes and resolutions, the fragmentation increases significantly which poses a problem to app developers. I’m just curious as to if and how Microsoft plans to handle this.
Any PC app right now has to be able to run on any one of dozens of resolutions you can manually select. Think of a high end video game and all it has to deal with and most do just fine at various resolutions.
I looked into it a little more, and it does look like Microsoft has provided some standards and tools for developers in regards to creating apps for different resolutions:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/03/21/scaling-to-different-screens.aspx
Should be interesting to see how it all pans out. I’m excited for the possibilities.
Wow, if Rudess is endorsing it then it must be good, he is so choosy about what he endorses.
Is there really NO other keyboard player in the world?
There are two others I can think of that are on his level, but being in their 60s I doubt Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson are that bothered about modern technology
The obvious thing here that everyone is overlooking is: If consumers decide they actually want and are willing to pay for large touch screens, everyone else can also produce them. Microsoft isn’t sitting on killer tech nobody else could get. They choose big screens specifically because nobody else was making them (which should tell you something right there). So if they turn out to be wildly popular, Apple will release one too (because we know they love money!) and it will run the wealth of iPad apps already available, and instantly jump it to the front of the line. Other competitors will do the same, and flood the market with low cost (and probably crappy) units. They will loose the ability to compete on apps, and loose the ability to compete on price. There is no possible way Microsoft could get enough units and apps into the user chain before they get trounced. The best they can hope for is second place.
And lets be serious. Down economy full of convenient and super powerful portable devices at many form factors. People barely buy new desktop computers anymore… how large do you think the market for big touch screen really is?
According to the description, the hardware is made by Lenovo, not Microsoft. Dozens of companies are already making this type of hardware. What MS brings to the table is touch-friendly Win 8. Your over-arching point is valid, though – if it’s successful Apple will undoubtedly offer it. However, they would have to rebuild OSX to support touch, as MS did (or merge iOS with OSX or something).
Keep in mind that iOS isn’t a desktop OS. Apple would need to add the capability to OSX, which doesn’t run iOS apps. With Windows, we have the same operating system across devices from desktop to laptop to tablet, and even at the core of the Windows Phone. It’s a fundamentally different approach.
[I work for Microsoft, and on the Build event with Jordan]
Was this a rehearsal, or the real deal? That room is really empty! Reminds me of the CasualConnect gaming conference a couple years ago when the Windows phone was launched. Standing room only at every other presentation but the Microsoft room had maybe 20 people in it.
It was empty only at the very start because Jordan opened the event. Doors opened when Jordan started playing. By the time he got to speak, the room filled up.
I suddenly want to go to Disney World
Pretty sure the screen in front of the Kronos was a feed from New York Stock Exchange displaying Microsofts share price plummeting.
It’s a dedicated device (no longer made) which displays musical score and, more importantly, patch change notes and other performance info.
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