Opinion: The Astonishing Accomplishment Of Ocarina

(I know we’ve covered Ocarina here before, but I’m a latecomer to it and I’m so blown away, I had to have a rant about it. Forgive the indulgence.)

It took me a few days to grok what’s so wonderful about Ocarina, the $0.99 app that’s been taking the App Store by storm in recent days.

It’s not just about playing music. It’s about sharing it. Globally.

I suspect I was like most newcomers to Ocarina, in that once I’d got it installed, I started trying to play it. The trickiest thing is making sure that you blow correctly into the microphone – blow gently, don’t whistle a tune, and make sure you hit the microphone square on. If your blowing misses, the music stops.

It took me longer to explore the other options Ocarina offers, but once I got into world view, I found myself grinning like an idiot.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, the world view shows Ocarina players all over the world as little glowing lights on a digital globe’s surface. The app takes you from player to player, their musical doodlings appearing as a stream of animated blue streaks and flying green circles, like something out of a 50s sci-fi movie. You hear what they’re playing.

So you can open up world view and leave it playing; have a thousand Ocarina players serenading you as you work, sleep, play, cook, chat. This is simply stunning work, and I challenge you to find anyone whose jaw doesn’t hit the floor in amazement when they first see it.

As you tour the globe’s Ocarina players, you can flag up the ones you like (some of them are very talented). Most webapps ask you to “fave” or “friend” the people you like, but inside Ocarina you get to tap a little heart-shaped icon. You don’t fave these people, you love them. Isn’t that fantastic?

The Ocarina forum is a treasure trove of great stuff. Want to learn how to play the Still Alive, the closing credits song from Portal? How about Breakfast in America? Or the Imperial March? My six-year-old is so going to go crazy about this.

I apologise if I sound a little carried away with excitement here – it’s because I’m very excited.

What makes me gush even more is that we’re still in the early days of the iPhone platform here. Yes, there is a lot of rubbish on the App Store and people everywhere (myself included) have had a good old moan about that. But buried amid the rubbish are some fabulous gems like this, things that inspire creativity and connectivity and a global perspective. And they’re available for just pennies.

The App Store has been with us for just over four months. What on earth will the collective genius of the iPhone developer community cook up for us in the next four months? The next four years?

Let’s say the iPhone platform is a theme park. Despite all we’ve seen in the last four months, we’ve not even arrived there yet. We’re still at home, looking at the brochure.