Monthly Archives: August 2009

Animated GUI preview

Here is a short video clip showing the animated GUI of the Zong! Viewer. You can see the animated buttons and tooltips, and of course the smooth scrolling and zooming of the score (in reality it looks even better than on the youtube clip ;-)).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCk4-YLj9dk&hl=de&fs=1&rel=0]

At the moment we are using free icons from the Nuvola library. But we have found a graphic designer now, who will design the logo and the GUI of the application, so expect a quite different look during the next few weeks.

Zong! speaks Bavarian

Today I integrated the newly created language engine, which allows to plug in different language packs into Zong!. A language pack is basically just a collection of XML files (together with some other files like flag images), so it is easy to translate Zong! into other languages.

The three languages that are supported by Zong! from the beginning on are English, German and Bavarian. The last one may surprise you, but it is no joke. I love the Bavarian language, but unfortunately many young people here in Bavaria are not able to speak it any more. Let’s hope there will be some enthusiasts that will love having a translation in their “real” mother tongue 😉

Beethoven is looking fine

2 Replies

Zong! is now able to display (nearly) all features of the official MusicXML 2.0 example file “An die ferne Geliebte”. This is a very important milestone, since from now on we can concentrate on fine-tuning the layout engine for creating even more beautiful scores.

Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte

The only things which are still missing for a perfect rendering of Beethoven’s score is the support of positioning information (i.e. especially MusicXML’s default-x and default-y attributes) and the rendering of grace notes. We will add these features step by step.

Zong! is on the way

Welcome to the Zong! blog. Zong! is a new music notation software which is currently developed by Xenoage Software. In this blog, we will talk about the latest news and will also discuss related topics like MusicXML or programming. We appreciate your feedback, so please tell us if you have any ideas how we can improve our software 🙂

Zong! consists of two parts: On the one hand, we will release the Zong! Viewer as free software, probably under the GPL. This application allows to view, print and playback MusicXML files, and is available both as a desktop application and as an applet, which means, that it can be used without any installation in every webbrowser supporting Java. Here is a screenshot of an early version of the viewer, running in a browser window:

Screenshot of the applet, 2009-08-06

On the other hand, there is the Zong! Editor, which includes all features of the viewer but also allows creating and editing scores. We hope that this commercial application will finance our work.

We plan to release the viewer in late 2009, and we hope to publish a first beta version of the editor in late 2010. Stay tuned!