Sneak Peek: iBeams 1.1b
by Eric March on January 26, 2009 at 4:04 pm
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(4 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
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App Name: | iBeams |
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| Developer: | Gedalia Pasternak |
Version: | 1.1b | |
| Publisher: | Gedalia Pasternak |
Size: | ~200 KB |
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| Category: | Entertainment |
Price: | $0.99 | |
Just when I was content in the knowledge that I had the ultimate hypnotic interactive toy in Spawn Illuminati, Gedalia Pasternak has to drop me an E-Mail and show me this. It’s actually an iPhone version of the same program he wrote back in 2001 for Windows.
It would be grossly unfair to compare iBeams to Spawn though, because they both take very different approaches and do very different things, even if on the surface it’s all about dazzling the eyes and occupying the fingers. Where Spawn is a particle toy with a wide variety of effects and patterns, iBeams takes a different approach using an array of procedurally generated dynamic objects and patterns in OpenGL. Sound like a mouthful? T’ain’t nothin’ compared to the visual delights that await your eyes.
I should point out that the version I am reviewing here is not, as of this writing, available in the App Store just yet, although it has been submitted for approval; version 1.0 is currently available though, and I’ve had a chance to play with that, too — but this update adds new patterns, the beginnings of a UI with a pattern picker and real-time parameter adjustments, and improves the interactivity, which is why I’m reviewing this one instead.
Using iBeams is very simple: The various patterns respond to touch, and are capable of responding to multitouch events up to 5 fingers. At the bottom, in either corner, are faint menu buttons; the left opens up the pattern picker, where you can pick patterns as you please, while the right opens up the parameter adjustment menu, where you can adjust sliders to modify pattern behaviour in real-time and toggle bouncy source mode, which bounces the beam emitter around and reacts to gravity. You can also double-tap to swap to a random pattern, and shake the device to randomize the colours.
There are a few slightly odd behaviours in this version, though. Some transitions can cause the fading transition to go a little spastic; this is due to the way global variables controlling the patterns are handled between one effect and the next, but Gedalia preferred occasionally spastic patterns if it meant nice, seamless transitions. Your mileage may vary. There is also a known bug in the tap event handler that sometimes doesn’t report back when a finger is lifted, resulting in the pattern aiming its beams at a finger that’s no longer there. I’m sure he’ll figure that out eventually. There are performance issues with certain patterns, especially if you bump up the beam count, but that’s to be expected — even Spawn bogs down with too many particles.
Generally these are pretty minor quibbles and don’t detract at all from the overall effect iBeams has — which is probably a bit like I imagine it would feel like to be Timothy Leary and Terence McKenna’s love child for about an hour, only without the vague but persistent notion that you may have gone completely off your nut.
Though I don’t want to keep drawing Spawn back into this, I feel that it helps to illustrate another contrast between the two in that iBeams tends to present a more laid back approach to interactive visual toys; I found myself a little less interested in sliding and dragging and a little more interested in poking and slowly transitioning from one place to another just to see what it would do. It seemed like more of a zen approach to psychedellic visualizations than the more excitatious nature of Spawn. It is for these reasons that I feel that both apps can both co-exist peacefully, safe in the knowledge that they both amaze and delight the optic nerves and pleasure center of the brain in different and even complimentary ways, so there’s no reason not to get both.
And if I have deliberately avoided going into an in-depth description of the app, it’s because there are just some things words can’t describe with any degree of accuracy. That’s why I’ve included a full gallery and a video below to really show off what this is all about. The video was supposed to be in HD, but it looks like YouTube’s random selection of who gets the HD treatment and who does’t didn’t smile on me with this one. I’ll see if I can upload a locally hosted full 720p HD version of the video later tonight. In the mean time this will have to do.
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Posted in Entertainment, Paid Apps, Sneak Peeks
