Always up for some fun, especially when there’s a lot of noise to be made, Ian Murphy took time out to talk to Tao Group and play with its new application

Microsoft has spent a lot of money promoting its Pocket PC and Smartphone platforms as cool development platforms. Despite this, there is still a dearth of applications, outside the standard PIM functionality that will run across both sets of mobile devices. Tao Group, best known for its Intent platform, is about to change that with the launch of SSEYO miniMIXA.

Cool applications to pass the time that run on multiple mobile devices are hard to find. This is especially true in a Microsoft world where few companies have ported their entertainment applications to both the Smartphone and Pocket PC platforms. This isn’t a reflection of the potential of either platform for developers, but more about the problems persuading operators, in particular, that your application won’t do anything that could cause unexpected call costs for the user. In a nutshell, the underlying development platform is not transparent enough for operators and developers to easily validate an application on the Smartphone platform. As a result, many developers have created some excellent entertainment applications for the Pocket PC, but decided against trying to make them work on a smaller handset.

Microsoft has recognised this problem and new versions of both platforms are due next year, along with new tools. These will make it much easier for everyone to ensure that nothing untoward could happen. In the meantime, it does mean that someone needs to do something quickly.

That someone is Tao Group. A small UK software house with a serious pedigree in developing Java-based platforms for mobile and entertainment devices. Now we all know that Java isn’t a word uttered too frequently around Redmond, well not unless you just stubbed your toe. However, Tao Systems has ported its Intent multimedia middleware onto the Microsoft mobile device platforms. It has also created a set of development tools for building applications on Intent.

Tao Group showed off its SSEYO miniMIXA application for the first time in public, at the Future DJ Event, in August. It will soon be available as an application to download, pre-installed on some mobile devices and ship on memory cards.

The SSEYO miniMIXA application is a multi-channel mixing application. If you are using it on a Smartphone, it appears as a five-channel mixer and on a Pocket PC as a nine-channel mixer. If you are a developer, you can also get the desktop version, which runs as a nine-channel mixer inside a device emulator. It is a remarkably easy application to work with. Once you have started the application, you are faced with a screen that looks like a grid. Down the left side you have the various tracks that you can lay down. These tracks are drum, bass, chords, lead and custom. On the Smartphone platform you get just one of each, while on the Pocket PC you get two of everything except the custom track.

One of the biggest problems developing an application for both Smartphone and Pocket PC devices is that they have different interfaces. Pocket PC relies on the stylus, while Microsoft’s Smartphone is a key-based approach. The miniMIXA application accommodates both methods of input, although it does take considerable practice with a Smartphone to do it from the keypad.

Each track has a number of cells into which you can load different “samples”. A collection of cells is a section. There are eight sections on the Pocket PC version and four on the Smartphone. Samples can be made to play just once when that particular section is highlighted. If you want a sample to play in multiple cells, you need to enter it as many times as required, as there is no drag and drop or repeat key.

To enter a sample into a cell you simply click on it and you are shown a list of possible samples for that track. You can customise this by adding your own samples when you are ready.

The first thing to do is to add a number of samples into multiple cells and then play it. After a while, it gets quite addictive and you end up changing the cells after they’ve been played to vary the sound.