NodeBeat for BlackBerry PlayBook now available!

28 Apr 2012 in Blog

After receiving a BlackBerry PlayBook through the developer offer in March, we started to look into the possibility of porting NodeBeat to the PlayBook platform.

While it is a smaller tablet (7 inch) than the iPad (10 inch), it feels quite nice in the hand. Spec wise this device is great (dual-core cpu, 1 GB ram, dedicated graphics chip), therefor it would be nice to test if the PlayBook would be a perfect platform to run NodeBeat on.

Porting

Since NodeBeat is build on top of the popular openFrameworks (OF) platform, I forked openFrameworks and started to work on a new add-on for OF called ofxQNX to extend the current framework. While there initially were some difficulties with the audio part, Seth managed to integrate SDL into ofxQNX (just for the audio) which now provides us with very low latency audio playback. More information about the ofxQNX project (it is open source!) and how you can use it in your own projects can be found on my personal research blog.

BB 10 Jam

With NodeBeat as our (ofxQNX) guinea pig, we have been working pretty hard the past weeks to get NodeBeat up and running just in time for BB 10 Jam. Since NodeBeat uses a lot of different OF features, it was a perfect way to test out ofxQNX and the stability of the add-on.

Below is some footage I shot of an early NodeBeat Beta running on the PlayBook (it basically lacks the UI). I love that compared to the Android build, this device is giving us much lower input and audio latencies which really enhance the experience.