Cracklin Rosie on a Whole Lotta Mobile Phones

Who said iPhone OS, Android and Windows Mobile don't play well together?

Music apps are a really cool type of mobile application, they let you you unleash your musical creativity wherever you are and are perfect to jot down a quick idea or to jam along.
For years one of my favorite pastimes on the train was to do some retro musictracking with the brilliant Milkytracker, but this time I needed something more.
It turned out to be somewhat geeky, even for my standards :-)

 
The Phone Guitar is born out of a presentation I'm going to do next Saturday on MobileCampBrussels about mobile cross development.
To put my money where my mouth is, I decided to create the same mobile app - a small piano/drum sequencer thing -  on 3 mobile platforms: Android, Windows Mobile and iPhone OS.
As a developer I didn't quite succeed: audio latency is a b*tch and building the app from the same source proved to be possible but unusable, so I ended up writing it three times: in java for android, in C# for windows mobile and in Objective-C for iPhone. More on that later, but boy did I have fun playing with it :-)

To play them all at once I just taped them on a piece of wood together with a battery powered speaker.
Add lots of audio cables and TADAAA: a very playable guitar shaped instrument that makes a hell of a noise :-)

I added Pocket Stompbox, a virtual amp with lots of great real time effects and of course the FANTASTIC iShred app from Frontierdesign

In screenshots, the setup looks like this

 

Instant gratification! Rock on!!!