TouchOSC

Great app. Works so much better than earlier version. Horrible documentation. You spend 10 minutes installing it and connecting to your computer, and hours trying to figure out how to create custom layouts. The online help seems to take you in circles, never really answering your questions. I messaged customer support, been 2 days waiting for a reply. With the earlier version, the reverse was true - hard to setup, but once you got it to work, the documentation made it a breeze to get up and running with creating custom layouts quickly. I'm giving 4 stars. Would be 5 if the support was better.

The addition of the desktop application with the server functionality has really made this a outstanding application. Having more fine grain control with things like osc addressing creates many more possible combinations for creative setups. The fact that you can route to multiple osc hosts from a single device is another really great feature addition.

This app (plus the desktop app) was so frustrating to use. Open Stage Control is much better. I started out with TouchOSC because I didn't realize I could use Open Stage Control on a tablet via browser and now I will be using it instead, plus it is open source so I know it will continue to receive updates or I can fork it myself. As for TouchOSC...the desktop app for building UIs is (at least on windows) very clunky to use, limited, not to mention buggy (I can reliably crash it or make it silently fail to send OSC messages by using OSC Connection 2 rather than 1). Even with disabling windows firewall, the MIDI capabilities did not work reliably for me (worked on one computer but not another). When you first start working with it the capabilities seem deep, but are in actuality rather shallow when it comes to the MOST IMPORTANT PART, I.E. sending and receiving OSC messages. It wants you to use a very specific mechanism in order to have 2-way controls, and if your receiver deviates from it, you are SOL. For example, my receiver wants encoders to send a "delta" value but I cannot configure TouchOSC to do that (at least not without custom scripting). It brags about its "Scripting API" but it is severely limited, for example if I wanted to customize how messages are sent/received I would have to copy paste a script block between every single control. Why not have a basic input/output function I can override to intercept all messages? Even just basic things like moving around the document tree is a PITA. You apparently cannot even do a simple thing like move a document from one location in the tree to another. You have to cut and paste, and when you do so, the name of the control is changed. So don't even think about bulk actions like moving a bunch of controls into a panel. I have too much negative to say about it to fit here. I think they've made some fundamentally bad design decisions about it from a UX as well as a technical perspective (seriously why not just run in a browser?) so I have little hope it will improve.