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Smithsonian adds iPad app code to its collection

Screenshot of Planetary, an iPad App by Bloom Studio

The Smithsonian Institution's 19 museums hold millions of items, and now the collection includes iPad app source code. The Cooper-Hewitt design museum in New York is one of those many Smithsonian "attics" that stash away the world's treasures, and it recently acquired the source code to an iPad app called Planetary (free).

The app is a music visualizer that was written by Bloom Studio, a company that's no longer in business. The Cooper-Hewitt has open-sourced the code on Github, and the museum has committed to not only boost the development of any outgrowth from the open-source project, but to also preserve those descendants of Planetary as well.

In case you're wondering, the museum requires a physical paper record, so the source code has been printed on archival paper in the machine-readable OCR-A font.