[Rosegarden-devel] Vote on my next project

[D. M. M. <mic...@ro...>]

There has been a lot of talk about notation on the Ubuntu Studio Users list, 
and I'm fired up, and feeling like shaking the world up a little.  I had a 
long discussion with a disgruntled going back to Finale user about what he 
finds lacking, and of course it's all true.

So I've been tossing some things around for awhile.  They're all going to be 
very challenging for me, and I'm kind of stuck doing nothing because I can't 
decide which to tackle first.  I thought I'd let the users (including other 
developers) choose.

1) Grace notes
2) A new magical percussion clef/staff based on key mappings
3) A build-a-new-composition wizard
4) Go document something

I have some post on here where I contemplated how to fix grace notes, and 
there wasn't really a satisfactory resolution on how to procede.

A magical percussion clef/staff is a big, big job.  One way to handle it would 
be a new kind of notation view like we have a new kind of matrix view, but 
that would not be very good for mixing and matching percussion with other 
parts in a score overview.  Better would be some kind of new magical clef.  
Could I really do it with nothing more than a clef?  
Pitch::rawPitchToDisplayPitch bases the final word on where to put the note 
on the clef, so if I had a new clef with some extra processing associated 
with it, I might be able to plug it in right there, and override the usual 
stuff with some other stuff that looks in some kind of data structure to see 
that pitch 84 should be drawn on line 3 and pitch 97 should be drawn on line 
4 or whatever.  There would have to be some GUI mechanism for configuring 
this map between keyboard keys/pitches, and heights on staff, and some kind 
of internal data structure to contain that map.  Lots and lots of stuff to 
build, and lots of questions I don't have enough programming experience to 
answer very well without guidance.  (I probably need a 
std:SomethingEveryBodyHasKnownAboutForTenYears to contain this, but I have no 
idea what it might be.  I grew up before the STL, and gave up on programming 
almost a decade before I lost my mind and started beating myself in the head 
with a sharp rock called Rosegarden.)

The build-a-composition wizard thing seems like an idea that we never really 
finished thinking about what to do with (now there's some great English 
grammar.)  We were talking about arranging staffs by instrument type into 
families or some such, but no place to do that, and so forth, and so on.  
About all I could think to do with this dialog right now is just leave people 
to set it all up manually.  Even there, I again really have no idea exactly 
how the hell I'd do it.  Set it up with what kind of KWhatTheHell to draw a 
little mini preview in some dialog window or something.  It's all really over 
my head, but if smarter people could bother to think about how it ought to go 
in fairly specific (ie. a KThingie and a QThingie and a std::thingie put 
together vaguely this way) terms, I'm willing at least think really hard 
about putting it all into action.

As far as documenting something, I have really felt no inspiration to document 
since my book came out.  The book proved that a Rosegarden book is not a very 
good way to break into writing, or a very good lever for proving to some 
employer that I have lots of useful, underutilized skills.  I only got two 
job interviews out of that, and I'm still driving a truck to keep the roof 
over my head.  Whatever daydream it was that kept me plodding through 
approximately 2,000 hours of that has long since evaporated, and I've just 
never found my way back into any kind of work as the project documentarian.

Beyond all of this, I'm also thinking about stepping back from being involved 
exclusively with Rosegarden, and trying to pioneer some collaborative 
movement in the Linux notation arena to get all our projects working 
together.  I don't have any clear thoughts on that, just an idea that maybe 
it could be possible to use multiple projects to accomplish something that no 
one of them can do by itself yet.
-- 
D. Michael McIntyre