Having recovered from the after party and settled into Athens, Greece for a workshop (more on that in the following post) I can finally give a little report about the GarageCUBE presentation.

While the bulk of this presentation was centered on new features to be added in the next version of MadMapper, there was some goodies that some have been looking forward to, primarily in the area of controllers.

The above is the first working prototype of a Modul8 dedicated MIDI controller that is a collaboration between GarageCUBE and FaderFox. Boris demonstrated an early version of a custom module that constitutes how he thinks in terms of how one will control Modul8 with this device. The most interesting thing about this is that there are some things that can be done with this controller and module that are not possible to do with a keyboard and mouse such as the ability to select and control multiple layers at once. The design considerations come from the long time experience and romance that Boris has had with a much older version of a FaderFox controller that he still uses to this day.

No specific dates or price was provided but you can expect it to be available late this summer. There will be a limited amount produced at first so stay tuned to our feeds if you are really excited about this device.

The second device to be shown and demonstrated was the fabled Activ8 controller from Codanova. Initially unveiled at the 2010 edition of the Mapping Festival, the controller turned out to be a lot more challenging then the designer at Codanova had predicted. Despite this the Codanova team soldiered on and were able to send in a fully functioning prototype for this presentation. In fact it arrived the day prior and the box in which it arrived was opened up for the first time during the presentation. Due to this timely arrival the device was demonstrated as a ‘raw’ MIDI controller and it performed flawlessly in this respect. Again, no dates for this but you can probably expect to wait a bit longer for this one and it will likely be priced higher than the FaderFox.

And what about Modul8? Well…

… and the rest is for the rumor mill. Yes, I know. Our developers are terrible teases.