I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!
- drag-n-drop to build data-capturing or information-only app UI
- add/remove/clone/edit controls, labels, etc
- controls supported: the typical plus bonus - barcodes and camera even for web-forms!
- brand your app: name, description, brand-image/logo, colors
- click to publish: gives you instant preview/production-ready app on web + analytics for data from your app (can have this private if you get an account on our theatre platform)
- u can update apps that are already in production (studio accepts bootstrapping new app via URI pointing to its defining spec/persona)
- when you push updates to existing app, those using it automatically get the updates without re-installing anything
HISTRION (web+mobile):
- U can use channels to push your app to mobile users (they just need to install the single, generic/universal app-rendering app - the "Histrion": https://tiny.cc/historion-apk
- if you download the *.persona file for your designed app (no need to publish if you don't want to), it can later be used to render the expected app via the web or mobile histrion.
DIVINER (web):
- free analytics - mostly descriptive stats atm
- build dashboards on the fly (they are persisted across browser-refresh)
- share/export your app analytics as you wish: pdf, excel, images, url, etc...
ALL THIS without writing any code, making any configs or delving into dev-ops or even without requiring you to have any account on the platform!
POWER USERS:
- u can point the forms to your own existing servers (check "theatre address" field)
- can use HTTP POST, GET, and for mobile: SMS, EMAIL
- can build your own data-analytics dashboard without having to code/host the data apps yourself -- you can get the data-api for your published app via the diviner/default analytics dash...
You can use this service to whip-out quick surveys, polls, capture experiment data, etc... all anonymously!
Like most metaphors, this one is likely to be easily misunderstood or at worst, taken for granted. That a potent message is delivered in a long narrative worthy of careful, contemplative reading, might make many miss the nuggets within (if not abandon this all-together).
That we are part of the enigma we are hoping to master makes things the more cloudy - is total abstraction possible?
The article is a huge open question too. Nice reading, very startling too. I did get inspired to try an idea or two... perhaps to add to an already increasing plethora of tweaks to our cloudy reality. It's in our nature too.
NFixx here: The intent here is to interest anyone in the community (especially a business co-founder), to get in-touch, and we form a team to see this whole amazing project deliver real value to more individuals and collectives wanting to embrace a robust data-driven workflow, without delving into programming, devops or managing analytics dashboards.
Note: The whole project consists of 4 components:
[1] The Studio: Where you design the your native/web apps (called personas in the project dialect)
[2] The Historion: A general-purpose app that can morph into any app describable by a *.persona file or other Persona spec.
[3] The Theatre: Where published personas reside atm (platform-as-a-service), so users of your app can just use it online without you configuring servers,etc. Also, this can host the data ("acts"), posted from your designed apps, so that they can be readily analyzed without further infrastructure/config on your part.
[4] The Diviner: A general-purpose, config-free, user-controlled data-analysis dashboard (there's a generic, agnostic one [5] - you can point it at any compatible data apis you have), that is automatically available for your app's data soon as you publish the persona. (there's plans to definitely offer private instances for paying clients).
I need collaborators, I need beta-testers, and BUSINESS! Okay, perhaps I need a team most of all... I'm currently in East Africa (home), but hope I can form a global team of like-minded folks. We need resources to pull this off, and perhaps some capital. But, the promise is, this technology has the potential to not only disrupt app development, but also bring the power of building and leveraging data-apps, to many more businesses, especially here in Africa.
Market Research, Scientific Education (think, ease of collecting data and running quick analysis), polls, etc can leverage this immediately...
Thanks for sharing this, and especially from the bespoke demoscene community! Sure, I now realize this concept in its most general form isn't that novel, and perhaps isn't as phenomenal, but, my motivations warranted it, and well, those fans of mine who've tried the new album packaging really seem to love it over the conventional package - audio/video.
I'll just keep it around, and perhaps tweak things as long as there's some passion for hacking on this some more or if it turns out to be that good for my fans...
Otherwise, thanks for that background you gave, and the interesting links! Discovering ideas you resonate with isn't easy either ;-)
Interesting commentary; some heated, but most informative nevertheless. Yes, like @caseymarquis, I hadn't heard of Demoscene despite being someone who kind of hoards all kinds of music (yes, I've even collected some algo-generated music as many folks do refer to that more modern trend here). But, in my part of the world - I'm doing these projects from East Africa, there's a lot that could use some innovation.
I definitely know there are more optimal means for my music to reach fans - and I'm being vigilant here (see how much channels I've tried thus far). This is my first serious music project in all of my life thus far, and being a techy, I always felt there should be a means to do something else besides suffering at the hands of tradition - I've not yet been successful with getting someone to manage or help sell my music. So I've decided to do whatever with it, as I see what ideas work, what doesn't.
Contrary to what one person said, I don't love locking my users/fans in. I just like to advocate for diversity - and looking at how many options a new musician has to use for distribution, I felt like, why not use all that I can readily use at the moment - especially sites/platforms that are more self-service, and have something new to bring to music distribution:
Genius: I love it, because, a potential fan gets to listen to your music while studying the lyrics and possibly seeing how others have interpreted what you have to say. This sort of method of consuming music, in my opinion, is the "higher end". It is more important than most other methods, especially for genres such as Hip Hop that I do, where so much effort goes into writing not just nice-sounding, but educative, often poetic lyrics, and this can best be appreciated when someone listens as they read the lyrics as well.
-- so in a way, despite being an official editor on Genius myself, I used their sleek idea to do something else my folks in this part of the world might love : my typical local fan here in East Africa might not have the resources to savor my music album via Genius/Soundcloud all the time, and yet, the idea of giving them something more than just typical audio/video, seemed to me like a nice thing - if packaged as an app, not only do they get to listen to the music, but there's more exciting things they can do with the album even while offline: read lyrics, take notes, browse longer album bio/stories (which can all be part of the package, and which, due to the dynamic nature of the app-medium, allow for more creative ways of presenting many things than a standard album on disc)
SoundCloud - the possibility of my fans highlighting specific parts of songs that they liked the most, and possibly leaving context-aware comments for why. I see Soundcloud giving to the lyricist in me, the equivalent of Genius's per-line annotation power, but instead, the focus being on the lyrics and soundscape, as they are combined, at a given moment during the song. DVDs and most other means of distributing music don't readily given the artiste this sort of power.
-- and, who says some future version of this KIZINA tech might not allow "album-app" authors to bake-in perhaps soundcloud-api-powered discussions for the tracks or offer something similar that uses the internal streams, but posts to the remote soundcloud (or does a sync of those comments, and renders them in sync to the user playing the song in the album?) There's lots of room for innovation and experiment here, and I think this does all of us more good in the long run, than not. I for one, love to tinker with things that seem to be important to what I'm doing with my life, and music is one of them.
So, what might be the real benefits of KIZINA?
- fans can choose to download the self-contained album app once they really want to be that engaged with your music (think of a fan that wants to unplug from the internet, but yet go on that hike with your lyrics, music, album gallery, stories, etc. They can spend more time engaged with experiencing your music, than what the typical audio-only or video-only methods of consuming music would offer). And this doesn't only have to work for music albums only.
- I've already hinted at the possibility of many educational projects that might use this sort of thing: story-books, magazines that bundle both music and visual/text, etc.
- The lure of this all, being the creative power the content author has, when determining what other auxiliary things to include besides their main product (in the case of music, the main product being audio). This is an app, so you might even bundle a game that lets the user play as they listen to your music! No existing music packaging tech might easily give you that sort of power IMO.
So, TL;DR: This is not as fringe/cutting-edge as I first thought, but it is nevertheless meant to address some concerns about music (and generally, content) publishing that I don't see other platforms offering me yet. And it also sort of opens up innovation, as making albums software, means we can do an infinity of things with each new music release... Think about that. So, perhaps KIZINA is still relevant to introduce to the public, as many, like me, didn't know of other similar options.
I will definitely even consider selling my music directly on the street (it's one of the more popular methods of indie distribution in Kampala - some bunch of chaps basically duplicate the records, and vend them on the verandas of shops and in kiosks of all sorts).
As I've commented elsewhere, this other song is meant to expose people to the concepts of Information Security (a very important topic in our culture and world today). It is a story of an African hacker that wakes up in the night, to find his servers under attack by the NSA. The song traces the battle that then proceeds, and in the process, drops many references to some of the real-world concepts encountered in real hacking and info-sec.
I hope these sort of music projects don't just entertain nerds and geeks, but introduce STEM concepts to a wider audience, using media such as rap music, that many youth can readily relate to, and perhaps even give more attention to than long essays and books - the attention spans of the young are getting worse, and so using such approaches as music to educate might make more sense for some scenarios.
Yep, using story-like approach would have given more meaning to the song, but one of the original motivations for this was to put enough references to math concepts in the lyrics, in a way that would encourage the curious listener to dig them up, and perhaps start to either relate with or love math.
This song is part of a bigger attempt at using the creative arts to expose our African youth to STEM disciplines, and to make the science and math more appealing to a population that's really greatly lagging behind compared to the rest of the world.
It's a song introducing important concepts of Information Security to listeners, via a story of an African hacker that's in battle with an NSA crew. It's more story-like.
Yes, I'd love to write more music like this, and so will get in touch to get ideas and feedback on how to get even better.
https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+mont...
I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!