In part one of the Je Joue post, I said I was going to take some time trying out the software (and playing with the output file format, you know, for research purposes). However, the more I started reading, the more I realized that I was a little too snarky in my first post.

In fact, I may actually be impressed by this! No, seriously!

So, first off, lemme get my facts straight. The Je Joue is absolutely nothing like the Ultime, outside of the ergonomic form factor. All the Ultime does is vibrate. For 400$US, you better be rockin' some god damn worlds, and now that I've actually done a smidge o' homework, I think they may be onto something here. At least, assuming you're female.

The Je Joue consists of a "Pleasure Pad", which from what I can tell looks like a soft pad with two bumps and some ridges on it (The exercise of "Where does this go on the female anatomy" is left as an exercise to the reader). The pad has 3 DOF (2 lateral, 1 rotation), though one of the lateral axis is vibration, but I guess that counts. Anyways, in non-technical terms, that means it can move up and down, turn in either direction, and buzz.

Because I love drawing with my mouse, here's a diagram:

So, that's already pretty neat. It's more than just a buzz-buzz. However, the smartness really comes in the software and interface. The Je Joue comes with a piece of software called PleasureWear, which is brilliant in 2 completely different ways.

The first is the fact that it's FREE, and built to be one hell of a piece of distributable advertising. When you load the software (on your PC or Mac. Yaaaay, apple people, you may stop running your SymToys clients in classic mode and come join us in modern sex toy happiness!), the first thing that pops up is a list of demo patterns. Once you click on a pattern and hit play, the toy GUI on the upper left hand side actually mimics the pattern feedback movement! I downloaded the software earlier thinking it was going to be a glorified version of FFEdit since I hadn't actually looked at the side, so when shit started goin' all up and down and rotating, I was like, "Whoa, maybe I shoulda snarked less", and began this post.

But wait, there's MORE! For one of the first times that I think I'm aware of, someone has gone past the slider based GUI, and, OMG, used PATTERNS in a non-Electrostim toy!

For those of you not into shocking yourself into ecstasy (And, really, you should give it a shot after doing the proper reading up), stimmers usually trade a certain type of sound file between themselves in order to share patterns they've developed. These patterns basically work in the same way that most toys with patterns do (say, the Doc Johnson's iVibe, for example). There's ramps up and down, sine/square/triangle waves, so on and so forth. Patterns are also vitally important to teledildonics, but we'll be getting to that in our UI article that will be up soon.

Usually, manufacturers provide a static set of patterns (i.e. iVibe again) stored on a uC (microcontroller, something we'll explain in the SBv5 tutorial, also up soon. Boy, I've got a lot of writing to do), and that's all you get. The Je Joue, however, allows you to load different patterns onto your toy through the USB port. These patterns are called Grooves, a term I'll try to use for the rest of the article because I'm obviously being a marketing shil in the first place. Anyways, Grooves are put together in the PleasureWare software.

Here's what the software looks like. Each little patch at the bottom is a type of movement. Each of these will be some permutation of the up and down movement, rotation, and vibration capabilities. To add it to your Groove, You just drag the pattern to the timeline on top. After this, when you select the Groove piece, you can change different attributes, noted by the sliders below the bar. These are related back visually by changes in the texture of the groove patch on the timeline.

Not only is there an easy way to build Grooves, the sharing mechanisms are also built into the software. You can have a buddy list of people you usually share Grooves with. Once again, fucking brilliant idea here. Not only does it mean that the usability of sharing is built into the software, the fact that the software handles it versus a webpage will give people an added sense of security, since there's no transfer step in Groove retrieval.

My only complaint so far (and this is as an "advanced end user", more commonly referred to by customer service departments as "asshole") is the fact that you can't use grooves as objects, i.e. there's no MetaGroove categories where you could chain current grooves into another larger Groove. However, that's pretty damn nitpicky at the moment.

So yeah, it actually feels good to say something nice about a commercial product for once. Sure, I've never used it, I don't even have the parts to use it. But it's different, the interface is awesome, and the sharing capabilities are spot on.

Fuckin' A.