JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com. I'm with Cycling '74 with Darwin Grosse. How are you?

DARWIN GROSSE: I'm great. How are you doing?

JOE WALLACE: Good. Now Cycling '74 has been very busy this year. Can you bring us up to date?

DARWIN GROSSE: Sure. We've been working hard, kind of all hands on deck on the new Max 5 project. Max 5 is a phenomenal change for us. It's what we consider the Max program for the next 20 years. It's been a core-up development, and it's with some specific changes. One of the main ones and the one that's obvious right from the get go is the change in the user interface. The user interface is a lot more modern and sleek but it's also a lot easier to use.

The other main focus though is really making it so it's more -- it gets easier to explore the product. One of the things that we find is that people sometimes have trouble approaching it at first or they use it and then they find -- they have trouble getting to the next level, so what we've done is we've built in a lot of ways to explore your way through the product, kind of stumble on great ideas, and interface with the tutorials, the documentation, and other people's work in a lot easier way so it's a lot more likely that you can stumble into something that'll be creatively exciting.

JOE WALLACE: Now, for those who have never used this before or even seen a screenshot, explain how it works and who is it intended for.

DARWIN GROSSE: Max is a program that really allows you to take the elements of sound, video, and performance characteristics, and build a program that's specific to the kind of art that you do, and so we have some people that use our products to make plugins to work within Pro Tools or Logic or something like that. We had a lot of people who use our product to make a performance tool that might be at a museum or might be at another performance space. A lot of VJs use our software to kind of experiment with the bleeding edge of video and graphics technology, and we have -- on our website, we have a lot of artist interviews where you see people doing everything from album sleeve design to bent architecture, again using our tools to sort of very simply program their way into something that's very unique to that artist's needs.

JOE WALLACE: Now, you mentioned making the interface more user friendly. What advice do you have for people who are used to the old interface and when they get into the new one, what are the changes that they're going to see right off the bat?

DARWIN GROSSE: Well, everything's kind of got round corners, which as we know makes it better. But in factm, what you'll see is that there is a lot of interaction between the program and the user to say, "Do you need more information? Here's where you can go." A lot more is revealed, so a really good example on that is the object inspector, which allows you to take an object, you open up the inspector, and you get to see all the types of settings that are available for that. So rather than having to go to the manual and read up on the settings, you just open up the inspector and it shows you not only all the settings that are available but what the current settings are. This is a big change from having to kind of know ahead of time what something does. The other thing that's a big change is something called performance or presentation mode. Presentation mode is basically allows you to program in programming mode. You lay things out that are very easy to program, but when you perform you don't necessarily want to see the whole program. You want to see the user interface elements and kind of work with them. When you're in presentation mode, it eliminates all of the programming and only shows you the items that you set that you want to see in performance, you can resize them, reshape them, move them around, making the best interface for performance but that does not in any way change your programming interface that might be most efficient for how you understand the logic of what you're working on.