Hypomnemata

My iPhone is gradually becoming a universal remote control, and I love it.  This is the first part of that: how to hook a generic GUI-creation tool on the iPhone up to run arbitrary commands on my Linux box.

One of the peacetime dividends of Perceptron is an awareness of OSC.  OSC is Open Sound Control, a standard for sending, well, sound controls over the network.  If you’re familiar with MIDI, it’s basically MIDI over the network, but with twice the resolution.  Technically, they seem to have made lots of really good design decisions, and it’s been around long enough to have mature tools around it.

Basically, OSC allows you to have volume sliders, arbitrary buttons (play, pause, turn on lights, etc), knobs: just about anything you could use to control music can be put into OSC.  This is great, because it allows a designer to abstract out the interface from their application, and just plug in different physical widgets to implement “volume slider 1″ or “play drum B.”  Or, just as easily, hook those up to software, so they can have a GUI to interface to humans, or pure software control, with a software robot hitting virtual buttons.

While poking around one day, I thought to myself, “Wait, someone has to have done an OSC GUI for the iPhone!”  And, sure enough, they had: OSCRemote.  It’s great fun to play with: you can add little sliders, move buttons around, and even use the accelerometers.  It’s a delight, especially if you’re used to creating GUIs in code.

However, at the end of the day, I’m still a command-line Unix guy.  How do I bridge that gap?  With a control daemon, of course!  There’s a nice C library that implements OSC (liblo) using callbacks; add a trivial config file parser and an exec() implementation, and voila: I can now run set unix commands by hitting buttons on my iPhone.  It’s incredibly configurable and general, while staying pretty straightforward.  Now I can start and stop music, jump tracks, and nudge volume up and down from anywhere in my apartment, using just my phone.

You can get the code for this at oscremoted (creative name, eh?).  It needs to get a proper homepage on my domain; until then, it’s just a tarball with a freshmeat page.  I’m curious if anyone has ideas for refinements or improvements; comment if you do!