Monthly Archives: January 2011

Welcome back, Editor!

Today, according to schedule, version p0.5.55 was released. It contains the new JOGL 2 library for OpenGL rendering and some MIDI playback enhancements, and after more than a year of inactivity the Zong! Editor is now buildable and runnable again.

I was a little anxious if it was hard to adapt the editor’s tools and commands to the new functional core. It turned out that it is now much easier than before to temporarily change the document’s layout for preview the user’s actions, and undo is really a one-liner:

document.setLayout(oldLayout);

Using the functional core, this can be done for nearly every command and tool, while the mutable core required lots of defensive copies and sometimes confusing undo algorithms for achieving the same thing. This is amazing, and only possible because of the great work of the pcollections project. I can really recommend having a look on this library to all Java developers. Together with a little experience gained in any functional language (like Haskell oder ML), it can (it will!) totally change the way you work with data structures in Java.

Roadmap for v0.5 development

Today I created the roadmap for Zong! version 0.5.

It will be released on 2011-09-30 and will include the following features:

  • The Zong! Editor to create, modify and playback musical scores
  • Edit all important musical notations like notes, articulations and ornaments, clefs, time signatures, key signatures, barlines, lyrics, directions and tuplets
  • Support for selections, copy & paste, undo & redo (the last one is trivial to implement thanks to the new functional core :-))
  • Create and modify instrumentations
  • Input using the mouse, keyboard or MIDI instruments (stepwise input)

During the v0.5 development process we will publish alpha versions from time to time. One of the next things is an Online Converter for MusicXML to MIDI, PDF and image formats.

Zong! 0.4 released

Yesterday, we pushed version 0.4 (aka p0.4.54) of Zong! onto our servers. From the view of a user there are not many new features compared to the alpha version released on christmas 2010, but the overall architecture has changed dramatically, as described in the blog posts during this year.

The next days we will create a detailled plan for version 0.5. We want to release a usable beta version of the Zong! Editor in October 2011. Of course, one of our main goals is also to improve MusicXML loading and musical layouting during the next months, to make Zong! a competitive viewer for MusicXML documents.