… just very busy!
Unfortunately, Aria has been on hold lately. The project is not dead though; as soon as I finish my university term (a bit before Christmas) I should have time to start working on Aria again, however. So, with a bit of luck, we shall see a “Christmas Release” 
Funny, seems like history repeats itself.
If you’ve read any of the previous posts, you surely heard about refactor previously 
Aria was started years ago, when I was much less experienced, so I’ve had to refactor nearly every part of it.
Lately I’ve been concentrating on score and tablature printing, which evolved from old code that outputted ASCII tabs. While trying to get the mess to work, I was getting more and more frustrated and met limits everywhere in the code. So I spent the last weeks refactoring even more, reorganizing huge bits of code around printing. While I’m not 100% finished yet, the resulting code is much easier to follow and much more flexible.
I have finally gotten many printing features to work better than they did. Unfortunately I still have quite a long list of bugs too 
I haven’t released in a while, so I’d like to release a new beta soonish — but I’ll fix a few more issues first.
I’ve lately dived into the joys of UML diagram modelling.
Here is a simplified diagram of how Aria is structured (ouch, more complicated than you’d expect!)
After some scattered work on Aria in my free time (and despite the lack it), I started working on improving the look and layout of score printing.
As you can see from these screenshots, it’s starting to really get somewhere.
I however have to make some changes to my roadmap : I originally planned many new features for Aria 1.2. Since I have much less free time than expected, and thus Aria is moving forwards slower, I will probably release 1.2 with printing as the only “major” new feature (and bug fixes of course), so there is a new stable version available to use (otherwise Aria would have stayed in beta state way too long). These features are not forgotten though, they’re only delayed to version 1.3
Despite having much less time than I used to, I managed to get one more release out : grab 1.2b6 while it’s hot! The biggest focus at the moment is getting printing in an acceptable shape. As of this version, while it’s still behind that of most music apps out there, it’s finally starting to get somewhere. Many core bugs have been isolated and mercilessly fixed; the majority of issues left will be about making it look nicer.
I just started university, and contrarly to what I expected, I actually have a very high workload (that is, classes about programming and computing are easily, but I hadn’t expected to get that many math classes). I therefore have much less time to work on Aria =( Hopefully I should get more later
After lots of fiddling around with obscure commands in obscure config files, I finally got sound back on Linux! I will thus be able to get development going on Linux, and have already committed a few fixes.
I have also been working on the user interface and looks of Aria Maestosa. I replaced some of my old and ugly icons with the nice ones of the Tango project. I also patched wxWidgets to provide me the functionnality I needed to get native unified toolbars in. Ladies and gentlemen, take a look at the next version of Aria Maestosa =D :
Little has happened with Aria lately, but there were good reasons. First of all, I finally got a new computer, which i’ve been mostly setting up for the last days. This means that compilation is now about 3 times as fast, which in turn means development can go much faster ^^. I’ve unfortunately discovered a few rendering glitches on my new computer, caused mostly by rendering drivers doing different rounding of coordinates while rendering. Hopefully they should be fixed in SVN but they might need testing on more computers.
On my new computer, I also installed Linux though unfortunately atm I have no sound =( Having no sound is very unhandy to develop an audio application, unfortunately. I’ll need to take time to try a few instructions i found on the internet and browse the forums in search of a solution.
On my new computer i also installed Windows (yup, triple-boot) so we may finally see Aria running on the 3 major platforms this will have much lower priority though.
Furthermore, i am about to finish college… This week is my big exam week. After this is the christmas break, then university! I suspect I will have much more time to work on Aria then (a little ridiculous, i’ll be just starting Computer Science, but as you can see from Aria i already know quite a bit in this field… so i don’t think i’ll find university very challenging compared to what i’m doing now)
Version 1.1b2 is out, grab it while it’s hot =)
While this version does not seem to add many new features, a lot has been happening under the hood (which is often what happens in programming – often you can spend weeks working on something that users will almost never notice, but that is necessary to go further). The implementation of the score editor, and the printing code, have been refactored to play nicer which each other, which means that Aria is now getting proper score printing/export to PDF. The current code in 1.2b2 is starting to be usable in this regard, but if you try it you’ll for sure notice that some things are missing. They should come by 1.2 final.
I have also been starting a user interface overhaul. After the new toolbar in beta 1, beta 2 sees a new magnetic grid widgets that will display note icons instead of the old “1/8″ text. So it’s both easier on the eyes and quicker to use. With this new widget, it’s also very quick and easy to toggle triplet mode on/off. I will continue with more user interface changes in the next version.
About adding a “record” button : from the mails I receive, I realise this is an important feature request for many persons. For now it’s not too easy for me because I don’t even have a midi keyboard at hand, nor a midi cable, and implementing that would probably require more time than I have at the moment. But the idea is not dropped, and I may even be able to make it before 1.2 final – it will depend on how it goes.
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