Thanks Nicolas.
To Oldgearguy:
Hey man, I saw your post, and I just want to say that I meant to answer some of your questions about nChord but now I see that your entire post was deleted too in the "thread cleansing process"
. I didn't manage to read your entire post but... I will address a couple of points you stated (which I don't see any reason to censor or moderate):
First, you made a very good point, at least as I remember it, about the functional needs/requirement differences between a) a quick shareable template for further development, ie., a module or a small project (an always welcome thing to do!), and b) a fully featured app that intends to help its currrent and further development via a fixed donation or a similar method.
My man, I do agree completely with what you said! A big part of my effort beyond the conceptual portion of nChord (I had everything working in my head for years before I decided to go ahead with the coding) went into making it a fully end-user-friendly work environment. You couldn't be more right about the additional work this aspect entails. Trying to make everything
transparent to the end user is definitely important to me. I think if you take a look at the quick tutorials above, you could pretty much take those as examples of what is like to work with nChord: yes, there is a heavy conceptual load (and thousands of lines of code) hiding behind the functions
BUT the user actions unleashing the concepts in a functional way only require 1 tap of your finger or 2 at most basically for everything. This aspect takes forever but it's well worth it. There's still progress to be made, as usual though. It never freaking ends!!!
I think I have the considerable advantage/disadvantage that I was and have been an electronic musician first intead of a developer. Throughout the years, I learned a lot about computer-assisted workflow and ergonomics within the music production side. I tried all forms and sorts of controllers in my studio, from exotic tech gadgets to basic devices and even 3 hw legacy Lemurs at one time, including
everything in between. A defect I have that I use as a tool: I am incredibly demanding about functional working conditions and environment, sort of a neat freak too, so my best bet throughout the development process consisted of truly becoming a
ferocious critic of my own work. To sum it up, I would give myself massive headaches with constant drilling like: "yeah, very fast, neat and cool, but... it could be faster". I certainly made myself code/delete/re-design/re-code related software routines countless times before I was "at ease", and until the whole thing was seemingly ice-cream-easy from a user perspective to perform the sw routines. But again, this is my motto and my philosophy: "Everything is perfectible... Permanently."
I am definitely glad to find sort of a soulmate (at least re this aspect) within the fellow lemur environment devs. Cheers to that.
I also remember you commented something on my nChord presentation style. Man, man, man, I couldn't agree more. I freaking suck at it. As a matter of fact, I literally
detest this aspect of the work. If it was up to me, I would be CREATING tech concepts 24 hours a day, instead of having to spend a single second trying to make the presentations "likeable" for everyone. Some people expect flashy videos with bullshitwood fx saying absolutely nothing but hype. Other people expect just a list of dead-cold product specs. As another example, at the beginning, people said, "how come you are just acting like a punk and selling nChord through a flea market like eBay; nChord deserves better, do a website!, ANY freaking website!". Done. Then "I hate your website".
Hahaha.
It never ends, but hey, you have no choice but to take the heat and try to keep pleasing as much people as you can because I truly think people make good points more often than not. There's something to learn all the time. Fact is, however, you end up using even more time on this boring aspect of the whole thing, rather than improving ideas and developing the tons of them already bursting in your head! You need to balance and hope for the best. Man, I wish I could hire a VERY NICE secretary to make my life easier (in every aspect)
. I will keep working on this though, because it is an important aspect of such a project, no matter what.
I know you made a longer post, but I would not want to misquote you. Let's converse if you like. Let's just keep it nice so we can keep moderato's wrath in parking mode!!
Cheers,
Avantgarde Sound
*for the love of the machine
http://www.avantgardesound.com
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