The Electroskip Beat project has to be the toughest challenge of the semester. It's based off the invention by Jamie O'Neil called Electroskip, which are MIDI input devices that can be attached to any pairs of shoes. I really liked the idea, and with a MIDI devices, the possibilities are realistically endless. For more information on the invention, a link to his TED Talk can be found here

So I took the device, and I wanted to implement the idea of a repeating track. Every time the track loops, it can keep being modified. This version of the app simply makes looping beats to anyone's creativity. It's very simple, but very user friendly and makes it easy to let any beginner get into making music. A concept that I had to take this a step further was to push the looped beats made in this app to another app, which would be able to piece together loops to make full length songs. However, the concept may be re-worked as I intend to work with the Electroskip team on some similar concepts.

The easiest thing to put together for this app was the UI. I feel like I finally found a layout that works really well universally, so I made some simple tweaks for the necessities of this app and it ended up working out perfectly. Along with that, the app's design took only a few minutes of playing around with shapes, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's simple, colorful, and displays everything you'd need it to. However, the simplicity only went so far. It's really tough to keep an app like this looking simple while wanting so many features. That's why it ended up being a loop app instead of a full-track recording app. I didn't want to sacrifice the simple design for more complicated features.

Designing this app, I learned that making a flexible user interface is really important. When it came to adding the menu (picture 2 above) fitting all the options that I wanted was really tough. It became cluttery really quick. It's always a great idea to make designs that can adapt to future change, as it really saves future headaches. There's definitely room for improvement in that, along with the idea of saving files. It's not an idea that I really worried about designing. However, it's important to the app and I think re-working the menus would help for that

I'd like to thank the Electroskip team for the inspiration in this app, and for their help when working with them. I intend to change the app in the future to design what may be desired by the team themselves, so that it may be used to advertise their product. The concept of making the app loop came from Jamie's presentation, where it was absolutely my favorite part. I figured, hey, why not make an app for that.